Devlog #02 — Introducing Health Kits
Getting caught out of position shouldn’t mean an automatic death — but healing shouldn’t be a free escape hatch either. Health Kits are the field-medicine layer we’ve been building between “no healing at all” and “press a button, walk away undamaged.”
How it works
Pick up a Health Kit from the ground and hold to drink. Over a couple of seconds you’ll recover a meaningful chunk of health — and everyone nearby will know it. A green healing aura wraps around you, a rim-light glow outlines your character, and the bottle stays raised in your hand until the last swallow.
Principles
- Healing is a decision, not a reflex. You’re locked into the drink animation. Move, shoot, or take a hit and it cancels — the bottle shatters audibly in 3D space, so nearby players hear where you are — and you keep whatever health you’d recovered up to that point.
- Everyone can see it happening. No silent, off-screen healing. The glow, the animation, and the sound are visible and audible to every player nearby, including bots. It’s a fight for tempo as much as a fight for HP.
- Healing scales with commitment. The longer you hold the drink, the more you recover, up to your max health. Topping out early ends the animation instantly — no standing around once you’re full.
Tech notes
The drink state runs on its own dedicated animation state so it can’t be confused with the teammate-revive heal or interrupted awkwardly mid-clip. The server owns the whole lifecycle — start, heal-per-tick, and cancel — while the visual presentation (healing particles, the fresnel glow, the hand-held bottle prop) replicates to every client, so a drinking teammate or a drinking enemy looks and sounds identical from any player’s screen.
What’s next
Health Kits are rolling out alongside a loot-spawn upgrade that’s also powering more varied kit drops across the map. Next devlog: Practice Mode, and how we’re keeping solo training honest without turning it into a farming exploit.