SHROOOMS by theloneplant

made by theloneplant for LD 40 (COMPO)

You are a wandering individual when all of a sudden you stumble and fall into a cavern. To your surprise, you are alive. But something’s off - wait - are those mushrooms moving?

This is my first official submission to Ludum Dare, I've done game jams and development before but I've never actually participated until now! Also I completely overslept the last day so there are a few things that I really wanted to focus more on but couldn't, like optimization and more art. :((((

Pardon the gif quality, hue shifts don't compress well

Update V1.2.1

I'm caving and doing one last small update that tweaks the controls and balance slightly, then I'm done I SWEAR * Inverted keyboard aim controls, now they're normal! Gamepad controls are unchanged * Reduced the duration of intoxication, reduced amount of mushrooms to get level 4 and 5 intoxication * Now level 4 takes 15 consecutive mushrooms (down from 20), and level 5 takes 20 (down from 40)

Update V1.2

I think this is the last version I'll make for the game jam, since I'm pretty happy with where it is and I don't want to change it too much from the original submission (Edit: jk I’m gonna invert the kb shoot controls when I get home but then I should be done): * Changed eat mushrooms from E to Space * Changed score from # of kills to # of mushrooms eaten * Players were finding the end game boring since you could simply kite enemies and rack up kills. With this change in place it forces players to dive into the hoard of mushrooms, making it much more difficult to manage large numbers. * Added web support (mostly) * One issue with web is the low pass filter doesn't work. If you want the full experience then download the Windows version :) * Fixed graphics issue with clamping textures, now they repeat properly * Added animation to score when you pick up mushrooms

Update V1.1

I got home a bit late to be in time for the jam to end, but I fixed some bugs and some pain points from the comments. Here's the changelog for the recent change: * Fixed graphics issues with clamping on the edges of the screen and sprites * Fixed buzzing audio issues with many enemies and the low pass filter * Increased the mushroom blast radius and spawn area, and reduced the max count of mushrooms * Moved the spawn point to the actual center (OCD senses were tingling) * Changed restart screen to only listen to Enter/Start so it doesn't instantly return to the menu

Controls

Keyboard

WASD - Move around
Arrow keys - Pull back and shoot a pellet
E - Eat Mushrooms (v1.0)
Space - Eat Mushrooms (v1.2)
Enter - Restart game

Controller (Highly Recommended!)

Left joystick - Move around
Right joystick - Pull back and shoot a pellet
A - Eat Mushrooms
Start - Restart game

Credit

Fonts

Munro - Ten by Twenty
Press Start - codeman38

Sounds

Music - Generated from WolframTones
SFX - Created using BFXR

Windows	https://github.com/theloneplant/SHROOOMS/raw/master/SHROOOMS.zip
HTML5 (web)	https://theloneplant.itch.io/shroooms
Windows	https://github.com/theloneplant/SHROOOMS/raw/patches/Versions/v1.2.1/Windows/SHROOOMS.zip
Original URL	https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/shroooms

Ratings

Overall	159^th	3.698⭐	50🧑‍⚖️
Fun	104^th	3.781⭐	50🧑‍⚖️
Innovation	216^th	3.427⭐	50🧑‍⚖️
Theme	126^th	3.917⭐	50🧑‍⚖️
Graphics	151^th	3.813⭐	50🧑‍⚖️
Audio	97^th	3.648⭐	46🧑‍⚖️
Humor	46^th	3.822⭐	47🧑‍⚖️
Mood	110^th	3.594⭐	50🧑‍⚖️
Given		33🗳️	33🗨️

Feedback

🎤 theloneplant

04. Dec 2017 · 04:05 UTC

One small bit about the codebase, I'm using standard assets but I actually modified the motion blur effect so that it saves more frames and skips several in between so it gives you the trailing image effect.

aplite

04. Dec 2017 · 04:07 UTC

Fun concept! It would be helpful if there was more of a visual cue when the mushrooms are no longer edible, but not yet hostile.

BelowParallel_Ian

04. Dec 2017 · 05:05 UTC

Really fun little game. I like the art style a lot, and the music fits the theme of the game perfectly. I wish the mouse button did the eating instead of the "E" key. I have to choose between moving right or eating. Great game overall. I really enjoyed it.

Handle

04. Dec 2017 · 05:32 UTC

Nice graphics and audio. The gameplay fits the theme well, and works mostly as I'd expect... I had a really hard time with the inverted aiming, though. Playing on the controller is a must, imo.

