Yo Shroomers!

After a most excellent holiday break, we’re really happy to be back to work on our first-person roguelike deck builder, Shroom and Gloom.

Today, we’re most stoked to share the news that we just dropped a new update to the prototype! 0.4.45 is the latest in a trio of updates that we’ve dropped over the last 2 weeks. These updates have brought some massive improvements and additions into the game. To celebrate 0.4.45 hitting itch.io, we thought it’d be fun to dig into 4 of the biggest changes that are now in SnG!

Mole shops!

Our moleman shopkeepers  were previously some of the roughest aspects of the Shroom and Gloom prototype. We’ve been excited about getting them closer to the salesmoles we’ve been imagining, and with past updates resolving the we were really happy to finally book a ticket to mole town.

The Hungry Mole and Sneaky Mole have been totally overhauled, both in how they look and play. The shopping experience has been improved, the molemen and their shops both have fresh new looks and expanded inventories of cards. We’re also happy to say they’ll no longer steal your food or lockpicks!

New Cards:

On the subject of new cards, these latest updates brought a flurry of new cards into the mix!

Some highlights include:

* Shurikens: a zero cost, handy way to throw out an extra attack every turn.

* Burning Wine, a limited use beverage that gives you card draw and generates Burning Rage.

* Spikey Personality: a passive that damages all enemies when you take damage.

* Inventors Blade: an attack that, if fatal, adds a unique lockpick to your explore deck.

New Card Art:

When we put together the new Shroom and Gloom prototype, the enemies and environmental elements were all completely drawn from scratch. While the the world and wildlife of the new SnG were all fresh, many of the artworks for foundational card were carried over from the original jam version. These images previously did a fine job of giving each card a distinctive appearance, but we’ve been dying to bring the cards in line with the massively improved visuals of the rest of the prototype.

Once again, with the prototype now running smoothly, we were freed up to focus on visuals. We’ve reworked more than 70 artworks for cards in Shroom and Gloom!

Gloom Worm!

Spoiler warning on this one!

At launch, one of the roughest elements of the prototype was our final boss, The Gloom Worm. We made the call to leave the end of the prototype very janky in favour of polishing the first 2 acts. It was the right call (ensuring we’d make a good first impression) but we were left aching to create a final boss battle that would finish the game in a truly epic way.

Today, we’re stoked to announce that we have an all new version of the Gloom Worm in the game, complete with 4 evolving states, a dozen nightmarish limbs, and a colossal body to blast to bits!

While the Gloom Worm battle is still very much a work in progress, the prototype now ends in epic fashion, giving players a first glimpse of the ambitions we have for making SnG a truly epic experience, unlike anything else in the deckbuilder genre.



Along with the above changes and additions, there's a whole bunch more magic that's rolled out in these recent updates. Bugs have been squished, audio and animations on cards and enemies have been refined, environments have been polished and card offerings across the board have been drastically improved. We're so happy with all these additions, and   we can’t wait to hear what everyone thinks!

If you’d like to share your thoughts, or join in on our quest to bring this game to life, come hang out with us on Discord! We’re also gonna be getting back to putting out monthly mailers (sign up here). Lastly, we’ve just started a Bluesky, which you can find here. Come say hi!

Thanks for reading, thanks for playing, and thanks for shrooming!

Stay weird!