🦆 Designing Mischief: How I Built the Core Mechanics for Mushroom Mischief | Devlog Ep. 2

Imagine this: you’re in a quiet forest, basket in hand, picking mushrooms. It’s peaceful… until suddenly, you realize you’re not the mushroom picker — you’re a tiny, chaotic forest creature whose one mission in life is to stop humans from stealing your mushrooms.

That’s the heart of my new project: Mushroom Mischief.

The Idea

This game started as a mash-up between two ideas I love — the playful chaos of Untitled Goose Game and the cozy, nature-filled charm of mushroom picking. Together, they form a cute (but surprisingly competitive) concept: protect your mushrooms at all costs!

You’ll play as a small woodland creature defending your precious fungi against a band of unsuspecting mushroom pickers. The goal? Keep enough mushrooms safe until the timer runs out. If you do, you win. If they collect them all… well, time to squawk harder next time.

The Core Loop

The heart of the game is the back-and-forth between you and the AI pickers.

• The pickers wander the forest looking for mushrooms.

• The player can distract them using special abilities.

For the prototype, I’m starting with a simple “squawk” distraction. It’s small, funny, and already gives the game a lot of personality. Eventually, I want to add environmental hazards and different types of distractions — maybe tricks that change how the forest itself reacts to your chaos.

This gives me a basic but solid loop: → AI tries to find mushrooms → Player interrupts their hunt → Chaos ensues

The Aesthetic

I love the gentle, minimalist vibe of Untitled Goose Game, but as a solo dev, I’m aiming for something a bit simpler — a low-poly European forest look.

Think soft lighting, mossy textures, and cozy natural details: trees, grass, rocks, and mushrooms everywhere. I want it to feel peaceful but alive — a little slice of chaos tucked inside a calm forest.

For the UI, I’m leaning into natural elements too — planks of wood, leaves, maybe twigs holding menu frames together.

Asset Roundup

Here are the assets I’m starting with:

• 🐿️ Animals: Free Animated Low Poly Animals

• 🌲 Forest Assets: Low Poly Simple Nature Pack

• 🧍‍♂️ Characters: Mixamo Character Library

All free, all perfect for prototyping fast.

Next Steps

For the prototype, my goals are: ✅ Move the player around the forest ✅ Add the squawk distraction ✅ Make the mushroom picker AI search for and collect mushrooms ✅ Teach the AI to investigate distractions

Once that’s ready, we’ll officially have the first Mushroom Mischief gameplay loop — chaos meets calm in a forest full of mushrooms.

Next time, I’ll show you how I’m building the enemy AI so the mushroom pickers can hunt (and be fooled) properly.