🎤 theloneplant

04. Dec 2017 · 05:40 UTC

@aplite
There's the visual cue right now which is the mushroom growing, but it can be kind of subtle if you're intoxicated. Things being harder to see when eating mushrooms was the point of the theme, along with exponential increase of mushrooms, but I do agree there should be a particle effect and/or a color effect when mushrooms get closer and closer to changing state.

@belowparallel-ian
I think you're on keyboard, which I didn't really design it for unfortunately. It's much better on a controller since you have the left joystick alone and the right side is either shooting or eating. Next time I'll focus more on kb/mouse implementation, it seems more people are using that

@handle
Yes a controller really is a must lol, it was an experimental idea that I had and it just doesn't work well with kb. If I had more time I would've tried doing something where you pull back with the mouse, but hey that's what game jam's are for. Thanks for the awesome feedback!

CMLSC

04. Dec 2017 · 06:30 UTC

This is probably the most humorous game I've played so far. :P
The pixel art was pretty good, the sound was great, and I love the idea.
One issue is that eventually the game would get so laggy that it's practically frozen(the screen would update every 5-10 seconds) if I play for too long. Another issue I can think of is that there isn't that much of a challenge because of how slow the shrooms are. Maybe add ammo or something. I'm not sure if this was intentional, but the shooting controls are inverted for some reason.

Good work though! :smile:

🎤 theloneplant

04. Dec 2017 · 06:41 UTC

Thanks! I was trying out an idea for controllers where you would pull back a shot and release it to shoot. I wasn't paying much attention to keyboard users which was a big mistake since most people are using that it seems, but I highly recommend using a controller for this! I was also wrestling with performance and added a cap on the number of mushrooms but I didn't have enough time to really investigate it. There are a lot of things that cause the lag to be a problem and 2 days isn't enough for everything :/
I also wanted to add a feature where the mushroom would leap towards you and also add obstacles, but I overslept this morning so I didn't have any time lol

CMLSC

04. Dec 2017 · 06:43 UTC

@theloneplant I accidentally fell asleep in the last couple of hours, so I kind of know how that feels. xD

Jake Cope

04. Dec 2017 · 07:12 UTC

Very well made game with a solid idea and solid construction. Music and art was really great as well!

jjjjason

04. Dec 2017 · 07:21 UTC

In a sense, it's almost like a zombie game. You're sweeping through an infected town trying to loot corpses before they come back to their unlives.

Really enjoy how the mushrooms cluster up and allow you to shoot down groups all together. Makes the player feel like a badass when they take down 30 mushrooms at once.

Mark Kennedy

04. Dec 2017 · 07:21 UTC

Bravo. It was neat seeing a game about psychedelics. Loved the polish/feel/effects of it - from the music to the way the spores fell into the dirt to the noises.

Nice Work!

kix334

04. Dec 2017 · 09:20 UTC

Haha great use of the theme, solid mechanics and a really nice art style, the little faces on the mushrooms were hilarious!

Sholf

04. Dec 2017 · 10:10 UTC

I'll never look at shrooms the same away again haha. That was really fun, great game! Artstyle is beautiful, music is great (and I love the effect when you start eating too many), and overall it's just a really well executed design. Great job!

MRUniverse

04. Dec 2017 · 11:38 UTC

I had an experience not unlike this once... Good game and the psychedelic effect has my head spinning!

Noa Calice

04. Dec 2017 · 12:18 UTC

The game is REALLY juicy ! It's just such a shame that the WASD keys really doesn't suit my AZER keyboard ! As a result it was tough for me to play the game !

tschery

04. Dec 2017 · 12:44 UTC

Juciy game, took me a bit to figure out the controls. Wont forget to bring my slingshot when I got to the forest next time

Scott R Howell

04. Dec 2017 · 13:01 UTC

found myself frantically kiting and blowing away hordes of shrooms, dangerously addictive and fun, really got that feel and polish in there! good job!

R2D48

04. Dec 2017 · 13:34 UTC

I wanna eat them all !

CKlidify

04. Dec 2017 · 21:23 UTC

Fun game with nice music art and sounds! Only minor complaint is that dying just kicks you straight to the main menu without any animation or anything.

Byron Bowen

04. Dec 2017 · 21:35 UTC

Good game feel, cohesive idea. This seems worth developing further maybe; with a few different enemies and more varied space to run around in, I could see myself playing this quite a bit. I scored over 1,100 kills and noticed that eating mushrooms became obsolete pretty quickly, because they only grew inside the mob. I found myself and the mob basically forced into a circular chasing pattern, which was fun for a while (good game feel) but then became tedious for a while before I died.

