Curse of the Mystical Mushroom by BACON BEAST

Summon, Train, and Upgrade cute little mushrooms to destroy the forest!
The Mystical Mushroom has cursed the Wacky Mushroom Witch with being stuck in the deep dark forest, forced to eat dull mushroom soup for the rest of their life! The Mystical Mushroom must be destroyed in order to escape the infinite loop! It’s up to you to use the witch’s Super Wicked and Wacky Mushroom Summoning Technique to summon cute little mushrooms to destroy the environment to gain energy, then invest back into upgrading the shrooms to make them more powerful, HOPEFULLY powerful enough to destroy the Mystical Mushroom and break the curse!
| Itch.io Page (HTML5 Web) | https://bacon-beast.itch.io/curse-of-the-mystical-mushroom |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/curse-of-the-mystical-mushroom |
Ratings
| Overall | 479th | 3.658⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 214th | 3.868⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 677th | 3.263⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 531th | 3.737⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 873th | 3.211⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 697th | 2.861⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 347th | 3.447⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 795th | 3.368⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 11🗳️ | 16🗨️ |
Critiques are: The attack sound for the mushrooms clips a little bit, and I think economy acceleration would work better than extending time as an upgrade.
Otherwise very well done! The dialogue is a nice touch too :)
The artstyle is pretty good, and I like the style of billboarded sprites in 3D space, kinda make me want to make a game like that myself! :D
The animations of the forest felt weird at first, seeing everything - bones, logs and living trees - move in unison felt somewhat uncanny, but I guess that added some weird mood to the game. Did you experiment with having every object have a slightly different animation speed to make them look like they're all animated independently?
The music is nice, really fitting for the mood of a witch stuck somewhere in a forest.
I really liked that your mushrooms retarget when there's a ghost nearby instead of just continuing to attack their current target and take a beating. Well done on adding that one small but important piece of AI! :)
Overall, the game is really great. It feels good to progress, and once you upgrade the max mushrooms high enough it gives you that real sense of power, especially when you start seeing them quickly obliterate the low-hp targets. I'd say all that's left to do here is some more balancing on the upgrades, as for example the "free premade mushrooms" upgrade is practically not worth it after the first level - I've played a lot, but I don't think I got the cost returned for anything beyond the second upgrade. I thought I might play till I got all the upgrades, but the final few got a bit too expensive for me to try and grind for them:

Also, for my first playthrough, I've focused on getting the time extended as much as possible, and it made me feel like it would be nice to have something for the player to do during the level. Perhaps some buff / debuff spells you could cast for a small energy cost? Another thing which would be nice is to add some bonus reward for returning home before the timer fully runs out. Oh, and while we're on the subject on the timer, I've discovered one interesting thing - fullscreen apps with media playback should prevent screensaver from appearing, yet while playing your game mine still activated. Not sure if it's a Unity bug or if perhaps there's something you've missed in the build options.
It would also be cool to have a max button for the buying mushrooms - clicking individually or holding the mouse button takes way too long once you get your max mushroom count higher up.
One small bug I found - the furthest mushroom on the right has its HP bar displayed behind its sprite:

I thought that it might have been the bones behind it, or a spawning ghost, but once everything was cleared, there still was an HP bar partially obscured right until I've destroyed that mushroom.
Overall, it's a really fun and well made compo entry. I hope you're going to keep working on it, as it is a cool idea, and I can see many ways in which you could expand it further. Well done!

I would have loved if the big mushroom had some sort of barrier, so that you cant spam your mushrooms there.
If you want to be nitpicky, the sound design could have been improved, especially when you summon 100 mushrooms :id:
But overall a really fun game which I liked to play!
Good work!