“A vibrant little mushroom in her colourful glory feels a surge, a hurricane that absorbs her essence, and is left pale. The sacred geometrical patterns are projected to the world around her, on the insides of a huge globe. They vibrate and breathe, shrink and grow. The light source in the centre illuminates all the colours in their magnificence, and darkens into obscurity. Asteroids fly hurling, rotating and orbiting in the dim. 

You have to help the little mushroom to remember and recover her true colours. 

Maybe obstacles are the way to bring light to the world?”

Does this concept sound interesting? At the dawn of a new game, a way to tell a story trough the visuals and the mechanics, is the feeling of excitement and curiosity. What can I learn? Can I create an experience that leaves a mark to the heart of the player. Can I bring a little light to the world by creating a shooting game?

Inspirational if not straight reference games

Feature creep is already coming. Wouldn't it be awesome to enjoy smooth movement controls and six degrees of freedom? I have been in awe of the joy of flying in "Outer Wilds" (don't spoil me, I've not yet discovered all the mysteries of that master piece!), and would love to implement some of that into this game, that is of much smaller scope. In my research, I've started trying out "Overload" as a game with smooth movements and six degrees of freedom, though I've not yet decided if this game will have all of the movement options, as I've got the (possibly) conflicting goal of having easy to learn and intuitive movement controls for the player in this one. 

Programming

In my last weeks game jam project "Cloudstrife" I got a headstart of learning to program a free-rotating camera system, and might want to try Cinemachine or other ready-made solution in this one, as programming a camera is easy but to program a good and smooth camera is definitely not. I'm also excited about trying out physics-based movement controls in zero-gravity environment, though I'm not sure it's the best fit for this game. And then the mouse-aiming. Raycasting is yet something that boggles my mind. I even got a hint about trying comparing coordinates instead, but couldn't get that working correctly within the jam game so back to raycasting. I've even got some ambitions of learning dynamic shaders or textures in this game, but so far my research haven't found a starting place for learning to do that in C# and in Unity, so we'll have to see. 

Visuals

I've created some preliminary 3D-models for the mushroom protagonist, the asteroid and the pieces of insight that you collect in the game. I'm not yet sure if any of them will be in the ready game, but they're not too far from what I've thought of.

On the visual front, there will be some inspiring challenges on the road. I've got this idea of sacred geometry patterns in the "background", in the inside of the sphere. As I'm yet new to digital painting, it will be interesting to learn, how beautiful imagery I can create. My goal with the game visually is to inspire awe and appreciation of the beauty of the world - might have to scope down on that one, but I'm up to give my best. The original idea would be to create a rainbow-coloured pleasing-to-eyes graphic that consists of mainly triangles, possibly the flower of life, and texture the inside of the globe. The patterns and the colours would need to be pleasing and interesting enough for the player to want to light up them. Designing lightning, that goes from darkness to light by small spotlights spawning at the destruction location of the asteroids is a challenge in itself, but doing that in a way so that both the dark and the light are playable and pleasing to the eye is an additional layer of challenge. The atmosphere I'm pondering at is more calming than overload of senses, but with that I might need to flow with the direction the game unfolds itself as. Overload might be a good experience, too. Creating the "breathing" of the visuals is something I've not done earlier either.

UI

I'd hope to create a system where the mushroom represents visually both collected insight pieces by regaining her colours, and the needed information for the player (health, cooldown of spore ability), so that there is no need for a HUD layer. That's both a visual and programming challenge. 

Rhythm

It's quite synchronistic that I discovered the existence of the game "HI-Fi Rush" after I'd come up with the idea that the game world is in sync with the music. There is an (arguably) AAA -release of the world syncing to the music that's been published just this year? I've yet to play the game, but even in this small scope, or because of that exactly, making that happen might be a too big of a bite. But, as we're still in the dawn of the development, I can pitch my idea with confidence, about the world breathing in sync of the beat. Visuals go with the rhythm, player shooting cooldown might go with the rhythm (or lightorb bullet launching at the next beat if I really go for the original 140 BPM), the special ability times itself with the beat.

I've got this vision of a quick percussive beat, more complex drumming patterns with different drums, and slower melodic layer on top of the base. In my head I hear strings like violins and flutes, but that's two instruments that're hard to synthesise well, and my violin playing ability is very rusty. My hope is to create the music for the game myself, hopefully playing real instruments together with great people and record that, but again, scope.

These visions are not promises - yet

I wanted to describe the vision I've for the game, but there are many elements I'm not yet sure about how to implement. And even if I can learn the abilities to create that, it might be that there are some elements that need to be changed, for a better player experience.

As a pondering thought to end this first devlog, I got really inspired by some pretty lights in a video about calming from sensory overload. There seems to be people that really benefit from calming music and soothing visuals, and that sparked the idea of having a game mode where instead of sensory overload the goal would be to help calm the nervous system - and that one I connected to the mushroom Reishi. I also had an idea of creating a game mode that would help you focus and invigorate for further mental tasks, in the spirit of Lions Mane. 

Would it be awesome to have a game you could play for a moment to shift your mood and state of alertness, like analogous to these mushrooms? Or would you love to see some friends of the mushroom, in form of mushrooms of a different species?