Celebrating our first person roguelike deckbuilder hitting Steam!

The butterfly effect is crazy. One minute you’re at a game jam, making a janky little experiment with your friends. The next thing you know you’re writing a dev log, informing the world of your intentions to make the most dazzling game in its genre, with The World’s great indie game publisher at your side.

Hello, dear reader. Ben here from the Cape Town game band Team Lazerbeam. I’m beyond stoked to welcome you to the most significant dev log of our 11-year career of developing lovingly handcrafted indie games.

This is a truly monumental moment for our little game band. We’re taking this post as an opportunity to celebrate this milestone, and invite you to join us on our quest to make the best looking, most fun entry into the deckbuilder genre.

Before we dig in, for readers short on time or attention spans, here’s an overview;

TL;DR: * Shroom and Gloom is a first person, roguelike deckbuilder. * We’ve released a free demo for the game! * We’ve partnered with Devolver Digital to bring our game-baby into The World!

Still here? Rad! Prepare to lock in as we introduce you to Shroom and Gloom, the game punx behind it, and our humble quest to bring you the greatest deck builder ever!

Hiiiiiiiiii!

Since this is the debut Steam dev log for this project, I guess we should kick this off with a quick intro. Hi! We’re Team Lazerbeam!

We’re a Cape Town based game band. Since 2014, we’ve been making and releasing games together. With a heavy emphasis on filling players with joy, we’ve aimed to celebrate games as the shape of punk to come. Our releases have spanned multiple genres, but the common thread between our games has been their hand drawn art, deeply emotive soundtracks, and gameplay designed to constantly surprise and delight players.

In the early years, Team Lazerbeam was a labour of love, spending our nights and weekends making games together between our day jobs. Our focus was squarely on releasing tiny alt games, shooting for maximum impact and minimal play time. We embraced jank and imperfection. We released as many little games as we could muster. We built a small but awesome following of Lazerfans. We had a ton of fun along the way.

But we’re not here to dwell on the past. We’re here to gaze into the future, and the future is fungal!

The History of Shroom and Gloom:

How awesome would it be to play a dungeon-crawling, roguelike deckbuilder with a first person presentation? Could we make a deckbuilder where cards drove not only combat, but all the juicy bits of exploration and leveling up between the fights? What if your enemies were both devastatingly dangerous and delicious? With these questions bouncing around in our heads, we dove into 7DPFS 2021, a game jam dedicated to creating a first person game in one week.

The result of this jam was a janky little game about fighting and feasting your way through dungeons full of fungal foes. Shroom and Gloom was born! The jam game was well received, with players praising both the unique visuals, and surprisingly vast potential for super-fun, game-breaking mega-combos. We were personally delighted by what we’d made, encouraging us to spend a few more days of our free time on improving on the jam game and experimenting with where we could take things. But once the real world came knocking, we had to step away from this fun little side quest. Shroom and Gloom was filed away under the “this seems like it could be a great game, someday we’ll come back to it” section of our collective jam archive.

Fast forward to April 2024, and we finally got to return to Shroom and Gloom. We spent a month on an art test, experimenting with where were could take things if we were to turn this into a proper game. Entirely focused on visuals, the art test featured no cards or fights. We worked out butts off and shot for the stars. The results were (if we say so ourselves) awe-inspiring.

Art test passed, we then spent 3 months prototyping a totally new version of Shroom and Gloom. Our goal was now to test the viability of Shroom and Gloom. Could we combine the new art style with a slimmed down version of the synergy-focused gameplay of the jam game? Would the resulting game be fun? Would there be an audience for something like this? Many (many) happy hours later, we emerged from our Lazercave with a brand new prototype. It’s was buggy, incomplete and held together with hopes and dreams, but we were overjoyed to bring people a proof of concept for a truly exceptional entry in the young roguelike deck builder genre. We set it loose, releasing the prototype for free on itch in early September 2024, hoping it’d answer a whole bunch of questions. Will people find this thing to be fun? Is there an audience for something like this? Should we turn this into a full game?

