Most video games have just a simple Health/Hitpoints system. You have 100 HP, you take 50 damage, some time goes on and then you heal 20, and now you have 70 HP.
Some games then have armor, and how they handle armor varias from game to game
- 2 Armor in some games means you take 2 less damage every time you get attacked
- 2 Armor in some games means that you effectively have 112% of your normal max HP (each armor point increases health by 6%)
Some games will have attacks that affect your maximum HP as well as your current HP.
The other day I got a cool idea for Morbus.
Health in Peak
Peak is a game about climbing up a big mountain. You don’t actually have health in Peak but you have a stamina bar and when you climb you lose stamina. When you’re not climbing you regain stamina.
You have to eat in Peak, and when you don’t your max stamina decreases. It also decreases when you fall and hurt yourself. All of this “stamina damage” is portrayed in an incredibly intuitive way.
Your Energy Bar never changes size, instead it starts to be filled with these “damages.” And if your bar is ever completely full of damage, your character passes out (and then you probably die.)
What this has to do with Morbus
In Morbus humans sometimes have to accomplish “needs” which are silly things like eating, sleeping, showering, or using the bathroom. It doesn’t make any sense why you’ll need to do one or all of those things within a ten minute round but it’s a video game and there’s gameplay reasons why these exist.
If a player doesn’t have a need, has a random need assigned every 3ish minutes, and they have 1-2 minutes to “satisfy/accomplish” this need before it becomes critical. They can only accomplish their needs in specific places so they might need to hustle to get to where they need to go.
In classic Morbus, if the need every becomes critical (they haven’t accomplished it in time) then they start taking damage every second. This damage is inflicted directly to their health.
Now what would be cool…
In our new iteration of Morbus we use a similar health system as Peak, where the players HP bar is divided up between Actual Health and Damage. When a player’s need becomes critical they take Need Damage which effectively reduces their HP but the player can see what % of their health is lost to not completing their need.
When a player goes an accomplishes their need all, or a portion of their Need Damage is removed, effectively restoring their HP.
Instead of thinking about Health as a resource, we think about Health being the absence of damage.
In classic Morbus completing a need restored 20-30% of your health, regardless of whether you had been shot at or if you had taken Need Damage. With this system, we’d only be removing damage you had taken from your need being critical.
We can also introduce some interesting dynamics; Imagine a need normally takes 8 seconds to complete. If you have taken more than 20% need damage, then every 10% of need damage beyond 20% causes the need to take 1 second longer to complete. So there’s now an additional trade-off of delaying your need; it takes longer to accomplish.
This gives us another lever to help balance humans and reward or punish them.
Intuitiveness
I remember watching some YouTuber’s play the original Morbus and when they were unfamiliar with the game they were confused by why they were taking damage for not completing a need. This could more easily show them why they are taking damage.
Need Reducing Items
The Morbus community added a “Pills” item to Morbus which would extend the amount of time you could wait until your need became critical. An interesting item which I think could be supplemented or replaced with an item that heals only Need Damage.
Other Types of Damage
When players are attacked normally they would take a “Wound” damage type now, which would be healed like normal by the Medkit.
However we can explore the additon of additional damage types, whether they be permanant or temporary.
Aliens having venomous attacks could be really cool. They could build over time and then decay, or just be inflicted in addition to a normal wound. This venom damage could then decay over time, or perhaps only be healed by an anti-venom (instead of a medkit.)
Temporary damage, or certain types of damage, when they are inflicted and push the player into the “no remaining health” zone could also incapacitate a player, knocking them out but not killing them right away. Giving their allies a brief window of time to resuscitate them (by healing a type of damage.)
I think these are all cool ideas that i’m excited to experiment with as development continues.
Infection
In the original Morbus when a human player is killed by a brood alien (while in alien form) the human comes back to life as a brood alien. I’ve always thought it would be cool for brood aliens to have a way to secretly infect players while in human form, or for an alien infection to grow within them and then result in their transformation into the brood alien side.
A long time ago I played a game called Zombie Panic: Source which was a really cool mod about a bunch of humans working together to escape a scenario while they are killed and turned into zombies one at a time. It shared some similar mechanics with Morbus where based on the guns and equipment you carried your movement speed would change (heavy shotgun = you move slower.)
Sometime that could happen in that game is if you were hit by a zombie attack then you had a chance to become infected. As a human you were unaware that you were infected for a period of time. Zombie players could tell you were infected and might even stop targeting you since they knew you were to soon join their side. After some period of time the game notified the infected human player that they were about to become a zombie. Giving the player a chance to get into a compromising position for their soon to be human enemies.
It was a ton of fun being this infected human.
In the original Morbus I implemented a “Brood Alien Resurgence” mechanic. It happened if there was only one starting brood alien and they were killed before they were able to infect any other human. My imagination behind this mechanic was that there was some covert infection of a human that finally converted a human as the last brood alien was killed. I don’t think a lot of players liked this mechanic because it was a bit confusing, and i think it could’ve been executed a bit better.
In this latest iteration of Morbus I want to explore the idea of covert infection. I’m considering making a type of damage “Infection damage” which reduces health just like “wounds” or “needs” do. If a player dies while they have infection damage then they would become a brood alien.
I’ve had ideas on how to play with this infection idea:
- Infection below a certain threshold is benign and does nothing
- Once infection hits a certain point, it starts to increase
- Infection is hidden from the human player until it grows to a certain point, perhaps until the human has been infected fully
- Infection can be revealed by medical scanning items or map features?
- Beyond the initial brood aliens, a few players may have slowly growing infections
- Could result in a natural resurgency mechanic
- This has other gameplay implications though
There are some things to iron out; for instance if infection damage is hidden from the player, then from their perspective they may die quicker than they expected, this could be frustrating.
Infection damage could just be another stat, not communicated via HP bar.
There could be a sort of “Infection Potential” which is actually inflicted, and slowly if the player has “Wound Damage” those wounds are replaced with actual “Infection” which does what we described earlier.
It could create interesting dynamics if a human player knows they are infected, communicates it to their allies, and they work together to cure the human instead of killing them. I think having items to cure infection would be crucial for this dynamic to arise.
The Sandbox
When I realize how many ideas and mechanics that could be introduced to Morbus I get excited. I view Morbus as a kind of multiplayer social deduction horror sandbox. I think that all, some, or a varied subset of these mechanics could all exist and result in a fun experience. It might be annoying to play with all of them all the time, but I think making things modular and either randomly turning them on/off or allowing server owners to tweak them could create some cool experiences.
Something you may thought about earlier is the concept of “some humans start the round with a hidden but growing infection.” In the original Morbus it would be kind of boring if a minute into the game you kill the one and only brood alien. Then you spend the next 3 minutes waiting around just to find out your buddy was infected and is now a brood alien too. I think in the current round framework of Morbus where the only human victory condition is to run out the timer (or kill all broods, which we’ve taken away with the hidden infection) this doesn’t work. Instead we need to introduce an alternative win condition for humans that involves completing tasks. This is something I want to explore later with Morbus but it’s still too early to address.
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