I hope you've had a great start into the year 2022! 

As we've implied on Twitter: 2022 will be the year of Mycorrhiza. I'm quite certain that we'll be able to release the game this year. Without further ado, let me show you what we've been working on:

Door 3's and the ending's writing is pretty much done

There was a new intro to write and some already written things to adjust since the story structure of the game was changed after the first demo release: From one where you had to go through the doors in order to one where you could choose which door to enter when. I think those who wanted more interactions and choices will like this new door. Though the higher amount of choices also means that we'll need to do a lot of testing to make sure that all the variables behave the way they are supposed to.

Outro and intro cinematics have been slightly revised

The story structure change mentioned above also meant that it didn't make sense to name the doors "Acts 1-3" anymore. That'd imply that you have to play through the doors left to right even though their order doesn't matter anymore. From now on I'll refer to the doors as Doors 1-3 (from left to right) instead of Acts 1-3. You can see the two revised intros below. Like mentioned though, the changes aren't anything bighuge. It's just the removal of the act number.

We've also unveiled the third door's intro cinematic!

Spooky hands. What could they mean? Did you notice that the closed door had fingermarks on them, which hinted at the appearance of the open door? Our title screen artist missyozart did a great job teasing at the open doors with the closed doors' designs.

New look for the title screen if you haven't played the intro yet

Originally you'd be sent to the intro sequence (the one where Scott wakes up in an alleyway) no matter what door you would click on if you hadn't played the intro yet. To make things a bit more logical and interesting we've made it so the title screen only shows one door, the intro door, through which you have to play first before you see the familiar screen with the three doors. I'm sure this will subdue your familiarity with the demos a bit and make it so the game's beginning feels fresher when you play the full version.

There's now a brightness option

Gab Smolders recently streamed our game on Twitch and uploaded the vod to YouTube. She and a few viewers mentioned that since there's a lot of white in the game, due to the manga-inspired nature of it, it might be a bit difficult to play for people who are light sensitive. Since, as you could probably already tell from the look of our options menu, we're all about accessibility, we've implemented a new brightness option (aka sunglasses mode)! That way you can curb down the brightness if you feel like it's hurting your eyes. Scott is canonically wearing shades whenever you turn down the brightness.

And some other general stuff

The usual. Some bug fixes, some graphical adjustments, some writing improvements. You'll see in the full game!

What's next?

We've now arrived at the asset creation and implementation stage. This means that we're working on new character art, new CGs, implementing backgrounds, creating SFX and composing music.

There's also the thing with the keys that we will start working on in the near future. Soon the mystery about what the keys you've been finding throughout the doors are for will be cleared up.

There are also a few other things I've been thinking about adding that might or might not make it into the final game. I don' want to delay the game too much or torture my wallet even more than I am already doing at the moment. I'll definitely let you know in future devlogs if I do end up deciding on adding these features. I don't think it will be too big of a loss if not, though.