Shroom and Gloom · published
Hi Shroomers! Welcome to the March dev log for Shroom and Gloom, our lovingly hand-drawn, first-person, fungal-punk roguelike deckbuilder.
We've been working super hard on the game since our last dev log. Progress over the past month has been immense! To shake things up a bit, in this dev log we'll share a bit about some tougher sides of making this game, but before we dig into that, we do have one cool thing to share... You can follow us on Steam! After much dragging of feet we have finally set up the Team Lazerbeam Steam developer page! If you're a fan of our game band, or would like to support us on our quest to make games the shape of punk to come, we welcome you to be one of the very first people to give us a follow! Okay, onto development news... Game Dev is hard! Our dev logs and social media posts tend to exclusively focus on the highs of making this game together. We celebrate huge creative wins, wholesome interactions with our community, or hitting huge milestones (like reaching 150K wishlists last month!). But there are far less fun sides of making the game that we don't tend to talk about. It only seems fair to give you a fuller picture so today we're trying something different, and talking about how game dev can be hard. Kicking this year off we tackled a daunting task - re-imagining how exploration phases in our game could play. With exploration being one half of the main gameplay loop in our game, this was an epic task. We were also in a difficult space - exploration in the current demo is fun, engaging and offered plenty of ways for players to level up. In short, it already felt good. The question was, can we do better than good? With this in mind, we set to work completely reworking explore from the ground up. What was intended to be a 1 week experiment to kick 2026 off turned out to be an epic undertaking that dragged out over all of January and half of February. We wanted to test if the new system was a worthwhile improvement, but to do that we had to get all these new systems working well. It took an extraordinary amount of work, which is tough in itself, but the whole way through the process we had a huge question hanging over us; "Are we totally pucking up? If old exploration was good, was it a huge misstep to try re-invent one of the main wheels on our mushroom car?" After loads of work and multiple in-person and online beta tests we finally got the new exploration into a space where we were confident that the new system was going to land well. Yay! But then: the next round of grueling work started... Since moving on from our exploration exploration we've been tackling two of the hardest systems engineering tasks that we've been putting off. These are getting save games implemented, and setting up the foundations to support translating the game into different languages. Saves are incredibly tricky in a game where every card can be upgraded infinitely in multiple different ways. Localization has been a challenge, given the complexity of how we generate the text on these ever changing cards. As we write this dev log, we're happy to share that both of these huge dragons have (mostly) been slain. But as soon as we've taken these beats out there will be more challenging tasks to take on next. Ultimately, it should be said that we're having the best time making this game together, but it is worth mentioning that sometimes this best time is also a tough time. But we love doing this thing, we're so proud of what we've made so far, and are so excited to keep bringing this game to life. And on that note, we'll wrap up by sharing something new with you!
New level and enemy preview! We're so excited to have finally returned to building out levels for The Facility. ICYMI, last year we revealed the facility as a brand new series of tunnels, bringing players a unique legion of enemies and bizarre cards to slay them with. Today we thought it'd be fun to give you a quick glimpse of how things are coming together. Here's a glimpse of 3 of the new enemies and one of the new levels! Okay byyyye! That's it for us this month. Thank you for reading and tagging along on this mushroom-infested adventure. Till next month, stay rad!