This is going to be a shorter blog post because we’re gearing up for our playtest and we’re a bit behind on these posts.

Crew Menu

In the original Morbus when you opened your scoreboard you could mark players with a tag. Something like “Friend” “Suspicious” “Alien” and when you looked at the player in the world, that tag would be shown next to their name.

This made it so you could leave notes for yourself, making it easier to remember who you trust and who you don’t.

This iteration of Morbus needed something like this, but instead of calling it a “score board” i’m calling it the “Crew” menu.

There was also the ability to “mark” a dead body, tagging that player as an alien for you and other nearby players. If you find a dead body you can know for certain that player is an alien now (either swarm or brood.)

Improvements

There are a couple things I wanted to iterate and improve from the original Morbus.

Each tag has a little icon associated with it. This icon shows up on the scoreboard aka “crew menu” as well as on the little nametag display you see when looking at them.

A tag that’s related to aliens makes the whole row for that player red, making it very easy to see they’re an alien. When you look at them in the game their name tag is also in red.

If you mark a dead body, they show up on the scoreboard as a “verified alien” now too. Making it crystal clear that if you encounter this player they’re for sure an alien and you should shoot them.

Last Seen

There is also a “Last Seen” column on the crew list. Whenever you see a player the counter resets, and starts counting up. This will help you remember how long it’s been since you saw someone last.

Status Effects

There’s temporary effects that need to be communicated to the player. For instance if you are a brood alien and you recently transformed into your alien form, you have a cooldown before you can transform back into your alien form.

This isn’t always clear to players that they cannot transform back. In the original Morbus the “alien” icon in the need section of their hud disappeared while this cooldown was active. I never liked this solution since it’s a bit ambiguous.

I’ve added a sort of “Status Effect” system where players can be afflicted with Status Effects. These effects can be time based too, expiring after an amount of time. In the case of this Brood Transformation cooldown, it’s now a status effect that lasts 6 seconds. While you have the status effect you cannot transform back into brood alien form (though you can transform out of it.)

The status effect is shown on your hud, and if you open your inventory you can mouse over the status effect to see a tooltip explaining what it does.