Finished this week out strong with a new item, some new models, a new gun, and a cool new feature.

Ammo Models

I was using some generic ammo box models from the Workshop for ammo boxes. They were never meant to be a long term solution and when I started implementing a new gun I decided it was time to get some new cohesive models.

I browsed some online marketplaces and couldn’t find any premade ammo boxes that I thought fit the aesthetic I was looking for, so I decided to model some of my own.

I got about 10 minutes into modelling and then started to become concerned that I wasn’t going to be able to pull it off. When I finished the topology and started texturing them I really knew I wasn’t going to be able to do it.

Like, how do people texture things? How do they do it remotely well??

Anyways this is what I made before I gave up

I think the center one and the furthest left one aren’t bad. The right most one doesn’t quite match though. Through this exercise I realized it’s not exactly easy to make a thematic and visually distinctive ammo box. How do you make 3-4 different boxes that are distinctive but also not too busy?

Defeat

I decided that buying some would be the best idea and try to finagle them to work in the theme. This is what we ended up with

I did some color modifications to the original textures, turning the boxes a dark slate vs an army green. I also then changed the text colors to match the “type” of ammo, as well as colored squares to match that type as well.

Green = Small Ammo
Blue = Medium Ammo
Red = Heavy Ammo
Yellow = Shotgun Ammo

M700

I wanted another gun, and there’s one more in the Facepunch FPS weapon library that I haven’t used yet, the M700, so I decided to port it over.

I’ve done this so many times now that it was trivial to do. What took a bit longer was adjusting the recoil, spread, and other factors to make it feel like how I wanted it to. The purpose of this gun in my head is a “marksman rifle.” It should reward accurate, timed shots, but penalize run and gunning.

To accomplish this I implemented a new “Moving Penalty Multiplier” into the weapon base. All guns have a 1.0x which means moving has 1.0x effect on spread/recoil/accuracy. But the M700 has a 2.0x penalty so moving has 2x the affect on overall accuracy.

This is also the first (and only right now) gun to use heavy ammo. Making it’s ammo potentially a bit more scarce on the map. I’m excited to see how this gun will do in playtests.

Health Vials

The medkit is a medium sized item so it takes 2 slots in your inventory. I want players to be able to have a “smaller” healing item which is less effective than the honker medkit, for instance this would enable a SMG + Rifle + Healing Item loadout.

I didn’t want to make a smaller medkit, so instead this healing item works a bit differently. Where the medkit has a large charge and it’s usage heals over time, the health vial is a single use and provides an instant healing effect.

I’ve buffed the charge of the medkit to heal a total of 120 HP before running out of charge. It heals other players at rate of 10HP/s while it will heal the user at a 3HP/s rate (I like to reward cooperative play.)

Meanwhile the new health vial will instantly heal 40 HP after a short delay. If you’re using the health vial on yourself the delay is 3 seconds, while using it on someone else the delay is only 1 second.

Inventory on player bodies

If you read the Inventory System blog post you’ll have seen my little drawing of how I explain my thoughts around the inventory slots and where the items would physically go on a player’s body.

I wanted to do something fun and cool today so I decided to try and make it so the items in a player’s inventory slots would physically show up on their body in the game world.

It was surprisingly easy to do and without very much tweaking it looks not too bad either. Here’s a video showing a lot of different combinations. The 3rd person camera is just for testing to see what other players will see.

This isn’t a gameplay critical feature so i’ll probably add a setting to disable it (for performance reasons.)

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.

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.

It’s been a great week of development so far. I could’ve written a blog post earlier but I haven’t been taking my end of day breaks to write these like I was doing in prior weeks. Anyways, let’s dive in.

The Past

The original Morbus was a bit confusing when it came to inventory and weapon slots. You had 6 (?) slots and each slot was for a specific type of weapon.

Slot 1 Crowbar
Slot 2 Pistols
Slot 3 SMG’s
Slot 4 Rifles
Slot 5 Utility items
Slot 6 I think also utility items?

There were a ton of different guns in Morbus so you’d run up to a gun, try to pick it up, and have zero feedback on why the SR-4 Phaser is actually an SMG and you already have a R22 Automatic Compact SMG in slot 3 so you should go pound sand.

It also created weird restrictions where you would have to choose between carrying a grenade OR a medkit, and maybe you want both!

I didn’t want any of this confusion in this iteration of Morbus.

