Development Update

Devlog 5-31-24

First we'd like to thank all the players who have picked up the demo on Steam since March. We've got a median playtime of 30 minutes and tons of feedback that has helped us improve the direction of the game.

Receiving this feedback has given us a few major questions:

What are we even making anyway?

MycoRelic is not a survival-crafting game in a large procedurally generated open world with village building mechanics and 100% science based mushroom breeding. Though we all can dream right?

**MycoRelic is a Souls-like with drop-in coop and less restrictive movement. ** We've been developing with multiplayer in mind since the beginning of the project. Over time we've found the game is more fun if you can jump, mantle, and air dash your way around the islands.

What happens when you die?

This question has the biggest impact on the gameplay loop overall. In our first demo, we knew how combat was supposed to work. We didn't know how death was supposed to work. This was one of the bigger flaws with the experience in coop. We found players would die and run back through an empty level, or struggle to get back to their friends because they had a different spawn point set.

Furthermore, the formula of a souls like is that the enemies in an area respawn when you die. (Or in our case when the group wipes).

We have prototyped a few systems in the interim. The first idea was that we would have a series of linked respawn points and they would have to be charged up to prevent enemies in that area from respawning. This system was promising at first, but it proved to be confusing. We also needed more sticky mechanics to keep groups together.

Enter our current and best candidate for a death mechanic: the life shroom system.

What is a life-shroom?

Early on in the game, the player gets the ability to place a checkpoint somewhere in the level. This ability costs 1 charge (our discrete version of mana, lore friendly name pending). When the player dies, they respawn at the checkpoint and it is destroyed. If the player dies again without having placed another life-shroom, the enemies in the area they are in will reset.

Here are a few design doodles that Jon put together explaining it:

We are still working out the details, but the bones of the system are in the game now.

Instead of one big island, why not many islands?

Over the past two months we have completely reworked our map from an architecture perspective. This was a hard decision as we had to say goodbye to our old level, but it needed to be done. Reworking the map has had a few benefits:

• Each island can be its own sublevel and we can unload the unused islands dynamically, increasing performance.

• Small islands are easier to work with, from prototyping to production.

• If we don't like an island, we can scrap it without worrying about the flow of nearby areas.

• Each island can have a coherent beginning, middle, and end.

• Islands can be connected in a way that has a satisfying progression.

In this way our world can grow as it needs to and we have room for modular content updates in the future. Plus there's something to be said about the vibe of a fungal robot archipelago.

Early concept of new tutorial island expertly drawn in paint by Graham:

What that concept looks like today (WIP):

Where do we go from here?

The new tutorial island is almost ready. In our opinion, the new tutorial is much stronger and indicative of the direction of the game. We plan to release the new tutorial on the free demo branch by the end of June.

It will feature an introduction to the game's core systems (movement, melee combat, parrying, respawning, leveling up). Experienced players will find that we have omitted ranged combat and magic for the time being. Ranged and magic combat will be re-introduced in our second demo update, hopefully before this Fall.