Hello and welcome back (or welcome for the first time) to the next in my line of devlogs for THE PIT.
This is a text version of a video devlog, if you'd prefer to watch instead of read, you can watch that here:
Additionally, If you are interested in more tech-specific devlogs I'd be happy to make those too, diving into all the technical details of the things ive added as I do find them interesting but don't know if other people do. This will be a long one so strap in and prepare to be dazzled (I hope)
So, lets talk about CHARACTER DESIGN.
As I mentioned in the previous devlog, each character in THE PIT will ave a unique passive or specialty, and there will be an associated UI element so you can read how much of your character specialty is currently contributing. I start each character by first designing their passive then crafting skills that play into that. I want the passives in this game to be SIMPLE first and foremost, I don't want league of legends samira tier where you have to memorize a whole novela to understand a character, they should be simple, but engaging.
So starting things off is the very first character: Surge
Surge's passive is Conduction. As he accelerates, he gains more specialty meter, and the slower he becomes, it slowly drains. This is important because of the way certain collision/interactions work, it would feel bad if you came to a stop 1 frame before using an ability and all your damage suddenly drops off. Pretty simple right? Move fast = more damage!
With this in mind, Surge needed two typed of abilities, ones he could use while moving and gaining speed, and ones that brought him to a stop in exchange for massive damage. So I'll first start with his Tertiary ability which replaces his Shift: Glide.
Surge becomes frictionless and can freely glide around all the procedural environment This allows you to feed into his passive to gain massive damage if you can control him well, and even if you can't he still does good damage, the purpose of these passives is to make players feel like they are in-control of their character, if they are falling behind by not finding good items or getting out-leveled by the enemies, this is a way for you to still feel good when RNG isn't in your favor.
So given this, his first three abilities are all ones he can use while gliding. His primary ability is a medium range projectile that pierces all enemies, doing a small amount of damage and applying a mark to them. 
This mark allows surge to activate his second ability: Chain lightning all surge's abilities mark enemies. As long as there is one marked enemy, surge unleashes a chain lightning attack from both hands that chain between ALL enemies recently hit by surge. This gives that built int "Ukelele" everyones favorite risk of rain item in a fun an interactive way. And keep in mind, the faster you are moving when you detonate this chain lightning, the more damage it does.
Surge's primary ability is a large frontal cone that briefly stuns enemies, knocks them and himself back slightly, marks them and does a small amount of damage. Pretty basic but also a good filler to mark up a large group of enemies.
Now remember when I said the specialty falls off over time instead of instantly? Thats important for surge's Secondary ability: Slam.
Surge channels all his energy into his right hand, propelling himself in the camera direction and unleashing a massive slam attack on all enemies. This is by far my favorite move of his and can be used either for small burst damage on grouped targets, or by sliding around and flying off the top ropes to deliver a massive area of effect and wipe out a huge group of enemies. 
Surge's 4th and signature ability is Electric discharge, Surge gathers his power, bringing himself to a stop and unleashing a massive beam attack that hits 4 times in front of him, you can redirect this beam as it's active, but unlike his area slam, it does not get more area of effect with more specialty meter however it is still by far his most damaging ability. 
Combinging this all together, you get a character that slides in and out of combat, poking enemies with a constant stream of attacks before unleashing all that energy on them in one massive slam, beam or chain attack.
Next up we have another super fun character tentatively named: Umbra, Master of shadows
I really like asymetric character design and I always wanted to make a character missing a vital limb. So with that said Umbra makes up for this with their entire right arm being a massive umbral blade.
Umbra's passive is shadowclones: Whenever umbra casts an ability, a clone is left behind where it was cast, Umbra can then use these clones to swap it's position with that of the clone. This allows for strategic dodging of abilities in a new, but fun way. melee characters NEED defense of some kind so my way of doing that with umbra while also fitting their theme was allowing this swap and I think you'll really enjoy it.
To keep that explaination simple. Using ability makes a clone, press shift to move to clone position.
Like surge, swapping clones is their way to generate specialty meter, but unlike surge instead of pure damage, it gains more area of effect for its attacks.
So with that in mind, All its attacks cover a small-ish area of effect and if you play strategically with the clones, you can cover MASSIVE areas of the screen with all the abilities.
Its primary attack is a simple swipe that alternates, but keep in mind, this can become MASSIVE with meter. 
Its secondary attack is a spinning slash that creates a black vortex pulling all enemies to the center to allow you to use those large AoEs more effectively.
Its primary ability is burst, umbra swings vertically before unleashing a shadowy burst and a vertical slash, propelling itself backwards to safety and leaving a clone where it was. Which you can then swap with to get back into the action if its safe. 
Its secondary ability is Spiral Dash, Umbra spins rapidly flying through all enemies before colliding with terrain or the finish in the air. This once again leaves a clone at the initial position, so if you got yourself in too deep you can swap back out. 
I already explained it's Tertiary attack so lastly is the ultimate ability: Darkness judgement. This is its most damageing move that unleashing two stabs covering a large area. If you use the clones properly to build your passive, this will cover extremely large portions of the map so while the default version may look kinda small... trust me it can get out of hand quickly.
Moving away from character specifics I added everyones favorite: Ragdolls! Thanks to unity these were actually extremely simple to set up initially. I ran into an interesting bug with them where if you spin the camera away from them, the gravity stacking on them pulls them through the floor and the character becomes invisible.. i fixed it but it was very weird.
Next I added floating damage numbers. I love these and they are simple but add so much feeling to the game. Unity has 2 or 3 ways to do this and I made sure to performance test this so that spawing 100 at once didn't cause any performance issues.
Lastly, I added a new enemy, doesn't have a name yet but it is menacing and it has two abilities: Calldown and Slam. Calldown places a tracking marker on the player, it tracks the players movement for half a second before maintaining the players velocity and detonating shortly later. I did this because with characters like surge flying around the map, it was necessary to have enemies that could actually hit someone going that fast, but was still dodgable in SOME way. The slam is just a nice to have so you have to play strategically around these badasses. 
So thats all for now! I know that was a lot and I have so, so much more to show. Two more characters next devlog, ill go a bit into items and show off some new environment art ive been working on as well as game-loop stuff and another new enemy to contend with. Hope to see you then!
For more frequent screenshots check out the twitter Twitter.com and please if you are interested in a more technical breakdown of how i achieved all this so performantly, weird bugs and things i ran into let me know I'd be happy to write up a "technical devlog" that covers the nitty gritty coding issues that come up when making systems like these. Thank you for reading! <3 