It took a few days to build some momentum, but we very quickly found that the prototype had answered all our questions. Player reception was overwhelmingly positive. The game rose to the top of itch charts. Publishers and funders were reaching out in droves. Shroom and Gloom social media posts blew up across every platform they were posted on. Should we turn this into a full game? Hell yeah we should! Shroom and Gloom hits Steam!

Today, we’re delighted to bring a free, playable Shroom and Gloom demo to Steam. The demo is a significantly polished version of the original prototype, introducing players to our game’s hand-drawn visuals and surprising twists on the roguelike deckbuilder genre.

We’re still in the early days of development. There’s still a great deal of work ahead of us, but we’re stoked as hell with what we’re making, and can’t wait to share it was as many people as possible.

Wanna get a taste of what Shroom and Gloom is all about? We made a little video to introduce you to the project:

Devolver Digital has joined the Party!

Aligned with our mission to bring Shroom and Gloom to as many spelunkers as possible, we’re overjoyed to share the news that we’ve teamed up with Devolver Digital!

After the initial explosion of interest in the Shroom and Gloom prototype we took every meeting request that came our way. We met with some very rad people that wanted to work with us on this project. But wrapping up this epic phase of publisher meetings, there was a single clear winner. A game band like Team Lazerbeam needs a publisher that feels like an indie rock record label. It had to be Devolver!

We’re overjoyed to be working with a publisher that just gets us, and gives us the freedom to craft the most creative, adventurous game that we can. Beyond the game, we’re also delighted to have full creative control over how SnG will be presented (case in point, we produced the key art and both Shroom and Gloom trailers in-house). We’re stoked as heck to be label-mates with some of our all time favourite indies (looking at you Inscryption, Cult Of The Lamb and Sludge Life!). Bonus points for Devolver bringing out all the magic from our Cape Town besties, Free Lives.

The significance of this partnership should be clear to anyone who’s been following Team Lazerbeam on our journey to explore games as the Shape Of Punk To Come. After our totally DIY era, Team Lazerbeam partnering with a titan like Devolver is a huge milestone. We can’t imagine a publisher better suited to help us achieve our wildly ambitious goals for Shroom and Gloom.

Join our quest! Our dreams for Shroom and Gloom are immense. We’re so proud of what we’ve been able to pull off so far - we think this game looks and sounds great, and offers players mountains of fun mushroom slaying gameplay. But we want to make this thing even better, earning a spot as one of the best looking, most fun deckbuilders out there.

We’re well aware how ambitious this quest is, but we believe in this game with all our hearts. We genuinely believe we have an opportunity to make something stellar that stands out, not just as one of the best games in its genre, but in indie games period.

One of the main reasons we have this faith in Shroom and Gloom is because of the community that’s already grown around this game. The overwhelmingly positive feedback of players and the immense enthusiasm of fans confirm that we’re making something truly special here.

The best bit in this journey is only getting started. As we bring the prototype to Steam, we’re excited to introduce Shroom and Gloom to a far wider audience. In the process, we’re delighted to continue growing the amazing community of Shroomers that are inspiring us to keep going, and helping us mould this game into it’s final form.

If you’re still here, I guess we owe you a high five. Congratulations, you’re a Shroomer now! So what’s next? Add that juicy little demo to your library, slay some shrooms, leave us a glowing review and spread the spores! If you’d like to give us any detailed feedback, come hang out with us on Discord and sign up to beta test or just pass along high fives. You can also track our quest to make this game by following us on TikTok or Instagram or Bluesky. We also have a pretty sweet little monthly mailer for all the Lazerpals.

That that! Okay, we’ve gotta get back to our mushrooms.

Thanks for reading and being a part of our adventures, bringing this game to the world.

Stay rad, everybody! Team Lazerbeam