Electric Fungus - Devlog 006

Yo!
It’s been about a month and a half since the last update! I initially thought this one would come together faster, but honestly, it makes sense it took a while — all things considered. Although the main goal of this update was to focus on game design, I ended up working on all fronts: art, UI, animation, new mechanics, and plenty of code adjustments.

For the first time during development, I also ran into some burnout — both from internal reasons (two nasty bugs) and external ones. I’ve also been struggling to stay organized lately, often starting one thing and drifting to another without noticing. This made my commits and documentation a bit messy at times, so I hope I don’t forget to highlight anything important here.

Lastly, the new academic year starts in two weeks. Since I teach several classes and have begun preparing for them, time is getting tighter. Such is life.

Anyway — without further ado:

Naming

First things first — the game now has a name: Electric Fungus. Whether it’s final or not remains to be seen, but it’s definitely better than the old placeholder, Robot Factory.

I wrote previously about the concept of an electric fungus growing within an organic body, and I plan to expand that further as development continues.

Game Design

This was the main focus of this update. Until now, the prototype was more of a mechanical testbed than a real game with goals or challenges. Even though I had a clear idea early on of the intended dynamics — resource gathering, territorial expansion, RTS-style units and buildings, and managing a dynamic power grid — bringing it all together into a single experience was surprisingly tricky.

It’s still far from complete (there’s no win condition yet), but for the first time, the player now faces an actual challenge and can even lose. The early game starts peacefully — you build, collect, and expand your reach. Once you build your first tower and expand your visible area, you’ll encounter the first enemy: the HandScorpion.

From this point on, expansion is hindered by attacks from these creatures, as their lairs begin to appear in unexplored territory, gradually spawning waves of enemies. The more the player expands (by building connectors), the more lairs will emerge. The HandScorpion is currently the only active enemy, but more are planned for future updates.

This setup isn’t the final game loop yet, but it offers a first taste of the game’s intended rhythm — defending and expanding by mobilizing connectors and turrets.

Since this is no longer just a sandbox, the old debug UI has been completely replaced with a proper one, and players can no longer spawn enemies or resources at will.

There are now seven types of resources: Calcium, Copper, Iron, Silver, Gold, Osmium, and Adamantine.

Three of them don’t have uses yet, but four do.

• Calcium, a main building block, is now collected by breaking and gathering bones that grow out of the fleshy terrain (rather than being ejected from mounds).

• Iron and Copper supplement calcium as general purpose materials, replacing Gold and Silver, which are now reserved for special uses (turrets, for example, require some Gold).

• Destroyed robots now drop wreckage that can be collected for a small amount of resources.

Game Mechanics

As the game design evolved, several existing mechanics showed their rough edges — some of them very frustrating.

The first big issue was the turret targeting system. I didn’t like how their heads rotated freely, even though they were supposed to be restricted to two axes. Worse yet, they had dead zones and sometimes froze in weird orientations.

Originally, I used a third-party IK package to control aiming, but it turned out to be overkill — and a pain to debug. After plenty of back and forth, I removed it entirely and wrote my own targeting logic.

Turret control might not be a unique challenge, but multi-axis rotations are always annoying to handle with. Still, the new system is much more reliable, lighter on the CPU, and looks way better — yay!

Another new feature is global resource prioritization. Previously, collectors automatically queued resources by their spawning order, and players could only reassign specific targets manually. Now, you can click any resource type in the resource panel to mark it as prioritized. Collectors will always target prioritized resources first before gathering others.

The Camera Drone (the flying cube robot) can now be controlled without selecting it first, by pressing the middle mouse button.

In addition to rotating the view with A/D (holding Shift to rotate faster), it is now possible to zoom in or out with the mouse scroll.

Art, Design & Animation

Two major updates here:

1. New Enemy: HandScorpion Fully designed and animated —  it can idle, walk, run, and attack. This is technically the second enemy I’ve designed for the game (the first is a larger creature that didn’t fit the early-game role, and will be added later on). Also  —  yes, the current HandScorpion’s lair visuals are still placeholders, but proper models are on the way.
   

   
   

2. New UI System The old sandbox UI is gone, replaced with a proper in-game interface that fits the visual tone of the HQ. I’m especially happy with the MS-DOS–style font — I used DOS a lot as a kid, and that retro charm fits perfectly. The Gui itself is composed of two parts:

   • The resource panel sits at the top and is always visible. Resource text colors match their materials, and clicking the headers toggles prioritize collection.

   • The building panel can be expanded or minimized with the animated “+” button. Hovering over buttons shows the costs of the selected element on the sidebar.
     

The fog of war also received a conceptual and visual overhaul. Since the player embodies the electric fungus, the undiscovered areas now appear as a pixelated “white noise” field — a visual metaphor for what lies beyond detection, giving the fog a more dynamic and thematically fitting presence.
Lastly, there is a new mouse cursor, with a couple of dynamically changing icons for different actions in the game.

Bug Fixes

Major ones:

• Turrets getting stuck in robot mode after redeployment — finally fixed. This one was a nightmare because it involved both the power system and a coroutine, making it hard to reproduce.

• Collectors freezing next to resources (usually calcium bones). This was a rare but serious issue that rendered collectors useless when it happened. I’ve implemented a safety fallback that seems to prevent it — time will tell.

• The HandScorpion AI was initially done using Unity’s Behavior Graph system. While it seemed promising at first, I switched back to written logic after running into too many issues. Having logic split between a visual graph and scripts was more confusing than helpful. I might give it another try someday.

Other smaller fixes include:

• Preventing turrets from being powered by diagonal connectors.

• Preventing players from issuing unit orders outside visible areas.

• And, as always, an endless supply of null reference exceptions (ahem, targeting system…).

Wrapping Up

That’s another long post, but hopefully one that covers the main points. There are definitely more small tweaks and changes I didn’t mention here, but the core progress is solid — Electric Fungus is finally starting to feel like a game.

Feedback is especially valuable this time, since the new gameplay dynamics need testing and impressions — so if you try it out, I’d love to hear what you think.

— Zach