Shroom and Gloom · published
Greetings Shroomers, and welcome to our last dev log for the year! We're wrapping things up with an absolute banger, so strap in and prepare to have your mind blown!
Looking back on 2025: 2025 was an awesome year for Team Lazerbeam, announcing our partnership with Devolver Digital, dropping the Shroom and Gloom demo on Steam, landing an overwhelmingly positive rating, racking up over 140 000 wishlists, and adding 2 awesome new members to our band. After so many great wins, the way we wrapped things up in December felt like the most epic climax to the the biggest year in our 11 years of making games together! Turning dreams into reality: Shroom and Gloom Invades Playtopia! Over the past weeks the Beams worked our Lazerbutts off in preparation of an unhinged undertaking; to turn our game's illustrated world into a real life booth and overrun the incredible indie games festival, Playtopia! We've shown Team Lazerbeam games at every edition of the festival, since Playtopia started back in 2018. For Shroom and Gloom's appearance at Playtopia 2025, we wanted to give people something really special, dreaming up a totally over the top booth that would recreate the hand-drawn, multi-layered art style of our game and bring into the real world. It's hard to articulate just how difficult it was to realize this vision. Moving Shroom and Gloom from the digital to the physical was a brain-melting undertaking. We teamed up with the amazing fabricator Byron Boshoff, and after weeks of hard work found ourselves standing in an incredible real life mirror of the fungal punk world of our game! The booth featured a 12 meter tunnel (replicating the mushroom infested levels in our game), leading into a mossy cave with three screens running a brand new expo build of the game. We finished each station off with custom made alternative controllers; giant purple "W" and "End Turn" buttons. Words can't describe how awesome this moment felt. Seeing our world brought to life at the scale was incredible. And it felt so rad seeing people playing in this booth, especially since they were playing something extra special... New depths: The Facility makes it's public debut! Along with a polished version of the demo we all know and love, the expo build also featured an option to try out the first act of our second pathway to The Gloom, the recently unveiled sci fi dungeon known as The Facility! As the public debut of The Facility, it was an awesome moment seeing players exploring new levels, facing news mushie monsters, and slaying them with brand new cards! These playtesting sessions gave us a bunch of insights into how we can improve on these new parts of the game, but also left us super excited about how much players loved them. We're fully confident that these new play-styles are gonna expand the Shroom and Gloom experience in awesome fashion! Audience Choice Award: Winning the Meerkat! The cherry on top of our most sweet Playtopia came as the festival was winding down. Each year, at the end of the Playtopia conference, an Audience Choice Award is handed to the devs of the most well loved game at the festival. Shaped as an adorable meerkat, and customized by a different guest artist each year, the Playtrophia is an awesome recognition of the game that stole the most hearts in Playtopia's epic exhibition of indie games. Back in 2024, Shroom and Gloom narrowly lost the Audience Choice award, landing in second place by only 1 vote! This year, we're delighted to share that we manged to clinch first place, bringing a beautiful flaming meerkat into our little studio! Calling it a year! If you've made it this far, high fives for your superior attention span! If you've just discovered our game, welcome to the Gloom Patrol! If you've been following our adventures or cheering us on for any extended period of time, thanks for your support and for being a part of our journey to make the world a more radical, playful place. We're gonna be calling this a year, taking a brief break from work to catch our breaths and return to Shroom and Gloom in 2026, ready to slay! If you want to keep up with us (or catch up on how we got here) we love sharing our journey on TikTok, Instagram, BlueSky and our monthly mailer! Also, if you're super new to all this, be sure to play the Shroom and Gloom demo (and leave us a review to help us tick over from 97% to 98% positive!). Thanks once again to every single person that helping to make this dream come true. 2025 was an incredible year for us, and we can't wait to push things even further in 2026. Stay rad everybody! Love and high fives,
Team Lazerbeam