Requirements and Goals

I had these principles guide me when designing and inventory system for this version of Morbus

• Allow flexibility of loadouts
  • I want players to have variation in what they’re carrying around
• Restrict the number of “big” weapons
  • Ideally a player should only be able to carry a single “big” gun
• No arbitrary slot restrictions
  • If a slot is for a big gun, then why can’t I put a smaller gun in it?
• Allow for multiple utility items
  • Grenades+Glowsticks+Medkit+XXX should be possible
• Simple
  • Needs to be intuitive to learn
• Strategy
  • Certain loadouts should enable certain strategies

Where we ended up

This is an experiment, it’s not final, and playtesting will reveal if it makes sense, BUT, I am pretty happy with things at the moment. Let’s start with a video before we dive into explain it.

Let’s break down what’s happening;

0:03 I pick up a pistol, we see me using my scroll wheel where it shows a weapon select where we can see my hands or the pistol

0:07 I pick up an M4, we see my inventory flash for a moment to show where it ended up in my inventory. And then when I scroll we see a simpler version of just my weapons. Scroll then Left Mouse Button selects the weapon to select it.

0:15 By pressing Q I open my Inventory Menu. I see 4 “slots”, with slot 1 having my hands, slot 2 having my pistol, then an empty slot 3 with 2 spaces in it, and a Slot 4.

We can also see next to each Slot a few boxes. These boxes are a secondary representation of the “size” of a slot. We see that Slot 3 is Size 3 so it has 2 spaces in it.

I drag my pistol from Slot 2 into a space in Slot 3 and then back into Slot 2.

0:19 I pick up a glowstick and we see it was placed into Slot 3. I readjust my inventory and move both my Pistol and Glowstick into slot 3.

0:24 I click 3 on my keyboard, which toggles between my Pistol and Glowstick since they are both in Slot 3.

0:29 I reorganize my inventory so the Pistol is in Slot 2, Glowstick in Slot 3, and M4 in slot4.

0:35 I walk up to a shotgun with my pistol drawn, I cannot pick it up since I don’t have slot space. When I take my shotgun out I see underneath the nametag “E SWAP” (Hold E to Swap)

If I tap E it still says “No Slot Space” but if I hold E then i pick up the Shotgun and drop my M4 on the ground.

0:46 I walk up to a MP5 on the ground. I pull out my glowstick in Slot 3. I then hold E to swap the glowstick out for the MP5.

The MP5 is 2 sized weapon. We can see in my inventory that Slot 3 is now completely filled.

0:55 I just continue to swap stuff and mess around with the system for awhile

1:10 I have a glowstick from Slot 3 selected. Slot 3 is currently filled with two items (size of one) making it completely filled. When I approach an MP5 (size of two) I can hold E to swap.

This swap will drop BOTH items in Slot 3, picking up the MP5 into Slot 3.

1:15 You can drag items out of a slot in the inventory view to drop them

1:23 This is I think the coolest thing ever; I open my inventory menu and then when I mouse over items in range it displays their name.

I can then click down and drag those items from the world into my inventory slots.

Why I like this

I like to base game mechanics off of realism. If I pick up an item in a game, where does it go? Depending on how “realistic” a game is, it could just disappear from existence until you need it, to it goes into your backpack which has finite space and weighs you down.

On the slider of “not real” to “very real” I want Morbus to be “plausibly real-ish.” I think a horror game is scarier if it’s a bit realistic. If it wasn’t realistic then why would it scare me? How can I relate this experience to my actual life and the danger my actual life would be in if I were in that situation? Or something like that.

Anyways, this is a long way to say I was thinking one day about “In Morbus, where do weapons in your inventory go?” “Wouldn’t it be cool if they showed up physically in the world on your player model?”

In Morbus, seeing someone run around with no weapons is big alien energy and could almost warrant an instant shoot on sight. If I were able to visually see another player’s inventory it could give me more evidence on why I should or shouldn’t trust them.

Okay so if I want to put a players weapons on their character then there’s only so many places we can put weapons.

More realistically I think there are 3 prime places;

Each thigh and the back.

To gamify things we can say that one thigh can carry more than the other, and the back can carry the most (big gun) so this breaks down to 3 slots, each of a a different size.

To keep things simple we say: Small (Thigh) / Medium (Thigh) / Large (Back). And if you get stuck up on the different sized thigh slots, perhaps there’s a perk or a class that gives two Medium sized thigh slots?

This served as the foundation of this system. Give the player 3 slots, each of a different size; 1, 2, 3.

Rifles and big guns would be of size 3 so they can only fit in the back slot.

Pistols and utility items would be of size 1 so they can fit anywhere. If a player wanted a Pistol + Rifle they get 2 utility slots.

Submachine gun like weapons are size 2. So if a player wanted to have one of those they could have 3 utility slots on their back if they wanted. Or they could have 2 different SMG’s and have 2 utility slots, or 3 if they don’t have a pistol.

6 “slots” in total, with lots of different ways on how to fill them!

