Yo Shroomers!

Ben Lazerbeam here, checking in with an update on development of our first-person roguelike deckbuilder, Shroom and Gloom!

TL:DR - things are going great!
In short, things are going incredibly well with Shroom and Gloom. We recently celebrated some massive wins, and development is progressing wonderfully!

We previously announced that Shroom and Gloom had gone into full production. Today we'd like to loop you in on a bit more of what that's meant, both for Team Lazerbeam and our little dream game.

A Wild Kelly Beam Appears!
We're delighted to share that last month we had an awesome new addition to our team! Kelly Lazerbeam has joined the band full time, joining Ross on programming.

Since joining us Kelly has already been scoring a bunch of big development wins. Recently she and Ross have primarily been focused on refactoring our code base, and polishing up our tools for building new content in the game. We're so grateful to have Kelly in the band, and are already so stoked with her contributions to Shroom and Gloom.

We have a Lazerbeam HQ!
After a decade of running Team Lazerbeam out of our homes, we are delighted to share that we now have our own office! We're delighted to have a space in the the Maker's Massive, the community space for Cape Town's incredible game dev scene. It's a really beautiful space, shared with some of the best people making games in SA. It's such a privilege getting to make our game from our very own HQ!

Here's a quick video showing off our first days in the new space:

We're signed!
Ice-creams were unwrapped and champagne bottles popped when we recently celebrated Shroom and Gloom signing a publishing deal!

After the success of Shroom and Gloom prototype, we were approached by almost 30 publishers and funds that were interested in working with us on this game. While we hit it off very well with several interested parties, there was one publisher that was a clear winner for us.

We're currently plotting a big reveal of who we've partnered with. For now, let's just say they're the coolest publisher we could have asked to work with, and a perfect home for a punk game band like Team Lazerbeam!

Video of us celebrating the signing with some of our Free Lives friends!

New Shroom Content!
Following on the monster string of updates we recently released for the prototype, we've shifted gears, and are now working on a massive batch of new content. The plan is to build a whole new set of new tunnels to fight through, two radically different new play styles (made up of dozens of cards), and new monsters and mushrooms to slay.

Efforts so far have been going into the environments and cards for the first new play-style.  Things are already coming together great. The new cards are feeling good, and environments looking incredible.


While we're crushing it on the development front, we're all having a ton of fun in the process. Here's a quick montage, capturing 1 month of game dev in 1 minute!

While we've been sinking the vast majority of our energies into development of the game, we've been delighted to continue sharing snapshots of our progress, and seeing the Shroom and Gloom community steadily growing with us. Numbers are nothing to write home about, but every new follow or comment means the world to us. It's just so encouraging seeing the game reaching it's target audience, and seeing it resonating with them.

The biggest space we're growing is on Tik Tok, where I have an account, as does the band. Some of our TikTok's are also making their way onto our Youtube as shorts.  We're also steadily growing our monthly mailer;Lazer Pals and our Discord community.


Something that's remained pivital through our whole game dev journey has been this very site, itch.io. We've been so grateful to have the game perform so well on here, and all your comments have been a constant source of joy and inspiration. Thank you so much for everything!

That all Shroomers!
That's it for us this month. If you've made it this far, high fives on being awesome!
Till next time, stay rad everybody!