Just today, the realization that 2024 is coming to an end hit close to home. Three months ago, we spoke with Upside Down Bird about wanting to demo their game at PAX West. Sadly, we had to cancel our PAX West schedule due to personal matters, but we were determined to still meet with Upside Down Bird and try out their upcoming game Shroom Siege. In October, we had the chance to connect with Upside Down Bird and their developer Ben Hamrick to talk about and play Shroom Siege.
During our video call with Upside Down Bird, we got a walkthrough of the demo and got to try out the latest build of Shroom Siege. Before we could dive into the multiplayer, we had to play through the tutorial and get the basics of the gameplay. Once we got the basics underway, we were able to jump into multiplayer and play with Ben, and try out the different game modes. For our multiplayer match-up, we tried out the different victory conditions; trying to find a balance between the Shogun, Dung, and Shrine victories.
Shroom Siege Interview
Introductions
Matt: Do you want to start off by introducing yourself?
Ben: Hi, I’m Ben, Ben Hamrick; I’m one of the developers of Shroom Siege. I primarily work on the platforming engine and a lot of the net code and networking infrastructure that we built around the game. Yeah, to tell you more about the game; the game is a 4 versus 4 team-based game.
Game Setup
You can play locally with 8 controllers or you can play online with seven other people. Currently, the demo supports online play and it drops you into a server. We have dedicated servers and have a rollback net code which we got inspired by from the fight game community and it’s kind of like the golden standard for fighting games at the moment; so that worked well for our game and yeah, I can to go through the tutorial with you if you want to that kind of explains how the game works.
We’ve been kind of messing with a lot of stuff in the game so it’s requiring me to go through the tutorial. Moved left and right with the analog stick, A to jump, and then you have these Gray characters that are on the map that you can hit X when you go over to them and you can mount them. Now I have possessed this character. I’ve taken it over. I can hit X again to get off of it.
Our attack works similarly to the arcade game Joust, so if you’re on the same like, Y Axis you bounce off, and then if you’re higher up when you collide was an enemy, you kill that enemy. As you can see you kill the shroom that is possessing that enemy. the teams are Blue versus Orange. So here it’s saying X to dismount. The shogun is the character that each team is in charge of protecting; each team starts with 3 Shoguns. Killing the opponents’ Shogun three times can grant you victory.
Victory Conditions
Another way to obtain victory is by playing as the minion. The minion can take his team’s orbs to the shrines. If your team captures all the shrines on the map, your team wins. That type of victory is called a Shrine Victory. You can neutralize the opponents’ shine to deny them victory. Our final victory condition is called poop victory. You mount a Dung beetle in order to push a ball to your team’s goal. So you have these 3 victory types that you’re balancing.
One team may go for one type of victory but may forget to defend against the other victory types; then the other team can swoop in. We usually play best 2 out of 3, but the game parameters are configurable. The tutorial takes players through each victory type one at a time. We also made the tutorial possible to be played online and playable with eight players locally.
PAX West Setup and Gameplay
At PAX West we had 8 players play the game locally and all do the tutorial together. When you start the match, you can pick to be either Blue or Orange. We always spawn in AI characters to play with you if you do not have a full team.
Since all of our maps are balanced, It will always be 4 versus 4 no matter what. So no matter how many players you play with you always have 4 vs 4 matches. The AI will let the human players mount the Shogun. There are screen wraps so going to the top, I will end up at the bottom the same with the left and right. I just killed the shogun 3 times, so now we have a shogun victory. We’re working on accolades. The first team to get 3 wins, wins the match. On some of the maps, it’s easier to get one victory type than the other; there are certain maps where the shrine victory is very easy. In other maps where a Poop victory is easy.
We’re eventually planning on adding the ability to command the AI to kind of tell them what to do; it’s kind of difficult to get a certain type of victory if you are just playing single-player. The game is really meant to be a coop match. There is the option in the lobby to disable the shogun and that kind of allows you to get the other victory types in a single-player mode. But really the game shines with all 3 victory tribes, cause that’s where the depth of the game really comes out.