🎤 theloneplant

04. Dec 2017 · 22:00 UTC

@cklidify Yeah there is the death screen but I think the problem is it's mapped to any key and when you're mashing buttons to eat mushrooms it causes it to change instantly. I'll probably push a hotfix for this and a few other minor issues like performance.

@byron-bowen Thanks for playing! Yes eating does get obsolete, I was missing a mechanic that made the game harder as the crowd of mushrooms grew instead of just running towards you. What I originally wanted was for attacks to cause a chain reaction that blows up an entire crowds of mushrooms but for performance reasons that wasn't feasible in two days. This would've fixed the problem for the most part, but I think having obstacles and having the mushrooms do a leap forward occasionally would also help make things more interesting. That being said, I'm also thinking of making this into a dungeon crawler roguelike with some hidden doors, puzzles, enemy weak points, etc. that are only visible when you're intoxicated.

eerongal

05. Dec 2017 · 01:55 UTC

That was really fun! I really liked the distortion and how bad it gets, makes for a real challenge.

SpaceMonkey

05. Dec 2017 · 11:53 UTC

Well that was some good stuff there! I mashed those arrow keys like crazy in the end haha
Obviously very nice pixel art, graphic effects and mechanics. I was expecting some glitches when chased by a huge group of angry shrooms but nothing really, not a jiggle. That is solid coding.
I only wish there was a deeper gameplay in the end-game, but it's not like anything is missing either. Well done ! I hope I'll be able to deliver games like this one in the future :)

Wuceng

05. Dec 2017 · 16:00 UTC

Great music and I love the double vision effect. Sadly the controls with gamepad are not optimal and a bit clunky because if you move the stick to the right to shoot to the right it first sets the direction to down regardless of input. Would be better if the arrow instantly followed the player input.

Apart from that small issue its a really solid game and has a great mood.
Also note that the 1.1 version doesn't have the data folder packed with it so you cant start it.

🎤 theloneplant

05. Dec 2017 · 17:41 UTC

@spacemonkey Thanks for playing :) Yeah I wish I could've added 1 or 2 mechanics for the endgame since it's basically just kiting and killing, or at least a good mechanism to make the game harder. In 1.1 I made the screen get narrower when you eat mushrooms which fixes a graphics bug and makes it harder late game since you move faster and can't see as much. This was about as good as I could do with a simple patch.

@wuceng That's a result of me using an input buffer for attacking. I store (5?) frames of input so quickly flicking the joystick still works but there's probably a small bug in there somewhere for that first frame. I updated the downloadable for 1.1, I just forgot to zip everything :)

forrest

06. Dec 2017 · 06:37 UTC

My biggest concern is I had no controller plugged in and was surprised to find the A button unable to be used to 'eat'. Perhaps for keyboard use mouse (and for controller use stick) to aim so you can keep the buttons consistent?

🎤 theloneplant

06. Dec 2017 · 07:30 UTC

@forrest Yup that was a big pain point for me as well. I wanted to keep the updates minimal so I probably won’t be changing the arrow keys and just leaving the flaw in but I was thinking the very same thing myself after I finished. I didn’t realize how many people were using kb/mouse for the compo so lesson learned lol

jjjjason

07. Dec 2017 · 17:53 UTC

@theloneplant of course we used keyboards for the compo, writing code with a controller would be ridiculous :)

🎤 theloneplant

12. Dec 2017 · 06:42 UTC

I've updated the game to v1.2! Now there's support for web and I've made a tweak to the scoring system that hopefully addresses many of these comments about late game. There are a few other minor changes in the changelog too. Let me know what you think!

Yohoho Games 2

12. Dec 2017 · 06:49 UTC

it looks impressive especially when there are a lot of mushrooms) beautiful particles and backgrounds also in game are very much :wink:

steven-pinto

12. Dec 2017 · 07:56 UTC

Nice little concept and fun game :) The shooting controls were inverse, was a design intention or? Because it was a bit hard at start. All in all good art and well done!
Feel free to play and rate my game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/split

Chartman

12. Dec 2017 · 08:05 UTC

Great ideas for the theme. I loved how the effects increased the difficulty as you ate more mushrooms.