The most confusing thing is the distinguishment from a “Slot” (Thigh, Other Thigh, Back) and the “Sub Slot”/”Size”/”Space” in each slot which distinguishes what and how much can go in it. I’m still working on terminology but I just call them Slots and Sub Slots right now.

Right now ammo is free. You can pick up ammo of a type if you have a gun that uses it and there’s an arbitrary limit to how much ammo of each type you can carry. I’m debating whether this should change. Maybe ammo should take slots, maybe you get more slots then?

Other ideas

There are a lot of other inventory systems we could explore. This is going to be our “1.0” inventory system to try out. We can throw the whole thing out if it’s too confusing.

A “simpler” system could be to do something like give the player a 6 slot grid inventory, then let them organize it and assign items onto hot bars. It’s very RPG like though so i’m not the biggest fan.

Inventory systems like this are often times slow and cumbersome.

DeadSpace also did something kind of like this, but you could have 4 weapons and then your inventory was just things like ammo

Ammo management in DeadSpace was really stressful (and fun.) I’m torn on whether I make ammo a resource you have to carry around and takes up space. It makes inventory more complicated but allows for further expression of strategy for players.

Weight

Item weight (that causes your character to slow down) hasn’t been implemented yet. It might just be that weight is based on slot usage, or individual items could have different weight values.

Conclusion

I’m excited to see how this inventory system will land with players. I doubt this will be the final iteration of it but I’m excited to take this system into the first playtest.

This week has been a short week of development due to some travel commitments but it’s a week with a lot to show!

Let’s start with a demo;

In this video we can see the HUD coming together, it’s very reminiscent of the original Morbus HUD.

Ammo Counter

As mentioned in the last blog post; we’ve got a “holographic panel” connected to the players weapon that shows ammo. This isn’t actually a HUD element in the traditional sense, it’s actually a “World Panel” which is UI rendered onto a plane in the world.

I made the system to each weapon can define it’s own attachment point, and dimensions of this panel.

We can see in this video that they’re all in a slightly different place. I’m not sure which looks best yet, so we’ll probably move them around as time goes on.

Status Section

This changed a bit from the original Morbus.

Instead the 3 bars being; Battery, Health (and Name), Role, we’ve moved the name to the same role bar. I felt like the bottom bar was being under-utilized and there was no need for the role to be so big. I think this looks slicker.

Without putting the HUD on an actual WorldPanel, which I didn’t want to do (even though i may need to) I tried to emulate the perspective/skew effect that the original Morbus had. It’s not perfect, but it’s okay enough for now.

The HP bar is a bit smaller now too, but I made it so it would show the amount of health you’ve lost because you haven’t completed your need.

This health can’t be healed by medkits, and is essentially a damage to your max health. I think I like this over just plain damage and having the additional warning in your HP bar telling you where this damage is coming from could be helpful to newer players.

Punishing bad Broods

I also had an epiphany on how to leverage this “need damage” to punish Brood Aliens who kill humans with guns. Right now Brood Aliens who shoot at humans with guns have no damage reduction on their gunshots. This makes removes the ability for a cheeky human to say “shoot me to prove you’re an alien” however, if a Brood Alien kills a human with a gun, they suffer Need damage.

This need damage can only be healed by successfully killing humans in alien form. Thus the Brood Alien suffers a reduction in max HP as a penalty for killing a human with guns, though they can redeem themselves by infecting other humans.

Thematically this makes sense to me. A Brood Alien desires to infect humans, if it kills them in a way they cannot spread the infection (guns,) this goes against their desires, and thus causes damage. Whether this damage is mental, psychological, or whatever is up to debate.

The Top

The rest is pretty much the same, we’ve got the need area, the timer, round state, and then notifications. All themed to match.

We might expand upon these later, but they work so why fix what aint broke?

Announcements

We can send announcements to players about important things. This is used for things like victory messages or to tell Brood Aliens they’ve suffered need damage for killing a human with a gun.

Alien Theme

Aliens get a red themed HUD because they’re dangerous.

Nametag sounds

You might have to watch the demo video again to catch this one.

I wanted to add subtle sound cues and effects with the name tags for items, players, and bodies. Just to add a bit more life to things.

I’m not sure how I feel about them, they could still be a bit too loud and obnoxious so we’ll have to see how player feedback goes.

Networking Reworks

I’ve moved even more systems over to be host authoritative. At this point I don’t any core system is client managed. Health, Needs, and Alien Transformation were the last bits and now that they’ve been handled I think we’re doing good.

I’m still very concerned about smoothness, I can test in the editor with a local instance faking 100ms lag, and it’s ~okay~ but I still wish it was better. S&Box just doesn’t give us great built in tools to handle these things for us.