AI Deliberate Flaws and Multiplayer
Ben: We intentionally have the AI make mistakes. We’re definitely still tuning, and you know when the game comes out, it’s gonna have different difficulties.
For future releases, they’ll be cosmetics that you can unlock by doing certain things. So we’re going to have hats that some are going to be really difficult to get. And then when you see someone online with that hat you’ll know oh, that person who’s been playing the game for a long time. I better watch out.
We’re gonna have bracket-style tournaments that are gonna happen like every 2 hours or like they’re gonna be timed. So you can sign up for them in the game and then everybody gets online at the same time. At the moment, we really don’t have a very large online community. When the game comes out we will have ranked-based matchmaking.
Right now it’s all cross-platform crossplay. Right Now, we have an itch version that works with the Steam version and we have a web GL version that currently works altogether. We’re trying to keep that the same, so when we release on Xbox, Switch, and PlayStation. We’re planning on having one online community just to maximize the player pool.
Matt: Is PC the primary focus or do you plan on launching all at the same?
Ben: Right now, we’re planning on releasing it on Steam first. But, the console release will be on all platforms at the same time so that will happen in late 2025. We are looking into potentially releasing a demo version on those platforms. We are constantly improving the game and implementing changes based on the feedback we are getting.
Inspiration
Matt: What were some key inspirations?
Ben: We are definitely inspired by Killer Queen and they’ve given us feedback on our game, and we’ve made changes based on it; it’s been really exciting to have their community help and receive us. We are going to be at Bumble Bash at the end of October. They wanted us to have our game there.
Matt: Since it’s more like a Feudal, Japan, kind of style, what inspired it, outside of Killer Queen?
Ben: That’s a better question for our artists, but definitely like Japanese rice paper painting. Personally, I’ve always wanted to make a game that looks more like a painting. We’ve tried to for all of our games, being Upside-Down Bird, we make we want to stay away from pixel art because we feel like that’s been overdone, especially in the Indie space. There’s a better contribution for us to do this hand-painted kind of art style and so I did a lot of the shader work here, so if you look really close, there’s this textured kind of pattern across everything and then everything is kind of like a little wavy.
You can look up the early version of the game, which was a Global Game Jam game in 2023. You always spawn with invincibility to avoid spawn kills.
Development Cycle & Team
Matt: So what has the development cycle been like? When did you start?
Ben: Yeah, we did the Global Game Jam and I believe that was 2023. The theme was Roots, so our take on that was the mushrooms put their roots into the brains of the mounts. We actually had the majority of the game done pretty early. Within like a couple of months we had it working. The rest of the time has really be polishing and getting the NET Code to work; it has been the most challenging part of the game itself. We created our own Rollback to match fighting games without it being exactly the same.
We also hired an artist who did a really good job with the background and stuff like that and got it animated.
Matt: How big is the Shroom Siege team?
Ben: Let’s see, we have two software developers including me. Then we have a dedicated music and sound effects guy; so all the sound effects in music is all handcrafted. Then we have two artists, one artist did all of the character art, the shrooms, and all the mountable characters; we had another artist who did all of the background art and all of the level terrain and it’s like different cosmetics. Yeah, oh, and then we have a level designer as well, doing all the maps and doing the base layout.
Matt: Can the human player tell the AI to back off a certain mount?
Ben: So if you’re playing with a controller, you can use the right analog stick to emote; the plan is that we have emotes for all of the victory types and tell the AI what to pursue. Currently, this is shown globally, but eventually, you will only be able to see the emotes of the team that you’re on.
The game really shines when you have 4 humans vs 4 humans.
At Pax West it was nice having 8 players come back to back we got through so many people so quickly.
PAX West Feedback, Development, & Future Plans
Matt: How was the feedback? Would you say it was positively received?
Ben: Yeah, I would say. A lot of people liked it; some people like, really, really liked that they came back to play it multiple times. Because we were able to get through people so quickly we never had like a long line.
Matt: Are there going to be other types of game modes?
Ben: We even have a Game mode where instead of like best 2 out of 3, the first team to get all 3 victory types wins. So if you get the same victory types twice in a row it doesn’t count and it just keeps on going until one of the teams finally has all 3 victory types.
Matt: What engine are you building the game with?
Ben: We are using Unity to develop the game. We actually found an issue with Unity and made some patches and shared it with them and they went, oh yeah that should make it work better. We have up to a second of Rollback. It has been challenging to get it to run smoothly with 60 frames of Rollback. Streamlining, that specific part of the game was crucial, making sure that it didn’t generate any garbage and using our own custom physics engine instead of the Unity physics engine. The Unity Engine was overkill for this kind of game.
So everything’s custom and C-sharp, which you know with L2CPP, actually combines on the C++ so everything ends up being really, really fast if you do it right, but it was challenging getting to that point. Our goal with the net code is to make it possible to play across regions so people in Europe can play with people in the US and stuff like that. In order to achieve this, we had to patch a portion of the Unity net code; after making our changes, we submitted it to Unity to see their thoughts.
Matt: So when you’re talking about releasing it first on Steam and then on consoles, you said for consoles you were aiming for 2025? When is the PC version supposed to come out?
Ben: Yeah, the original plan was to do early access in early 2025, kind of polish it more, and then do a console release in late 2025. That may change. We’re currently working with the Xbox Dev Kits so we might potentially get the console version in earlier, but we’ll definitely update post updates on Steam. We’re very active on our Discord.
Cosmetics
Matt: Earlier you discussed cosmetic unlocks. Did you have specific stuff in mind or is it all theme-based or kind of like Team Fortress 2 style?
Ben: Yeah, kind of like Team Fortress 2 like all kinds of stuff. We know we’ve actually specifically got a request from the Killer Queen community to put in a Penguin hat. Apparently, that was something that was supposed to be in Killer Queen Black and then didn’t happen, so they want us to do it now, that’s definitely going to happen. It’s going to be one of those features that will also help with keeping track of your characters, so we’re gonna try to create hats that have very distinct silhouettes. It should make it easier to track who you are controlling on screen.
So even recently we actually made the blue and the orange colors slightly different. So even on the Orange team, you have like a character that’s you know more yellow, and then the character has more red and that has helped a lot, and then changing the player indicator so you’re nameplate is the color of your team.
Matt: Will you have any color-blind features in the game? Because I know sometimes orange and blue can be a little bit difficult.
Ben: Yeah, so orange and blue, we were hoping that those would work based on what other games pick, but we can, we can programmatically change that color. We’re planning on definitely having accessibility features where you can change those colors.
In all of our past games, we’ve always tried to not lean on adjusting a color that distinguishes you know the team or the characters. So I think that’s where the hats come in or like different symbols for the teams. So you can see in the lobby we have these flags on the left and right. The intent is to potentially have a symbol that your character has, that would then appear on the flag. When four people join, those four symbols will show up on your team’s flag.
Story Mode
Matt: Are there any talks about like a story mode aspect to kind of build on the lore aspect of the multiplayer?
Ben: No, no, that’s not something we’ve been focusing on for this game. We are more focused on the competitive nature, but I think that may be something we could do later, like create some sort of lore; it probably won’t be directly in the game and might be like a secondary thing that you can like read about on the website or on the Wiki. We’ll probably try to tie certain things together.
But currently, the lore is just 2 teams of mushrooms that are fighting, taking over other characters, and possessing them.
Matt: With talking to the Killer Queen devs and community was the idea pitched at all that if successful, or well adapted, have a crossover almost like Marvel vs Capcom?
Ben: Yeah, I mean, we’re definitely open with that to those kinds of things. We’re really excited to meet the Killer Queen team in person. We’ve already talked to them; we have like one map that pretty much copies the layout of a Killer Queen map. In order to get that vibe and then our environment artists are currently working on a new level that we will show off at Bumble Bash which will have references to Killer Queen and Bees.
