Glowsticks are an iconic part of Morbus. I don’t know when or how I came up with the idea back in the day but I just love them so much.
Grenades are kind of silly and a bit mixed in usefulness. The idea is that you could chuck it at a group of swarm aliens, or some aliens chasing you and it possibly take some out or buy you some time.
Glowsticks
We’ve got the standard 3 types of glowsticks, Normal (green), Sticky (Orange), and Anti-Grav (blue)
You can also break them like in the original Morbus, but instead of it being by pressing E on them you either have to punch or shoot them (or swipe if you’re an alien.)
There’s some cool little colored droplets that shoot out when you break them, and it leaves behind a little splatter of glow in the dark goo. This goo still emits a bit of light for a time being before the light fades away.
Explosive Grenade
The classic explosive grenade. I wanted to keep the “Look out!” voice line that plays when you toss a grenade. The original used Half Life 2 voice lines so we have some more modern ones now.
The grenade also makes a scary little beeping noise so you know where it is, as well as a flashing light on it.
Other Grenades?
I was thinking that an incendiary grenade, like a molotov cocktail from Counter Strike, could be very helpful for humans. The particle effects for this are going to be a bit tougher so I’m holding off on it for now.
A cryo grenade could also be cool. It freezes nearby victims and slows if you’re further away.
Flashbangs and smoke grenades seem useless for humans to use, though a Brood Alien tossing a flashbang into a room and then transforming would be very cheeky, which makes me kind of love it so maybe we’ll see a flashbang get added.
Other stuff
I’ve been tweaking guns a bit more lately. I’ve added damage fall off as bullets travel. Most of them are are an ease out curve that looks like this:
Within 15% of max range the bullet does full damage, then it slowly decreases. At 50% of max range it does 90% damage, but then rapidly starts to decrease, doing only 50% damage at 80% range.
In most situations this won’t make a difference. In the chemical labs map shooting down pretty much the longest hallway with a pistol the bullets do ~80% damage and a rifle does 95%. Shotguns on the other hand are greatly nerfed at that range doing only 50% damage.
There’s also accuracy penalties on movement now. Moving increases spread and recoil, jumping even more so, while crouching reduces spread and recoil.
Spread will also bloom more when you’re moving, making moving and shooting very quickly lead to inaccurate shooting.
What’s next
We have a lot of the core mechanics in and we’re pretty much ready for our first playtest next week. I’ve started working on the “scoreboard” and hammering out any bugs I find with networking. I’ve added a little bot system so I can more easily test things like round and player states with fake players.
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