Shroomchitect's path to a "stress-free and wholesome" creative builder game

gamedeveloper.com:

Shroomchitect is a chill game about building little mushroom houses for charming little mushroom people. The game gives its players freedom to let their creativity go wild as they build these homes with their little buddies’ help, but they’ll need to keep these creatures happy and social as they do it.

Game Developer spoke with Remy Devaux of Punkcake Délicieux, creators of this relaxing mushroom house-making experience, to talk about how a focus on creating a chill experience would influence much of its design, the challenges and thoughts that went into crafting the UI, and how feeling bad for little creatures was a far more effective way to motivate the player than goals and Game Overs.

Game Developer: What interested you about making a game about making mushroom houses and caring for little creatures in the forest?

Devaux: So, Shroomchitect is part of a project where Benjamin Soulé and myself (with music from Pentadrangle) make a new game every month. For January, it was my turn to make a game and I wanted to make something super chill. We'd been making really tight action games. I wanted to wind down.

And I wanted to make something out of this old 3D voxel tech I had built for an older project. I knew it would make for a unique-looking game, but I had no idea what the game should be. So, I started thinking about 3D shapes that could be interesting to play with, and that's when I thought of mushrooms! Mushrooms have this very recognizable shape that can still be super variable and feel very organic by nature. I love that.

I wanted a super chill game with voxel mushrooms. My voxel rendering is homemade, and I knew I would be working on it a lot for this project, so I wanted to make the most out of it. That sparked the