I've been working on this game for over a year now, It is a solo project (currently) and Its finally reached the state where I want to start sharing my progress and getting people excited about it.
Before I dive in, I just want to say, this game is very early in development VISUALLY this is a solo-dev projects and I'm a programmer. I don't do art very well so as development goes forward, I'll be working with artists to refine character designs, make 3d models and improve animations. I'm very open to feedback on character designs and enemies visually, but one things for sure. There will be some biblically accurate angels.
With that being said, Welcome to THE PIT!
The Pit is my next game, a third person action roguelike about a group of extremely powerful beings and their dietic battle with their former captors. Each character in the game is a master of some respective element or means of combat. The character shown above is Surge, Master of lightning and as his name would suggest, he's a literal physical manifestation of energy that unleashes lightning with every devestating attack.
I've been trying to work on a "visuals first" development style since almost all the work done on the game so far has been behind the scene and its slowly getting to the levels i'm happy with showing off.
So... This is a third person roguelike... and I know what you're thinking... isn't this just Risk of Rain 2?
While I do love risk of rain and what they've created, I have a different vision when it comes to characters, environments, enemies, and overall gameplay loop to the point where just making mods for RoR2 would not be enough, which is mainly why i decided to make this into my own game. I'm also combining a lot of aspects from other games like movesets and augments similar to Lost Ark, a different visual style, and more skill-based combat like Furi.
So what am I doing that different? First thing up: Procedural Environments.
After watching a fantastic video on marching cubes by Sebastion Lague on youtube, He created a cave-like shape using his generator. Looking at this and after playing a lot of minecraft I thought "Man, it would be really cool doing combat in an area like this" in minecraft with large overhanging cliffs, crevases, pits, spikes, mountains, you name it. And something I always wondered in risk of rain was why they never did this, how hard could it be? Turns out, not actually that hard, but the BIG problem will come later when I talk about AI, but i'll leave that for another devlog on how i tackled it. After customizing the generator to generate indoor environments, next thing to do was create character that actually do well in this terrain, which leads me to...
CHARACTER DESIGN
Each character in THE PIT will have a unique passive which augments their power directly in some way. Surge, Master of lightning's passive is very straight-forward: The faster you are moving, the more damage you do. Thats it. So similar to loader in RoR2, you need a way to start moving faster, this is why I gave surge the ability to "glide" or "ski" If you've ever play a game in the Tribes franchise I promise you'll love this character.
Then you have characters like "Quake" Master of earth who's the literal opposite. The longer he's standing still (or more specifically, not inputing any directional commands) The more damage he does, pretty simple right? But using these passives as a restriction helps influence ability design to create characters whos abilities all feed in to their passive, and their passive feeds in to how satisfying it is to use the abilities again, creating a nice feedback loop of: Use Abilities -> Generate Specialty Meter -> Use More Powerful Abilities. Every character is designed with their passive FIRST then abilities designed around it. Currently I have 7-8 characters movesets designed, but i'm waiting on visual development to show those off.
So that's all for now. I have a ton of exciting character movesets to share, gameplay ideas and other various cool things i'd like to cover in this but we'll save that for another time! I hope you've enjoyed this look at the game and look forward to it coming out!
I'll try to do devlogos here and in video form, but best bet is to sign up for the newsletter:
Thepit.dev
or follow my twitter
Twitter.com
Youtube version of this devlog:
