Melany's Ultimate: FORCED EVOLUTION!
I spent time during the holidays to research and work on Melany's ultimate ability, this is something I should have done a year ago, but I was focusing on levels and more content, so right after the last build that had a new level I decided it's going to be a good time to finally be done with the ultimate ability.
This is the result 80% complete (still no weapon):
Now in depth..
The ultimate's name is Forced Evolution, it lasts for 6s and has 3 stages.
Ascend - Melany evolves with wings and a organic weapon attached to her arm, then jumps in the air. If the ceiling is low, she will stop as close to the ceiling as she can.
Fly & Shoot - Shoot a burst of 3 explosions with a 0.5s delay between bursts, they explode on contact with enemies or environment and deal AoE damage.
Descend – After 6 seconds, Melany slams down at extreme speed at the cursor’s location and dealing AoE damage on impact.
The ultimate has 80s cooldown.
These are the problems I ran into:
As I'm tweaking the damage, I realized that this ultimate can very easily kill bosses and that makes it no fun, so I had to make a whole hit processing system and now before dealing damage, those things are taken into account.
Each enemy has a collection of Hit Reaction Rules, those describe what kind of multiplier to apply before a damage is processed based on where it comes from. For example bosses have a rules for ultimate abilities coming from all characters and from specific characters ones for further damage tweaks.
This pretty much says reduce all ultimates damage with 60% (because we are multiplying by 0.4).
And below if the ultimate comes from Melany's rockets, it will remove additional 20%.
There's the same thing for Melany's "nuke", which is the damage during the final "Descend" stage when she slams down.
Having this system means some enemies can be one-shot, while others will take more. Also it depends on the game mode, for example in Boss War (Deathmatch) we can spawn a boss that is not so strong and is one-shot by an ultimate.
During the Descend stage, Melany has to crash exactly where the crosshair is aimed. This turned out to be quite tricky to implement, because even if the player targets a point behind her, she still needs to rotate mid-air and adjust her trajectory to land there.
Later on, I realized it made more sense to restrict the player to the Aim state during the ultimate. Since the ability lasts 6 seconds, losing 0.5 - 1 second just to aim felt unnecessary. With that change most of the math and logic I had already implemented became redundant, but it was fun to do.
Wings take up a significant amount of screen space, especially while flying. I’m still working on finding the optimal field of view and ensuring that the wings don’t obstruct the crosshair or distract the player.
The ultimate ability is unlocked on level 2 (or level 1 if you don't count the Recovery Ward) during the first wave fight.
I’ve added small dialogue triggers that have a chance to play one-liners when an ability is activated. For example, if you use the parasite ability, there’s a 40% chance that Melany will say one of several lines, like 'It’s feeding time!'
That said, do you have any ideas for what lines she could say when she activates her ultimate?
Designing this ultimate ability was a real challenge, mainly because I wanted it to be fun to use. Over the past year, I looked at a lot of games like Overwatch, Marvel Rivals, League of Legends, but most of their abilities didn’t translate well. They were either designed for PvP, so not very overpowered or they were just simple AoE damage skills. I went through many ideas early in development that I eventually abandoned.
One concept involved throwing a fish-like creature that would summon a biopunk shark to devour it and deal AoE damage, similar to Fizz’s ultimate in League of Legends… but that just wouldn't be very fun in a fast-paced shooter, right?
The next step is to add an organic weapon similar to Hivehand or Artilor's barrel gun and work on the dive animation while Melany is descending. Then, I will work on recoil, audio and further adjust the damage.
This ultimate ability will be available in the next build in a few weeks :)