Mycelium Kingdom

Fifteen waves. Ten fungi. One gold mushroom to keep alive.

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Inspiration

Having moved to the PNW recently, it's become apparent how prevalent mushroom hunting has been. In an attempt to learn more about my environment and my community, I wanted to make a game about mushrooms! Beyond my community, I drew inspiration from other Tower Defense games in the genre like Rogue Tower and Bloons Tower Defense.

What it does

Mycelium Kingdom is a portrait tower defense on an 8×12 forest-floor crate. Bugs walk a gold road toward a gold mushroom. You plant chubby fungi on moss, tap Start Wave, and try to last fifteen waves. Each fungus is a real species with a real job: Dotty flicks spots, Puff sneezes a blast, Manee finds hiders, Pixie hops bugs backward. Plant them close together and a cream web appears — they work a little faster, the way real mushrooms share food through mycelium underground. Survive, or lives hit zero and you Play Again.

How we built it

I had a general concept for the genre, then started by having the AI draft a GDD and style guide to abide by. These would be the ground truths for the model to listen to throughout development. I used Cursor and an array of different models throughout to process. In the end, we have a fully functioning prototype built with AI.

Challenges we ran into

Using a system like Cursor posed a couple issues. Starting out in Auto mode, the model it chose often lacked the understanding and complexity of the game. I had much more success by manually selecting frontier models. But that was the other challenge. On those models I would be rate limited or see downtime so I would have to carefully bounce around to get the compute I needed.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The prototype has come a long way and is now in a place I'm happy with. It's visually interesting, optimized for mobile, and fun to play. I'm proud of the way I utilized the AI. I managed context windows effectively and cross-referenced the work done by the AI with a subagent frequently.

What we learned

For AI, it's always best to have another agent evaluate the main agents work by a set criteria you yourself establish. Beyond AI, I learned a lot more about mushrooms, different varieties, how they interact with their environments, and their common predators!

What's next for Mycelium Kingdom

What's next would be a visual overhaul. I like how it looks, but text based models are only so good at generating 3D models in Three.js. Having a more competent 3D model generator would help this tremendously. Following that, extrapolating on the map varieties, enemy types, and mushroom evolution trees would be next!

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