Bonus Content:

This is a silly one but M0ji_l in Discord brought up the Morbus HUD evolution so I figured I’d highlight it here:

June 2011

We can call this the “wow I made my own HUD” era.

I hardly knew how to program at this point, and I still sorta remember putting this HUD together. I thought doing the subtle “lighting” effect on the HP bars was so cool,.

November 2011

This is the HUD that people actually know if nowadays. I can trace it back as early as late 2011 which was a lot earlier than I thought it would be.

This HUD was inspired a lot by the ammo counter, which I didn’t actually make myself but was an addon from garrysmod.org which I repurposed for Morbus. I had taken a class on programming, still knew hardly anything, but managed to hack together this HUD.

What helped was I probably had a much clearer vision of what I wanted, which was holographic, Sci-fi, 3D, visor like.

May 2026

Which takes us to today.

First Playtest

Okay don’t sue me if this doesn’t happen, but i’m tentatively planning for our first playtest to be 6/8/2026, around 5-8pm Pacific Time.

It’s going to be rough, but if you’re interested in trying it out I’d be overjoyed to have you play!

Join the Morbus Discord server here for updates and information on the day of!

There’s been a lot of great progress over the last couple of days; let’s start with the video:

Item Refactor

I did a big refactor of the item system. I started thinking about how easy it would be to cheat with the client trusting model I was using. Cheaters make everything harder than it needs to be. So now the item system is host authoritative; only the host can create items and all the clients must request item creation which will be validated by the host based on the circumstance.

Guns

There are now 4 guns in the game, I think it’ll stay at this amount until I get real, thematically correct, gun models. Here’s what we have:

USP – Pistol Archetype

Classic pistol, light but lacking in power. These will be the most common gun.

MP5 – SMG Archetype

Fast firing but eats up ammo, light weight considering it’s fire power. It uses pistol ammo and will be more common than any other stronger gun.

M4A1 – Rifle Archetype

Powerful, the bench mark for all other weapons. Will be somewhat uncommon; not everyone will get one.

SM4 – Shotgun Archetype

A powerful shotgun, excellent at close range but lacking at distance. Will be just about as uncommon as the M4A1.

Philosophy

I want powerful guns to be a bit more scarce than in the original Morbus, but I also want all guns to have some purpose; even a pistol should be able to kill a brood alien (if you get lucky and the brood alien is bad.)

Ammo

Minor in the grand scheme of things but ammo now works as intended (reloading uses ammo in your inventory.) You are limited by how much ammo of each type you’re allowed to carry, and if you drop your last gun that uses a specific type of ammo, you drop all your ammo with it.

Also we have a slick “in world” ammo counter.

Nametags

Items and players have nametags when you look at them. I’ve been playing around with how the effect works; you can see a bunch of iterations I made:

I was considering leaving it as the White/Transparent styling, but the ammo counter is that holographic effect so it seemed like I should keep it consistent instead of mixing styles. We’ll see how it pans out later, this isn’t supposed to be the final HUD.

So many little tweaks

I swear whenever i sit down to work on something i’ll find something else that doesn’t quite feel right and needs to be tweaked. There’s lots of little things like repositioning the player flashlights, or creating a world and a view flashlight based on if it’s your own flashlight or someone else’s, or fiddling with the player eye position, that are so small and insignificant that they don’t deserve sections to themselves.

I’ve also found ~5 bugs in S&Box in the past week which has been a bit annoying, but Github issues have been filed for all of them so hopefully they get sorted out. Whenever I find a bug I typically change my design and plans to not be impacted by the bug. It doesn’t feel great making something that isn’t right, and cannot be right for reasons out of my control.

Playtest?

My todo list is getting shorter until the next playtest, we need to finish the basic hud, add in dead bodies, a simple player list, voice chat, victory messages, and place some weapons.

Then, in theory, we could do a simple playtest to see if any of this will hold together under pressure.

The pace things are going is pretty good right now, if they keep up we’ll easily have our first playtest by the end of June.

Finding needs in the original Morbus was a pain in the ass. In this iteration of Morbus it can be better. It’s great that I actually know how to program and have 10+ more years of experience under my belt.

S&Box has a nice NavMesh system built in, I can generate a NavMesh of the scene in the editor, then at runtime I can query it for a path between the player and the need location they need to go to.

You can see in this video a simple debug path being rendered.

And if we then make it so we shoot “particles” along the path with a trail, we can get an effect like this:

These videos were taken a few days apart so you’ll notice some lighting in the map that gets added. The map is still WIP and i’ll post a more in-depth update on it later. You might recognize it as Chemical Labs from the original Morbus.

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.