We know it has been ages since you’ve heard from us. We’re sorry that we’ve been so silent, but we are excited to say that we are back with a BIG update to Terrorarium, and a lot of exciting news.
The feedback that we got from our initial Early Access release made it clear that we had a lot to reconsider about the way that Terrorarium works. With your help, we spent the last months leaning into the good stuff, and steering away from the … less so good.
With that being said, here’s a list of everything that’s new in this version of Terrorarium:
Massive optimization, performance improvements, & bug fixing:
The first Early Access release had some issues, we know that. All of your feedback and bug reports have given us insight into where we should focus the most work to improve. We’re happy to say that the result is a much more stable and smooth gaming experience!
- The game should run much smoother on almost all devices
- You should experience far less crashing
- Many, many, many bug fixes
- Known exploitable behaviours fixed:
- Teleporting through objects
- Falling out of the map
- Moogu death loops
- Path editor exploits
Sweeping visual updates:
We also took some me-time to fix a lot of things that we didn’t like about the last release. Things now look a lot more like we intended. Animations are smoother, visuals pop more, and lights really glow. You can now build some pretty sweet looking murder gardens.
- Better animations for almost everything
- 4 visual ‘biomes’ to differentiate assets:
- Lumina Flora (Bioluminescent Garden)
- Northern Mists (Frozen Garden)
- Torrid Wilds (Arid Garden)
- Sunglow Grove (Jungle Garden)
- New textures for most objects/monsters
- Lots of polygon smoothing
- Many new visual effects on The Gardener and Moogu
- Many new lighting & post-processing effects
Maker Mode quality of life changes:
At its core, Terrorarium is a maker game about designing and sharing your own cool little levels (called Murder Gardens). This release focuses heavily on improving that experience, since it’s the main thing that we want players to do within the game.
- Objects are easier to click and grab for editing
- Path Editor for moving monsters improved
- File saving process smoothed out
- Objects categorized by biomes to allow for map diversity
- Object scaling modified to reduce map-breaking placements
- Object colliders modified
- Various bug fixes and UI improvements
Game mechanic changes:
One of the game’s core goals is to make Moogu feel important but expendable; hard to control but useful; and symbiotic to the player character. Without them, you can’t do a whole lot, but too many of them become a liability. The last build of the game took this too far and the result was very chaotic. It was fun at times, but too frustrating at others. With that in mind, we significantly changed the way the player uses Moogu, and the Gardener in this update:
Breeding:
Moogu no longer leave corpses behind when they die, but can breed at ‘Moogu Graveyards’ the player can place with intent. This provides some much needed scarcity to Moogu. You should be worried if your swarm count gets low. It also prevents breeding loops.
Death:
Moogu are killed by more things (as if that was possible). Moogu are killed by pretty much everything. They die if they are outside of your control radius for too long, so using your beckon to bring them back and making sure they don't wander off is more important than ever. And the more Moogu you get, the smaller your control radius becomes! Spicy and Gooey Moogu die when you shoot them to use their abilities. Which brings us to our next point...
Abilities:
Moogu now only have one ability per type that is activated when you shoot them. Thick Moogu break stuff, Spicy Moogu turn into little fireballs, and Gooey Moogu turn to goop that slows enemies down (and also is flammable…). Focusing each Moogu type on doing one thing really well helped to remove some confusion about what each type is for, and consequently makes them feel more individually valuable.
Navigation:
Moogu pathfinding and navigation has been significantly improved. This results in fewer stuck Moogu and a more natural, flowy movement to the swarm. They’re still stupid little creatures, so you’ll need to carefully navigate your swarm through dangerous environments.
The Gardener:
Feedback from the last release also showed us that we didn’t quite hit the mark by making the Gardener nearly invincible. The idea was that everything killed Moogu, and nothing killed you. You were their shepherd and if they all died, you went with them. In practice, this left a disconnect between the dangers of the game and the player character. You’re now much more vulnerable. Fire kills you, monsters kill you, spikes kill you… you get the idea. Proceed with care.
Other stuff:
Many of Terrorarium’s monsters and hazards also got behaviour updates. You’ll need to hop in and experiment for yourself to see what they are.
What’s Missing:
This Early Access update changes a lot of things about Terrorarium, but there is still more to come before our garden is complete.
Story Campaign:
Anyone who played the last release will notice that our 25 level campaign has been replaced by…. 4 levels? We changed so much about the game that we decided to to (re)start from scratch. We’ve included 4 levels in this build (1 for each biome) that shows off what the new Maker Mode can do.
We’re hard at work on a new and improved campaign to the place the old one. It will include tutorialization, and a 12-part animated story that finally tells the tale of the Gardener and her little Moogu friends. That campaign will drop in the coming months with the final release of the game.
Old levels:
For the same reason that our old levels didn’t work, well, yours won’t either. If you were one of our loyal early adopters who created and shared a Murder Garden on Steam Workshop, we love you, but we had to hide your creation from the world because it won’t be compatible with this release. Future updates will focus on preventing this from happening again.
Mac support:
We will no longer be releasing a Mac build of the game. The unfortunate truth is that right now, we don’t have the resources to properly support it.
4th moogu:
You may notice that our 4th species of Moogu, Gassy Moogu, are absent from the game. Don’t worry! We are currently figuring out how they fit into the new version of Terrorarium and their stupid heads will be releasing with the story campaign later this year (along with some other little surprises).
Stay in touch!
Join our Discord! The game creators and fans are all here sharing our latest levels and answering your questions: https://discord.gg/9uzFDv4.
We also want your bug reports! This is still an Early Access release from a small team, after all. We feel we have made massive strides in performance and stability, but there is still work to be done. Discord is the best place to give that valuable feedback.
CONTEST
To coincide with this launch, we’re running a Level Design Contest with $5,000 in scholarships and prizes, including a $2,000 cash prize, Nintendo Switch consoles, and a potential credit as a level designer. We want people to build the wildest, prettiest or most treacherous levels to add to our game and challenge all levels of player.
The contest is open to game design students in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom, as well as recent graduates. Students who register for the contest will receive a free copy of the Early Access build of Terrorarium via Steam Key. For more info and to register, go to at murder.garden/contest
We want to recognize all the gifted emerging talent and help give them a boost by including their work in the commercial release of our game. It’s our way of giving back to our wonderful community of old friends and new; for being part of the Terrorarium journey.