THE PIT Windows game

Hello and welcome or welcome back to Devlog 2 (the 3rd) devlog covering THE PIT my upcoming action roguelike! As with my previous article, this is a text version of my video vlog, if you'd like to watch that you can watch here:

But if you prefer to read thats what this is for! So flowing the same way as the video I'd like to introduce Beccaria! Master of Light.

Beccaria is a long ranged agile character, being slowly overtaken by the light's corruption.

Starting out the same way I have with all my characters so far, Her passive is precision, the more shots you hit in a row, the more meter she gains, and missing shots drains the meter. This meter provides a stacking damage bonus for a significant boost.

I was struggling a bit designing this character's passive. But i think this rewards higher skill gameplay, and provides a bonus "minigame" so to speak within the actual game which makes the point and click style of sniping a bit more exciting.

Additionally, I didn't want to make the passive "more damage the further away the enemy is" because its a very non-interactive passive, and fairly boring however she will have upgrades in the future that give this ability.

So, on to her abilities, While un-scoped, Beccaria recklessly discharges her rifle, delivering a small area blast around her weapon, I've always liked the "sniper-shotgun" classic gun combo in games and felt like the this was right character to fit that into.

While scoped, She fires a powerful beam of light that stops on the first enemy hit. If this beam collides with a piece of the terrain, it bounces up to two times, and splits into 4 seperate beams.

Her primary ability is Splinter Shot, Becarria overcharges her weapon for several seconds. While this buff is active, her shots now chain between all nearby enemies up to 5 times.

Her secondary ability throws out 4 prisms ahead of her, if you shoot into these prisms, it causes her sniper shots to bounce around within them, splitting and bouncing to create a fantastic area of pure annihilation.

Her Tertiary ability is a burst of light that propels her in the camera direction, and fires out an array of homing projectiles that track down all nearby enemies. This allows her to escape from sticky situations while also providing a bit of damage that isn't as demanding as playing with the sniper.

Her signature ability is extremely powerful, Beccaria takes a low stance and fires a massive beam that repeatedly pulses and hits all enemies sometimes multiple times. This ability can also ricochet off her prisms so i'm interested to see how people use it.

Moving on to another one of the original characters i've ever designed, whos been redesigned a few times already and may still have a few more iterations to go, Quake, Master of Earth

Quake is a strong, resilient fighter who channels his power into the surrounding eart to deliver devestating damage.

Quake's passive is the complete opposite of surge, and while simple, has a lot of complexity to it... Quake's passive is....standing still.... Yep thats right.... the longer you stand still, the more damage you do.

Now As I've said in my previous devlog, standing still in games like this is usually a death sentence, and since enemy ability can knock most characters back, this passive functions by making sure you are not inputting any directions. By doing this, this allows quake to use his abilities to move, while generating meter.

Quakes primary attack summons a large rock at a target position, quake can then use his secondary attack to control up to 3 of these rocks at a time, and unleash them in a target direction.

Quake's primary ability is an earth shield, I said standing still was basically suicide so quake NEEDED some kind of shield to protect himself, after activating, quake become mostly immune to all damage for a brief period.

Quake's secondary ability and I think my favorite is Pillar. Quake targets an area and prepares a large pillar for eruption, after releasing the ability, quake summons a pillar in the direction the player flicks their mouse allowing you to control the angle of the pillar. The most fun part of this ability is you can use it under yourself, and give yourself a super jump all while building up your specialty meter.

Quake's tertiary ability is charge, quake quickly dashes in a direction, damaging all enemies then unleashing a shotgun of shrapnel dealing damage in a cone in front of him.

Quake's signature ability is slam, quake dives quickly downward, pulling all nearby enemies downward with him before slamming the ground and errupting into waves of small pillars in a large area beneath him. This ability does massive damage but only to grounded enemies so try to use the wind up of the ability to pull airborn enemies downward beforehand.

Next up, Ive implemented items! And these neat little chests that hold them.

Currently there are 4 tiers of items. Common, that are mostly stat modifiers like attack speed, move speed, that sort of thing. Next there is uncommon items, there are items that provide bonuses that your character can specifically build into, like critical strikes. The third tier is Character upgrade items. These items are special in that they themselves don't give you any bonus, instead, they give you an upgrade point for one of your 4 abilities or two attacks. Every character's abilities all have an upgrade menu specific to that ability, these upgrades allow you to control the way you build your character. I am to make these drop often, but not extremely frequently so you can't just take one of every upgrade, it should be a choice. I could go on for actual hours about every single characters upgrades to every ability, but to keep the video rolling, the final tier of items is mythic.

These items will fundamentally alter your character or provide bonuses that directly affect your playstyle. For instance one item I'm calling pendulum of power. Every 4 seconds, your character deals 200% damage, after that time passes you now only deal 75% damage for the next for seconds, I'm trying to design items that aren't simply "you do more damage" but provide a fun or interactive way of dealing more damage. Another item is Essence Channeler, your common and uncommon items bonuses are halved, but for each common and uncommon item, you gain 5% more damage. This is only a small subset of the total items planned, on release I aim to have a minimum of 40 items

Finally, Ive been working on some environments, Ive shown off some characters already like surge who can use a smooth environment with big sloping hills to his advantage, and I'm trying to design levels that offer certain characters strengths and weaknesses. So I'll let you think how these places can be used specifically with some of the characters i've mentioned so far. My goal is to make very varied and interesting terrains that are both beautiful and fun to play around in.

Thank you for reading this devlog, In the next one i'm going to show off two more characters (the final two before early access), and give some more depths about the gameplay loop overall as well as show off one of the first boss fights. I sincerely hope to see you next time, and If you enjoyed and are looking forward to this game, be sure to follow my social media or sign up for the newsletter on the website ThePit.dev this is a solo project and it helps my motivation knowing people are interested in playing it. I hope to see you next time.