Last month we dropped a new prototype for our roguelike deckbuilder, Shroom and Gloom. We had one question burning in our minds; should we turn this crazy idea into a full game?

Today, we're excited to celebrate Halloween 2024 by answering that question, and sharing some details on how the prototype was received. Oh, and we've also pushed out a tasty little Halloween update to the game!

What's a Shroom and Gloom?
If you're new to the party, here's a quick intro to SnG! (If you've already been following this adventure, skip to the next bit!)

Shroom and Gloom is a first-person, roguelike deckbuilder about stabbing, roasting and eating your way through dungeons full of murderous mushrooms.

The game was born at the 7 day fps jam in 2021. The jam version of the game turned out pretty awesome, and left us excited to explore the concept further someday. Earlier this year we carved out a month to an art test, exploring what an elevated Shroom and Gloom might look like. Then we set aside 3 months to build a totally new prototype. We dropped that on itch opening the door to...

Releasing and marketing the prototype:
We dropped the new Shroom and Gloom on itch last month, without any kind of real marketing push behind it.

We made sure the itch page looked nice, made a really (REALLY) scrappy gameplay trailer and shared the new release with our humble Discord community. That was pretty much all the push we gave Shroom and Gloom. All our energy and focus had gone into the prototype. The team behind it was tiny (for the most part, 2 full time devs and some part time friends tagging in and out), and with only 3 months to get something together we figured all efforts should go towards making the prototype as awesome as possible.

One small exception to our "zero marketing" approach was that Ben Lazerbeam slammed out a pair of very low effort TikToks, which they stuck up on their personal account.

That was pretty much it. No press release. No influencer outreach. No marketing campaign. We sent the Shroom and Gloom prototype out into the world, knowing it would live or die based purely on the quality of what we'd conjured up.

Response to the protoype:
The initial response to the prototype was nothing to write home about. 105 downloads off 319 page views.

But while the reach of the actual game was slow to start, right out the gates something was happening that gave us hope. Ben's TikTok's had started gaining some wild traction!

At the time of writing this dev log, the first post (featuring 5 seconds of gameplay) has had 196K views. The second post (1 minute of gameplay) has had over 830K! While these numbers have obviously grown significantly over the past weeks, even after we'd just dropped the game, the reaction to these posts on TikTok was miles ahead of anything we'd seen sharing our games on the platform over the past few years. Engagement on the videos were wild, and both were exploding with enthusiastic comments. Shroom and Gloom was clearly making a good first impression on people.

That was a trend that we were delighted to see across other platforms, with posts by different creators. One of those creators was Alpha Beta Gamer, someone who has been picking up on our games and sharing them since we started Team Lazerbeam. Their initial post on the game gave us a huge confidence boost, but it was the performance of their social media posts that gave us another major strong indication that there was an audience for this game. Between Youtube, Instagram, Tumblr, Threads and Twitter, we kept seeing the thing. People were picking up on what we were throwing out there! And then Reddit happened...

Someone posted about Shroom and Gloom on r/indiegames. People liked it. It rose to the top of the subreddit. At the time of writing this dev log, with 4.9K upvotes, it stands as the second most popular post in the history of r/indiegames.

As Shroom and Gloom was organically going viral, a lot of things started happening very quickly. Downloads on the game shot through the roof. Shroom and Gloom rose to the top of it's categories on itch. Press from all over the world started picking up on the game and covering it. Our Discord started blowing up. We started getting approached by publishers and funders. We were not prepared for any of this.

On our side, we were still just frantically trying to polish up the prototype and get it to a point where we could get some sleep. As more and more people were playing the game, we were finding out about more weird exploits, jank and bugs. We didn't really know how to respond to the publisher interest, because from our perspective, we'd shipped this protoype not even knowing if we'd want to turn this into a full game. But now, as we sat watching with our game rising to the top of itch.io, one the was becoming clear to us...

The answer to our big question:
As we share this dev log, on Halloween 2024, the Shroom and Gloom prototype has been download more than 41K times. The game has had a viral post on almost all of the major social media platforms. We've received hundreds of encouraging comments from players, and heaps of feedback on ways fans would like to see us improve on the game if we take it further. We've met with some of the very best publishers out there. We've ironed out the worst of the prototypes rough edges and made something we're incredibly proud of. We feel we're in a very good position to answer the question that drove us to make this prototype.

WE'RE DOING THIS THING!

We're overjoyed to to share that we will be turning Shroom and Gloom into a full game! Our friends at Free Lives will be funding development, ensuring this project happens in the most indie fashion possible. We're in the process of signing a publishing deal with the coolest label our band could ever have hoped to team up with. We're doing this thing, and we're out to do it in the most radical, awesome way possible.

Thank you!
Our eternal thanks and high fives to everyone that's gotten behind Shroom and Gloom in these most early days. To everyone that download the prototype, left a comment, rated the game, shared it with friends, posted it online or spread the shroomy gospel!

The encouragement we received to make this game was beyond anything we could ever have hoped for. We couldn't be more stoked to be bringing thing game to life with all of you by our side!

Halloween Update!
To mark this special occasion, we're super stoked to unveil a brand new update to Shroom and Gloom. Burst with wicked tricks and treats, this is the biggest single update we've rolled out for the prototype. Highlights include testing the foundations of a new meta=progression system, a bunch of (pumpkin falvoured) new cards, new accessibility features, and a loads of polish and bug fixes.

The full change log is here for anyone that's curious. We look forward to hearing what everyone thinks of all the new additions!

Thanks again everyone, and happy Halloween!