dd faq

Q: what the hell is this
A: devil daggers, fun indie arena shooter thing that's basically like an arcade game, 1 hit kills you and goal is to survive as long as possible (kill count doesn't matter).  it looks like a horror game but it's not really.  enemy spawn points are pre-set, but spawn points are RNG

pb is 1027 (rank 60ish) goal is further idk.  felt like playing this for a bit since RSG was kicking my ass for a week straight, don't feel like playing celeste rn.  i'll probably be playing a couple weeks at most if even, a new patch came out for this that added QOL stuff and after 2 years of watching my PB occasionally i cringe at some of the bad habits and wanted to put up a slightly better run lmao



Q: why are there so many skulls on your screen
A: probably because i'm farming (if that's not the reason it's because i fucked up and am about to die)
squids (the pillars that spawn skulls) gush skulls every 20 or so seconds, and each of the larger skulls drops a gem on death

gems are collectables that power up your hand, how many you have is on your hud under the timer.  once hand is fully leveled (typically happens at 260, the game slows down every time you level up), any further gems collected can be spent as pink homing daggers that will home in on enemies.  homing is my gas tank for the run - starting about 700 or so things speed up to the point that aim alone cannot clear everything and homing needs to be spent more and more as the loop speeds up.  once homing runs out the run is over very shortly after.

putting both together, i can keep squids alive longer to dump out more skulls, giving me more gems early on (during the safe part of the run) giving me more homing to play with in end game.  it also has advantage of leveling you up a bit earlier which means you're less likely to bleed gems in the 260 section from having to sustain shooting longer

oh worth mentioning also that shooting keeps you from picking up gems and shotgunning pushes gems away so you gotta balance shooting and collecting



Q: what threat do the spiders pose
A: spiders will pull gems towards them and if eaten, will spawn an egg that will eventually spawn into spiderlings that chase you very aggressively.
this is a problem because:
1: picking up gems is entirely disabled when a spider is aggro'd
2: again, gems/homing are the gas tank of the run and i want as many as possible
3: one egg isn't a big problem, several is a MASSIVE problem
4: they drop eggs silently and at an angle you typically don't have to worry about (directly above) so it's surprisingly common to get sniped by an egg spawn

kill them ASAP.  the big green spiders are functionally identical just have more HP



Q: what's the threat with the white ghost thingie flying through the air
A: ghostpedes eat any homing daggers on the field while alive, and it makes them COMPLETELY USELESS.  extremely high priority to kill and basically forces you to clear arena before they spawn or otherwise have to deal with a massive wall of shit attacking you while you spend 5+ seconds killing him.  the first ghostpede you let fly around for a while though since he spawns at a time when a lot of stuff is going on and in about 50 seconds you'll have downtime to deal with it.



Q: what's the deal with the thorns
A: just HP sponges - they eat up a lot of homing if not dealt with though so really important to chew through them with shotgun before firing off homing




Q: does this go on forever
A: after leviathan is killed (giant cage that turns into orb at 360), game enters a loop at about 450 that is the spawnset for the rest of the run.  the set is:

wave of squid 1s and 2s
squid 3 (the huge one)
gigapede/ghostpede
3 spiders
thorns
2 spiders

this loop starts off really slow and gets progressively faster and faster each clear.  by 900 seconds, this loop starts happening once every 20 seconds and continues to get faster.
the loop alternates between ghostpedes and gigapedes - every 2 gigas you get a ghost.  again, take a lot of time to kill so you really want to have things cleared beforehand and then spend a lot of homing to catch up on everything else

this does go on forever though.  kill screen is generally considered to be 1230 i think and WR at time of writing is 1201.  you can only farm so much and you'll reach a point where spawning just happens to fast to feasibly kill off the ghostie before having time to deal with everything else.  who knows what TAS could manage.



last pb has a lot of bad habits, lots of holding m1 when shotgunning is better, doesn't prioritize thorns, spends a lot of time trying to shoot at blocked targets when i should be dealing with stuff that's easier to get to first.  clean up and ez pb