Lairkeeper
Lairkeeper is a reverse dungeon-crawler inspired by Slay the Spire—but from the boss’s perspective—and the relentless escalation of Vampire Survivors.
You are the Bone King, final guardian of an ever-growing dungeon. The heroes keep coming. You cannot win, only delay the inevitable. How long can you survive?
Spend runes to unleash one of three dark powers:
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Grasp Heart (1 rune): Inflict a brutal damage-over-time effect on a single hero in the room you're observing.
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Summon Skeletons (2 runes): Raise a scaling horde of skeletons that hurl themselves at the heroes. Their damage is weak, but their numbers are endless.
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Royal Exhume (3 runes): Call forth a powerful skeletal ally that periodically damages all nearby heroes.
The invading heroes come in four archetypes:
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Fighter – Stabs a single target with reliable damage.
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Cleric – Heals nearby allies in an area.
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Warlock – Damages all nearby enemies in an area.
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Barbarian – Swings an axe in a wide arc. Less damage than a Fighter, but better coverage.
Created in just 5 days for Mini Gim 3, this was my first time ever opening Godot. Every system, sprite, and script was built from scratch during the jam, albeit with a bit of help from ChatGPT to translate gdscript for me.
Comments
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I love the vibe and style, but the gameplay is extremely flat. I just spammed the best guys, and won without thinking or doing anything.
Hey, working on a dev log for this game and will then be remaking it for a full release. Glad that the only issue with the jam release was how easy/flat it is and that nothing else went wrong lol
As is the norm with jam games. Balance is a bit of an issue. Royal Exhume just stacks up and causes the auras to insta-kill everything on spawn. The only thing that can deal damage is the barbarian, and only if it spawns when the aura is down. This happens too rarely to break the "spawn camp". So you just kind of can't lose. Unless the game goes plenty past Wave 6? But by Wave 5 the waves are so long that the game basically grinds to a halt.
Unfortunately the core loop wasn’t finished until the last few hours of the jam (learning Godot and making a game in 5 days was perhaps a bit too much for me), so balance did kinda go out the window lol. You probably can’t survive past wave 10 though. By then it’ll be spawning 10 heroes a second, and you’ll have 500 to go through. Odds are you’ll eventually get to a chain of barbarians (axe dudes) and then die to them.
That all said, even though the game is easy, the reception has been pretty good. I think I’ll remake the project (for cleaner code and project structure) and continue working on it.
Yeah, having the balance go brr in jam games is very much expected. I personally kind of see it as the mark of a successful jam game when the balancing is the thing that's the problem. Because it means enough of the things that could go right. Did go right, to the point where balance even starts to matter. And with the amount of time you have for a jam game, unless you're absurdly lucky. The balance won't be right. Just not enough time to dial that in.
cool
Love the look and the overall vibe!! 💀
coo