Yo Shroomers! Welcome to the most exciting dev log of our lives! Today we're so excited to celebrate the launch of our first-person fungal-punk double deckbuilder! Shroom and Gloom is now out in Steam Early Access! You can finally welcome the spores of our mushroom infested baby into you brain!
The road to launch! Development of this game has been a trip. It's been punctuated by some absolutely huge moments; dropping the original prototype, signing with Devolver, going viral on social media multiple times, bringing the demo to Steam and participating in some amazing events. But even more awesome than these huge moments, there's been a constant stream of hype and excitement from our growing community, inspiring us and cheering us on every step of the way. In Sep 2024 we dropped an early prototype of Shroom and Gloom as a viability test The response was almost instantly overwhelmingly positive. Two year's later, it's surreal to look back on how far the game has come, and how massively the community has grown since then. We can't really express how grateful we are for all the lovely people that discovered the game, and joined our journey to bring it to life. And today, we are absolutely ecstatic that we can invite you to join us for the next chapter of this wild creative adventure! The final week! As we've been gearing up to release the game, Shroom Hype has gone off the charts! Wishlists were steadily growing ever since we opened them up, but things went into overdrive after we announced the launch date. Things were further helped by SnG being included in some choice lists of upcoming games, and us landing a few viral social media posts. Then with wishlists streaming in, we were delighted to see Shroom and Gloom creep it's way into Steam's Popular Upcoming charts, peaking at number 5! Back in our February dev log, after hitting 150K Wishlists, we announced a wildly ambitions dream; reach 250K Wishlist by launch. Today, as we drop this thing, we're beyond stoked to share that we not only reached that goal, but massively surpassed it. We're launching with 326 696 Wishlists! Early Access at Launch: As we bring Shroom and Gloom into Early Access, here are some highlights of what you can expect: • Next level double deckbuilding! If you played the demo, you'll have a feel for Shroom and Gloom's double deckbuilding gameplay. In Early Access, we've fine-tuned, rebalanced, polished and amplified everything we love about the game.
• 2 paths! The Mysterious Facility can now be discovered! This is an entirely new path towards The Gloom, complete with entirely new card pools, enemies and rewards!
• 5 characters! At launch you'll be able to play as Paperboy, Janitor, Lunchlady, Activist and Concerned Parent. Each character has unique starting decks for both combat and explore, plus a base Foresight card that changes how they play. You'll also be able to discover game-breaking character cards during your explorations of The Underealm!
• Quests! You'll have to do some mushroom-hunting to earn these advanced characters and access to The Facility. The quest system that allows you to unlock new content and grow this strange world as you venture deeper and learn more.
• Achievements! Along with quests, we're also launching with a selection of unlockable Steam Achievements. With a range of challenge levels, your goals to unlock some achievements are clear, while other are hidden and will need to be discovered.
• Game Saves! One of our most requested features is here! Each time you win a fight, or escape a dungeon your progress will be auto saved!
• Controller Support! Our other most requested feature is here too! You can now throw your keyboard and mouse in the bin and enjoy Shroom and Gloom from the comfort of your couch!
• Simplified Chinese langue support! Shroom and Gloom is now playable in Simplified Chinese! Support for additional languages will roll out in Early Access over time.
* UI/ UX and QOL improvements! We've put a lot of effort into improving the moment to moment card play in Shroom and Gloom. Targeting in both combat and explore has been vastly improved. Each card now indicates if it'll hit a single enemies, multiple enemies, or apply a buff to you. Targeting cards in your hand has also been streamlined, with any ineligible targets falling away. We've also added a card inspector, which should help when playing the game on handheld devices.
• Secrets! The less said here the better, just know that we've sprinkled some fun things into the game for you to discover! What's next?
We couldn't be more stoked to set off on this next phases of development, working more closely than ever with the Shroom and Gloom community in Early Access. In short, our big picture plan it to keep improving on the game, add even more characters and eventually open up the third and final pathway to The Gloom. Between here and the final 1.0 release, we'll roll out a few major updates to introduce new characters and cards. And between those big updates, we'll drop smaller ones, fine-tuning the existing content. Our first step will be building out a roadmap. What exactly this will look like depends on the community. Your feedback will help to shape and direct future development of the game. So, if you do pick the game up in Early Access, leave us a Steam review, and become a part of our lovely Discord to join future discussions about how we can continue to make Shroom and Gloom the best game it can be. Go eat some mushrooms!
We could swoon over this dreamy moment forever, but you have more important things to do! The Facility won't unlock itself, and someone needs to clean that mess up! Thank you so much to you for being a part of this moment, and extra thanks to all the wonderful members of our community who have encouraged us and supported this project up to this point. We couldn't possibly be more grateful, or excited about what comes next. Stay rad and be excellent to each other!