Last night was the first playtest for this version of Morbus and so I thought it would be good talk about the results.

Video courtesy of Chad Diver

Players

There were roughly 27 different players across the 2 hours we played. We peaked at like 15 players at one point which was pretty exciting.

No major bugs

There were no existential, game breaking, fun ruining, bugs. The worst thing that happened was one round (near the end) every player was a brood alien, but all the other brood aliens appeared as humans to them. It was really strange, I have no idea what happened or how to reproduce it. We’ll just call it the Trouble in Brood Town bug.

Morbus Moments

I saw a couple of “Morbus” moments happen. What I mean my “Morbus” moments are moments of gameplay that I think are really cool, fun, and unique to Morbus.

One of these moments was when I was a swarm alien. It was late in a round, maybe 25% humans remaining and the lights were out. A handful other swarm aliens and I saw two humans in the showers. The humans knew we were outside so they were hunkering down waiting for us to attack.

About 5 of us swarm aiens gathered and then rushed them all at once. I was the first to be killed, and the humans had some pretty strong guns so I don’t think any of them were killed, but I immediately knew it was probably a really fun encounter for the humans to fend off a wave of swarm aliens like that.

Guns

I thought the guns were actually decent. Bigger guns like the M4 and the shotgun were much more rare. Finding one felt like a treat. There were many rounds where all I had at first was a pistol and I had to hunt around for an SMG or Rifle.

Ammo was also somewhat scarce. I never ran out of ammo but I was always aware that my ammo was somewhat low and I needed to be somewhat deliberate about whether I shoot or not.

Mid Session Swarm Alien buff

About 30 minutes into the playtest it became very apparent that swarm aliens were too weak. I think the biggest offender was that they moved too slow.

I was able to buff their movement speed immediately since I had the server running in the editor and it made them actually fun to play. My experience playing the game wasn’t amazing since I was in the editor, but being able to make a quick change like this was very nice.

Lots of great data

Seeing people play the game gave me a lot of data points on how people are interacting with what’s there. Things are still early and rough but I think I saw a lot of positive signs.

Annoying little bugs

There were a couple annoying little bugs that I don’t know how to solve.

One of which is weird black lines that almost look like shadows being casted from a player’s model to what I imagine is the origin of the map. It seems related to the highlight component so I’m wondering if it’s an engine issue and not me (that component is built into the engine.)

Some bad attitudes

There were some people who joined to play who said some very negative things about the game. They called it bad, poor quality, that is sucked, etc. I don’t know how they found out about the playtest, or if they even knew it was a playtest, much less the very first playtest of a game. It was somewhat discouraging hearing such criticism. Yes the game isn’t amazing yet, it’s still early in development, it lacks polish, the map is barebones, but I don’t understand why some people have to be so rude about it. Maybe they’re insecure or jealous that someone else was able to make something better than they could? Maybe they have nothing better to do with their life? Maybe nobody loves them so they need to take it out on someone else? Or maybe they just don’t understand that their words and actions can have an impact on people?

Long story short it kind of sucks hearing that. It’s vulnerable having people play something you’ve made, especially when they’re the first players. I’ve put a lot of effort into this game so far, I think the HUD looks sicks, I think the tab menu looks cool. There’s a lot of gameplay systems already in. In the ~5 weeks I’ve worked on this project i’ve done more than I think I did in a whole year when I worked on original Morbus. Compared to Shoothouse I think i’m way farther than I was 5 weeks into that project too. I think I was hoping people would come in and say that they thought it looked cool, that they had fun playing and that they were excited to see it improve and play it again later. I know that many people did feel that way and i’ll continue to remind myself of that, and that the original Morbus was amazing and this version will be also.

I think i’ll put together a more hand picked set of playtesters in the future. Early on the game should be played by people who’re going to be supportive, not demoralizing.

Glowstick Hell

I somehow forgot to make glowsticks despawn after awhile, and they also stuck around between rounds. This made it so eventually the map would just fill up with glowsticks. I pretty quickly started to get performance hits when playing and I started to manually delete all the glowsticks from the scene in the editor between rounds.

This was quickly patched.

Bugs bugs bugs

There were lots of little bugs that popped up. Some easy to solve, some not so much. The most frustrating type of bug is the ones that make no sense. For instance sometimes players will lose the ability to see their HP. No idea why this happens, but I added some safety rails and a system that will hopefully notice when this happens and print debug information in console.

If you watched the video above you’ll notice that HP bar bug, and also that no nametags show up.

Next playtest

I’m going to go back to cooking for a week or so. I’d like to get some basic brood alien upgrades in, perhaps even some new guns. Swarm alien upgrades could also be good, or perhaps a basic starter ability for them.

The next playtest might be on the weekend of 6/20 so stay tuned for that!