One Full Round

This is a tiny amount of work in the grand scheme of things, but it’s going to be a memorable moment.

Anyways, today marks the day of the first complete “round” in this version of Morbus. This is the core gameplay loop;

• All players are spawned as humans in a “warm up” game state
• A few (or one) player is chosen to be a brood alien
• The brood alien player can transform into their brood alien form
• If a human is killed by an alien in their alien form, they respawn as an alien
• If a brood alien is killed, or a human is killed by guns, the player respawns as a swarm alien
• If all brood aliens are killed, humans win and the game ends
• If all humans are killed, aliens win and the game ends
• After a short “cooldown” period, we restart

This has all been implemented.

Of course there are some bugs, like Brood Aliens can attack Swarm Aliens, and vice versa, but that’s a quality of life improvement 🙂

I remember when I passed this milestone on the original Morbus in Garry’s Mod. I had spawned bots and used a console command to make them mirror my actions to test things out. (I should maybe build bots like that too.) This was all done in gm_construct back in the day, it’s amazing how far things have come since then.

What’s Next

I had to use the citizen model for the swarm alien and the brood alien claws I had made as well. So it would probably be a good idea to sculpt another derpy alien model for swarm aliens, both world and claw view models to serve as a placeholder.

There’s no UI yet to tell you anything about what’s going on. I like to avoid building UI for as long as possible but it might already be time to have some sort of visual display of HP, Alien/Team status, Round State, and Victory/Defeat messages.

Further On

Humans right now spawn with a gun, this isn’t the Morbus way. They need to have only have a melee weapon (or maybe just fists) and find weapons and ammo in the environment. So we’ll need to build a system for

• Items to be in the environment
• Ability to pick up items
  • Either into an inventory or a weapon slot bar
• Ability to drop items

Ammo also needs to be handle, so we’ll need to decide how we want inventory to work. Do you have weapon slots like in the original Morbus, or do you have inventory slots that you get to decide how to fill?

Also do we have items which are not weapons? So many decisions and things to think about! To keep things simple for myself I’m thinking I’ll just keep things the same as the original Morbus for now and then iterate upon them later.

We also are going to need a map pretty soon. I’m going to look into seeing if I can somehow import the original spaceship map into S&Box and use that as a base.