🎤 theloneplant

12. Dec 2017 · 08:06 UTC

@steven-pinto Yes that was intentional and I've mentioned it a couple times in previous comments. I didn't have time to implement mouse drag and I had kind of neglected kb/mouse for the LD so it feels weird for that. It was originally a concept of "pull back and release to shoot" which worked pretty well on controllers but needed a mouse to work well on kb/mouse. So yeah it was intentional but on kb it was more of an afterthought unfortunately.

mainghia95

12. Dec 2017 · 08:34 UTC

I don't really like the control system in your game since I play on my laptop (maybe it's better with controller?) The audio can be improved a lil bit. I think you can make the mushroom transformation a lil bit more noticeable. Anw nice try.

SaraMartins

12. Dec 2017 · 09:15 UTC

That was some party! Nice art, the sound effects and music help set the mood. The particles and the color changes were really cool. Did you have a set of predefined colours that you chose from randomly?

I don't have a controller so I just played with the keyboard. The controls were weird and difficult, so if you could improve that it would be a win.

But overall it's a fun game, great work :)

Felegz

12. Dec 2017 · 10:31 UTC

I really liked the mechanic of choice: do I run towards it and eat it while it's small, or do I fave to wait and shoot it — that's a good one. Cool and funny game, cute and fitting graphics. It was a bit hard for me because of having just one life. I'm a fan of Vlambeer-like bullet size, so I suggest maybe having bigger and heavier pellets?
Great job, thank you for making your game!

BlakeMcDeezy

12. Dec 2017 · 10:50 UTC

Haha, 46 shrooooms! I'm so proud of myself!
That was a fun and engaging game. The pixel art was perfect, and I enjoyed the music and sound effects as well - it got so trippy in the end, haha. Great use of the theme!

Lex

12. Dec 2017 · 11:12 UTC

I good idea would be to have you start seeing things other than mushrooms after a while. Another thing would be to add an ending for when you eat, lets say, 50 shrooms. A dreamlike ending.

maybe

12. Dec 2017 · 11:16 UTC

Really cool game, loved the concept!
Loved getting high as well, really nice effect.

I read the issues you had and I know that time was a big factor, I faced that problem as well.

But realy cool overall!

![Screenshot_28.png](///raw/607/2/z/e847.png)

dawik9000

12. Dec 2017 · 13:10 UTC

Awesome entry! BTW on the html version the arrow controls are the other way round(up is down, left is right, etc.)
I would add a couple of lives as i the game is real fun and the best part is when you have eaten many shrooms and you are trippy, but getting instakilled was a bummer.

Great game, congrats!

Phaix

12. Dec 2017 · 13:14 UTC

Great game, love the art.

It would be great to have the target/shot inverted, but maybe that's what you wanted, to have it more challenging. I know it should simulate the pull back system, but it makes it a little tricky.

🎤 theloneplant

13. Dec 2017 · 04:58 UTC

I've made two small tweaks in another update. The feedback has been overwhelmingly in favor of reversing the aim controls so I've made that change, along with making the intoxication levels easier to get to and easier to sober up. This should make it more common to get and lose intoxication, which I thought would be well used as a choice between keeping mushroom numbers low vs keeping intoxication low (better visibility). Hope you like the changes!

Unfortunately I don't have time to investigate the low pass issue on the web version since there isn't a lot of info on it. If anyone has experience with this please let me know :)

arron-fowler

15. Dec 2017 · 10:31 UTC

Solid little game. Loads of room for development and adventure. I liked it a lot.

PonchoGuy

16. Dec 2017 · 01:38 UTC

Played this on my stream last night - It was great fun and I really enjoyed it :yum:

Graphics hit me hard as earthbound/undertale style and I loved the cheeky little kid eating the mushrooms and getting more and more hallucinated

Maybe (purely my opinion) the slingshot should have a move and shoot option with a massive reduction in accuracy?
That would get me out of a few sticky situations where accuracy isn't important and it gives me more of an option with stay/move

I loved the mushrooms - they looked really funny hallucinated, maybe add a few more coloured mushrooms with different effects? white are ok, red hallucinate bad, blue etc etc (gives the player an excuse to research)

Great game! Really great actually!! Hope the feedback helps if you take this post-jam! :smile:

Jordgubben

17. Dec 2017 · 18:39 UTC

I find it a bit hard to tell when mushrooms go from food to foe. Perhappes thay could change in hue, not just size.

Liked the control scheme once I got used to it.

Schu

20. Dec 2017 · 23:08 UTC

This is a fantastic entry! I think this could easily be made into a full fledged arcade-style game. It started to get extremely hectic with all of the mushrooms coming at me and I love that they don't stop even after they've killed you. My biggest complaint is that it took me forever to figure out the button to eat the mushrooms since it says "A" over them.