TL DR: We've just dropped a prototype for our first-person, roguelike deck-builder Shroom and Gloom. Grab the prototype , and help us turn this thing into a full game!

Hello Hello Hello!
Ben here, Team Lazerbeam's head of scribbles and bad ideas, here to bring you some wonderful news;

We did it! The Shroom and Gloom prototype is out!
After 3 months of joyous work, Team Lazerbeam are delighted to share something special with you! We've put together a fresh prototype of our first-person, roguelike deckbuilder, Shroom and Gloom!

The story so far:
Shroom and Gloom was born in December 2021, at the 7 day FPS jam. Teaming up with with my dear friend Evan (creative overlord of the awesome Free Lives) we came up with the idea of creating a deckbuilder with a first person presentation. And, loving other roguelike deckbuilders, but wondering if they maybe needed more cardplay, we wanted to make one where everything is a card. No picking classes, no clicking around on maps, or text options, no gathering dozens of relics and tracking abstract numbers attached to them. Everything had to be a card.

Our friends thought we were crazy for trying to build a roguelike deckbuilder in a week. We did it anyway. We put everything we had into the jam. The game turned out pretty damn rad!


Inspired by how well the game had turned out, we chipped away at it a little more over the last days of our December holidays. We polished out some of the roughest edges. We created a new final boss. We added ways for players to brew soups with the mushroom people they were roasting in combat.

By this point, we estimated we'd spent around 10 days on the game. The real world came knocking, and we had to go back to making our main games. Shroom and Gloom was effectively shelved.

Over the next 2 year we'd occasionally have little Shroom Jams, playing around with new cards and ways to play the game. We added a third deck of cards that could be unlocked through meta progression. We added the ability to summon pets, confuse enemies to death, and harness the power of your emotions. The results of these intermittent jams were exciting, though we never felt we got things tight enough to share the results publicly. On thing was clear though, we felt like Shroom and Gloom had potential to make great game, and unique entry in the roguelike deckbuilder genre.

The new prototype:
Fast forward to 2023, and with development on Wrestling With Emotions 2 winding down, Team Lazerbeam started looking ahead to the future, thinking about our next game. There was one very obvious choice for what we wanted to do next (and it sadly wasn't Snow Cones 3).

I approached Evan with the idea of possibility making a full Shroom and Gloom game. He proposed that Free Lives could support Team Lazerbeam developing a prototype to test the viability of the project.

We kicked things off with a 1 month art test, exploring how we could elevate the game's visuals. We created a totally new project, focusing purely on environments. No cards, no enemies, no UI - just a series of tunnels, representing a vision for the shifting environments we imagined the game playing out over. The results were incredibly exciting.


With the art test in the bag, we created another fresh Unity project - the Shroom and Gloom prototype! We completely rebuilt Shroom and Gloom, lifting some of our favourite cards, enemies and game design elements from the original jam game, incorporating the environmental elements that we'd made over the art test, and bashing out a bunch of new content.

A big focus was looking into our enemies. The enemies in the original jam version were totally all over the place, mostly a random assortment of weird little dudes that I'd scribbled out in the space of a few hours. Imagining enemies for a proper Shroom and Gloom, we wanted to create a far more cohesive mob of murderous mushrooms. We wanted them to feel related, but distinctive, and we wanted their behaviours and abilities to come through in their designs. We drew a lot of weird little dudes. We sculpted a bunch of weird little dudes. We did animation tests. We wrote lore that nobody will ever read. We drew more weird little dudes.



Simultaneous to our art efforts, we were slowly chipping away at rebuilding Shroom and Gloom in Unity. This process was initially painfully slow going. We were approaching things with far more consideration than we had when creating the jam version of Shroom and Gloom. While we knew Ross was engineering a far more robust and scalable foundation for this new Shroom and Gloom, it was at times really tough looking how far we were from recapturing the magic of the original jam game. But, like a party of determined dungeon crawlers, we kept going, slowly chipping away at the best that lay before us.

We got 3 of our friends to do some music tests. We poured ourselves into trying to improve UI and UX however we could. We designed a bunch of new cards. We scrapped a bunch of new cards. We planned out a series of tunnels, with branching pathways and different rewards. We bashed our heads against how we could make exploration phases more exciting. We reworked our tunnels over and over again. We stayed up too late too often. We locked ourselves in a cabin in the woods to jam on the game. It was a turning point.

After our cabin jam it felt like we'd finally broken the prototypes back. It was still a janky mess, and hardly fun, but it felt like things were coming together.

We kept focusing on game feel, stability and content updates. The whole experience, in some basic form, became playable. Combos and deck builds weren't feeling satisfying. Ross threw a chest full of powerful cards into the first tunnel. Things turned around again. The game was were still a janky mess, but it was finally fun!

Over the last days we slammed together a pair shops run by molemen. We added a 3rd deck of passive cards (planned to be unlockable metaprogression rewards). We added more cards. We added Gloom. We pushed as hard as we could and gave it our all. We ended up with a prototype we were very proud of.

Go time!
And now we're pulling the trigger on this thing, sharing this mutant game baby with the world. It's still a janky mess, but we hope it'll bring people a lot of joy. We hope we'll get to keep growing this strange world of mushrooms and madness. We hope you'll be along for the journey.

Grab the prototype here. Murder some mushrooms. Let us know what you thought. Spread the shroomy gospel.

Thanks for reading, and be excellent to each other.