Mycopunkis shaking up the shooter scene with a blast of weird and wild sci-fi creativity. Combining influences from across the industry, the Pigeons at Play team has managed to create a new spin on the genre withMycopunk’s recent launch.
The new co-op shooterMycopunkis already going over well with gamers, with an incredibly unique weapon modding system and sci-fi setting. Having recently launched in early access,Mycopunkis reminiscent ofgames likeDeep Rock Galacticin structure, only with a spatial-based weapon upgrade system that allows for incredible customization, allowing for wacky weapons in an even wackier world. Game Rant sat down with CEO and creative director Liam Cribbs, lead 3D artist/animator Ryan Yan, lead concept artist Lily Yu, lead writer Noah Matheu, sound and level designer Nick Fellows, and concept artist Nicholas Wong—all of whom spoke on subjects such as post-launch feeling, the game’s unique modding system, and howMycopunk’s story will evolve in the future.The following interview has been edited for both brevity and clarity.
Mycopunk Team Talks Modding Weapons, Fungal Enemies, And Evolution Beyond Early Access
Q: How are you feeling now thatMycopunk’s launched? What’s the response been like?
Cribbs:It’s great. Everyone’s playing through all the content really fast, and it’s great seeing people find all of our secrets—little hidden things, like dancing with Roachard.
Yan:We all feel extremely excited. It was great seeing some streamers pick up the game from the moment it was released, and we were watching their streams and playing along with a lot of the players. It’s been a lot of fun, and kind of surreal to see that it has come to a point where the game is out, and we’re pretty proud of it.
Matheu:Oh boy, I think a lot of us hopped around between different lobbies to play with people, just see what they got up to, and how people worked together and interacted with the game. It’s been really funny to see people mess with each other in different ways; they figured out a lot of the fun stuff: yanking each other out of the drop pod was one I saw a couple of random people do. It’s been really great to see everything like that.
Yu:And embarrassing too. Yesterday we were playing with someone who was way better than some of us, especially me. This person had to save my life more than 20 times in just one game. That’s embarrassing, yeah, but it’s also really funny.
Q:Mycopunk’s big focus is on fighting back a fungal enemy. Why did the team center the game on this element and the sci-fi niche it represents?
Cribbs:I just think fungus is really interesting and cool, even the real fungi on Earth are so alien and weird. It just makes sense for some sci-fi threat to also be fungus, because there’s so much cool stuff that you want to do with it.
Matheu:The fungus was in the project from the very beginning, and it was always something we wanted to use and really expand on. Everything we could do with dramatic sizing and what’s true about real-life fungus had us thinking about some of the little things that happen—where mushrooms grow on trees and take over these little plots of the land. But what if that happened on a whole planet? That was a really fun idea for us. Then there are all those fun ideas of, like, how intelligent is fungus really? The little fungus in the lab isn’t gonna grab a scalpel and attack the scientists, but we thought it’d be fun if we leaned into a lot of the unknowns and weird little fantasies about this little weird alien fungus.
Yan:What makes fungus really interesting to meis just the idea of control. Obviously,The Last of Ushas cordyceps, but there are various different types of fungi that just take control of their host. I think this idea of controlling living things is something that we wanted to play with; we were like, ‘Oh, what if they just, you know, gave life and control to inanimate objects more or less?’ So that’s where the enemy design idea sprang from. Long story short, we just think fungi are cool, and there are so many types, and they all look weird.
Cribbs:Like the idea was, ‘What if the fungus infects machines instead of living things?’ There’s this kind of fungus that we were reading about that eats radiation (I think it grows around Chernobyl), which we found especially cool. So, in our game, the fungus also likes radiation and power.
Q: What would you say setsMycopunk’s FPS gameplay apart from the crowd the most? What element of the gameplay is most essential to its own identity?
Cribbs:I think what really makes it unique is the upgrades, like being able to completely change how your guns work. The gunplay is fun, but other games have fun gun play. However, most games don’t let you apply, like, 10 different game-breaking upgrades to your gun that’ll turn an SMG into a rocket launcher. With our upgrade system, we really wanted to give players the freedom to break the game in a (hopefully) somewhat balanced way. It’s all about creating cool combinations between upgrades that might be good on their own, but together they’re really cool. There’s this one set of upgrades for the Glider that’s really good in combination; one of them lets you fire just one of her rockets at a time, and the other one refunds wingsuit fuel when you fire a rocket, so you may just keep tapping fire and fly forever.
