I have finally figured out how to make a discussion and I'll be going over my thought process for this job for those of you who are interested.

Play style & Feel

I wanted a more combat focused job, preferably melee, since I do want to do a more ranged focus job in the future. The Clown came to mind when I was thinking what that melee job could be. The first things that come to mind when I think of a clown whether that is in media, or in real life, is "Silly" and "Crazy". All of the talents fall under those broad umbrellas, preferably, with talents concepts that don't exist in the game in vanilla.

Prerequisite Talents
The Harlequin is a clown job mod and so it felt right that the first talent you got was one that gave you clown power. A few of the talents in these rows are modified, or re-imagined versions of existing talents or older clown talents. "Follow the Honk" for instance was a different version of the old clown talent that would let you heal people. I like the idea, but felt it was too much power, so I mad this version which lets you assist in CPR efforts and made it tied to your medical so you couldn't just use it all the time. It is also slower than regular CPR, so your doctors can still do their thing without you really stepping on their toes.

Fearmonger
Mainly inspired off of the psycho clown talent. There was a thought to base it around psychosis, but having invisible enemies and allies and hearing a bunch of random noise all the time didn't feel great to me, so I based it around fear instead. You can really go into the melee stuff here. The goal was to put emphasis on your murderous intent, increasing how crazy you can appear attacking again and again and again, like in some movies or shows when a character you may like goes a bit too far. The bully part of talent tree was to add something new to game. It was suppose to allow you to go a bit crazy and run wild in a positive way, without griefing, hopefully.

Fool
The fool was inspired by the gullible foolish type characters you might see in movies and shows. Self deprecating humor, slapstick and the like. The slapstick part ended up going into the Fearmonger talent tree to go with the fear idea.You get the job done, in a maybe not so elegant way. The downsides on all the talents were a way to emphasize the foolish part and you get some good benefits for it. "Hysterical Strength", and "Safety Last" were one of the first talent ideas I came up with for this talent tree. Originally, you took more damage and the point that you stop taking damage from the effect was lower. It was not so good for a long form thing like campaign so I ended up making it less punishing. "Accident Prone" was also one of the first talent ideas I came up with for the job that modified other talents and made them better either over time, or upon acquiring the talent.

Jester
I wanted to do some sort of stacking mechanic for since I always enjoyed it other games, and it didn't exist in Barotrauma. "Killing Joke" was both a reference to certain crazy clown and seemed like a good way to implement the idea. It was important to me that you would be able to track your stacks in some way and a status effect counter seemed like the best way to do it. I did have some issues when creating it, but managed to get a pretty one done in the end, in my opinion. A bit of a balancing act is here with you gaining more things as your stacks increase, but you could spend them on your effects you choose in the 2nd level of the talent tree. With the way Barotrauma is getting or maintaining stacks would be difficult, so I also made sure to add ways to get them faster. Then make your stacks even better, or easier to maintain on the final level of the talent tree.

It took a while, but I am pretty happy with the job I created. I feel like it is different enough from my Acolyte and the vanilla game while not being too out there and still fits the themes I was going for.