Good news Shroomers!

For everyone that's battled their way through our first-person, fungal-punk, roguelike deckbuilder, we're delighted to announce that things are once again happening with Shroom and Gloom!

Ever since it's birth over 7 Day FPS Jam 2021, we've been itching to take Shroom and Gloom further. Combining roguelike deckbuilding with a first person perspective, hand-drawn art in 3D environments, and hoards of murderous mushroom-people, it felt like we'd stumbled across something special. The response from players was super encouraging too.

Unfortunately, we were all thoroughly tied up with development on our main games, so after some quick bursts of further development over our holidays and weekends, Shroom and Gloom was largely put on the shelf. Despite this, the jam game kept attracting enthusiastic players, and hung around in our imaginations as something that could make for an awesome full game. Today, we're very happy to say that we've returned to the project, and started exploring if it'd make sense to turn this into a proper release! Our end goal is to create a whole new version of Shroom and Gloom. We've put together an absolute dream team to make this happen.

Our first step was looking at Shroom and Gloom's visuals. We kicked things off with a 1 month art test, exploring at how we could get the game looking as awesome as possible. The art style of the original jam game was regularly well received by players, who loved it's chunky, cartoony characters, and trippy environments, but we really wanted to push things to another level. Our goal was to create something that maintained all of the charm of the jam game, while crafting a far more immersive, colourful, rich and shroomy world for players to explore.

To explore this new look for Shoom and Gloom we built a totally new version of the game. This was focused entirely on visuals and exploration. No cards, no enemies, just vibes. We knew we wanted to hold on to the core approach of using black and white 2D illustrations in 3D space, colouring elements in the game as the player explored through tunnels. That said, we were excited to play around with different lighting techniques, adding in splashes of glowing secondary colours, and adding animated elements into the world. We also further wanted to further explore different kinds of environments, and experiment with players being able to choose between branching pathways (which was a big leaps from the jam games single-pathway approach).

24 wonderful days, a few very late nights, and many cups of coffee later we called it a day on the art test. While we found there was still a whole lot left to do, we were incredibly stoked with where we landed up by the end of the test. We wrapped things up feeling like Shroom and Gloom has the potential to be one of the best looking Deckbuilders out there, and give players a totally unique visual experience.

If you wanna see more of the art test process, Ben Lazerbeam made this vlog when we hit at the 10 day mark.

So what's next? We've kicked off development of the vertical slice. Carrying over bits of things we made for the jam, and the art test, we've started building a whole new Shroom and Gloom. It's still early days , but as things come together, we'll try to check in to share more news.

Till then, stay shroomy everybody!

High fives,
Team Lazerbeam