Matheu:There are a lot of builds that we experimented with, like whenever a new upgrade gets added, you may add it to the grid and screw around. We started out with fresh accounts (you know, on our personal Steam accounts) along with everybody else, and that’s been a really fun way to get the upgrades organically and build crazy stuff along with everybody else.
Cribbs:Yeah, and people are already finding really broken builds that we never thought they could do. We just saw a shotgun build that has some insane DPS, which was fun to see in action.
Q:Mycopunk’s grid-based weapon modding system is particularly unique in its approach. How was it conceived, and what are the design goals behind it?
Cribbs:It just sort of happened! Originally, you could just equip seven upgrades, and they didn’t have the hexagon patterns or anything. Then we were like, ‘What if they had hexagon patterns?’ As soon as we prototyped it, we found it was really fun to combine things, even with the few upgrades we had in the game back then. We just knew we wanted to expand on it and add cool interactions that actually use the space, like certain upgrades being buffed based on the upgrades that surround them.
Matheu:There are some obvious inspirations, likeGhostrunnerand just spatial inventories in general. SayingResident Evilfeels weird, but it’s that idea of how much you’re able to pack into a little space, and especially like when we’re building the loop of the game and saying, like, ‘Oh, where are players going to spend their downtime?’ Having that kind of fun little activity of doing your upgrades in the hub really just clicks with everything else.
Yan:This is a smaller thing, but it satisfies an itch when you get the upgrades to slot in just perfectly. It’s like when you have a massive hole onthe right side ofTetris, and you find that forward, vertical block falling down, and then you can just slide it right in there. It works, it just makes sense, and it feels really good. I think for me, a big part of it is the min-maxing of getting everything you want in there—finding the right placement of all of those upgrades is pretty satisfying. It can get annoying at times, too, but that’s part of the fun.
Q: What goes into crafting an online experience with an indie team, budget, and scope? What are the barriers to entry like there?
Cribbs:I mean, it wasn’t that hard for us, because we’re just using Steam, andSteam has a lot of great toolsfor that. For a lot of our other online elements, like the global community progress, we were just lucky enough that another Devolver team was already making a backend for their game, and so we just got to leech off of that—which is pretty cool. There’s a lot of online stuff we’ve done that we weren’t really able to test before launch because it requires everyone to be playing. We’ll see how it goes. Hope it works!
Matheu:Luckily for us, our online is pretty self-contained outside of mods, as it’s just four players in a lobby. On an average workday for our team, we have at least six people active, so we can always kind of get together and play the game in that intended way—which really helped us in early development; we would know what the game was going to be like as it went on. We also really want the game to be playable offline or solo, so any online elements aren’t required for it to work.
Q: What’s the experience working with Devolver Digital been like?
Cribbs:They’re awesome. They help us with localization, QA, and everything that, if we had to do all by ourselves, we wouldn’t have any time to make the game!
Yu:The best feeling about working with Devolver is that they really respect your ideas. Sometimes, when we’re really busy, or we’re dealing with some annoying issues, there could be some time crunch or stuff, but in general, they really care about the devs, and then they really respect what you come up with. Sometimes we have a crazy idea, and they’re always telling us to just go do it!
Cribbs:We love them all. They’ve been really great.
Q: How much story content will be brought toMycopunkas the game evolves? How important would you say story is to the game?
Matheu:It was important to everyone on the team that we worked on fleshing outthe universe ofMycopunkand why things are the way they are. ‘Oh, why are you playing with robots? What’s going on? What’s happening outside the one planet that you’re on?’ We ended up just liking the story more and more, and that ended up being a really fun vehicle for us to look at how the game should go in the future, when we’re thinking about what will happen in the universe next and pushing everybody in the game through that kind of thing.
It feels like you’re on New Atlas, with a bunch of different people working to fight this big thing, and it’s fighting back. When it comes to all our updates and stuff in the future, we want them to be tied to the story in one way or another to push that forward. There’s going to be new guns, weapons, enemies, all that crazy kind of stuff, but we wanted to kind of wrap it in the story to bring everybody together and bring it in on that.
It’s not going to be mandatory that everybody learns the story to progress through the game, but we definitely want to leave breadcrumbs and fun stuff for people who can really get into it. We’ve had a lot of positive reception to that; a lot of my time when I’m on break is spent answering random questions in the Discord server, and people are having a lot of fun with that and looking at the little booklet we gave out. So there’s going to be a lot, but we don’t want to shift away from where the game is. We want to really keep it all together and mesh the story in with that.
Q:Mycopunkhas a strong comedic slant. How much of the game’s upcoming story content will lean into these comical overtones, and, in your view, how important is this tone to the overall experience?
Matheu:Well, at the end of the day, we can write and, like, the most somber, crazy thing—and then when someone gets shot, they’re going to split into two pieces, and their head’s going to go flying and be banging around the wall. It’s always going to be fun and funny, so we don’t want to push against that with the story. We want to tell a fun, funny story that brings the tone up-and-down here-and-there, because that’ll be fun. We want to explore different aspects of the universe, but we really do want itto stayMycopunkthroughout all of it.
Yan:A lot of things that we decide on, like the door being welded on the drop pod before you set off, we just ask ourselves a lot of ‘What If?’ questions. The crazier they get, the more we seem to like them. There are a lot of things that we’re just like, ‘What if it just did this?’ and then we’re like ‘Huh, that’s kind of stupid and crazy—we like it.’ Then we just go ahead and make that. For things like Saxon, they’re a mega corporation, so we can really push the bounds of what they do and how they are. So we’re just asking ‘What if Saxon did this?’ like that basically all the time.
Cribbs:Saxon is so comically evil that, even when they say all this serious shit, it’s just kind of funny,
Fellows:It’s so insane. What’s almost funny about it is that it’s a darker, serious tone, but what they do is so absolutely insane that it’s funny, so it’s not like they’re joking or anything, but it’s so serious that it’s funny.
Yan:And it’s also just like, ‘What if our mission control was a cockroach? Let’s do it!’
Matheu:Yeah, when we talk about it, it makes it sound like we had a bunch of dumb ideas and then tied them together with string later—and some of it’s certainly like that—but when it gets down to it, it’s about wanting to give some special consideration. Yeah, he’s a cockroach, and he’s hired because cockroaches are really resilient, so they don’t have to pay him that much because he doesn’t eat a ton. We wanted to tie that into just how the world is.
Q: What went into creating the game’s hub? What between-mission amenities did you most want to include, and can players expect the hub to change much as the game evolves?
Cribbs:Yeah, we were inspired a lot by the hub areas of similar games, because we know there’s always a lot of downtime between missions and when you’re waiting for your friends to get on, or just when you’re walking around the hub and messing with things. We wanted it to be a fun place to do that. The most important thing for us was making sure that you could always shoot your weapons and kill teammates in the hub. We don’t want to force people to walk around without shooting each other!
We just wanted to fill it with lots of things you’re able to do, and we do want to update it with even more stuff over time to make it more of a playground. We have this recreation sphere area in it, the big dome, and there’s a terminal in there where you can choose between a shooting range and this training set, which is sort of like a PvP map, but we want to add a bunch of other stuff just for people to mess around between missions.
Matheu:The hub, at some point, became like a ‘I have a cute little idea for something, I’m just going to make it in my spare time’ and then it goes in the hub. The bees that have made their way into a lot of different other parts of the game came from the little voluntary trauma chamber, because I wanted to make bees, and now I can’t stop making bees.
Cribbs:And there are all these little locked doors and passageways beneath the hub, just fun little places to explore. Maybe find a couple of secrets.
Yan:I insisted on having a racetrack in the hub, and I’d like to make a bunch of them and update them—that would be great. There are a lot of plans for expansion of the hub, and we hope to carry them through.
Q:Mycopunk’s ‘early access’ is already launching in a more-or-less 1.0 state. With that in mind, how long do you expect the Early Access phase to be, and will it encompass all of the roadmap outlined by the team?
Cribbs:Yeah, so everything in the roadmap that we’ve published is planned to come out during early access, with 1.0 coming right at the end of that roadmap. The plan right now is for it to be about six to nine months. Who knows if that’ll change? Things get delayed, and we don’t know what’ll happen—but in terms of the content and narrative, we know exactly what we want to add before reaching 1.0.
I’m sure we’ll get to a lot of other stuff. One of the things that players have been sending us has been upgrade wish lists and ideas, and it’s really hard to ignore an upgrade idea so that’s a big part of the early access—just interacting with the community and seeing what’s going on, what players are interested in, and really shaping the game up to be the best that it can be now that we have a ton of different hands on it.
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