In 2020, the WolverineSoft Studio, a game development student organization at the University of Michigan, embarked on its first-ever 3D game. Bloom: Tome of Power was a first-person shooter set in a decaying magical forest. Inspired by old-school shooters like Quake and Hexen, our take on the genre had you battling enemies and collecting unique weapons on your journey towards the long-lost archives.
The following year, we decided to improve on Bloom with the knowledge we had gained since its release. We built new enemies from the ground up to diversify your foes even further. We added new weapons, including the fan favorite sniper and machine gun, to even the playing field. Our shaders had been rebuilt to better showcase our unique environments. We expanded on the sound and music to make each environment feel unique and lived in. This new iteration, now titled Bloom: Roots of Renewal, was launched in December 2021.
We're excited to announce that you're going to be able to experience Bloom: Roots of Renewal in a whole new way. Starting today, you can now play download and play Bloom on Steam. It's the same experience as before, just with a fresh coat of paint that takes advantage of the rich set of features steam has to offer and offers additional improvements based on user feedback.
Changes From the Original Release
Upgraded Save System
We rebuilt the save system from the ground up. This includes:
- The ability to save up to 4 games at once and continue your progress from any one of them.
- The ability to push your files to Steam Cloud and load them on multiple devices.
- Numerous fixes to saving and loading checkpoints
Additional Accessibility Options
Accessibility is a core value of the WolverineSoft Studio. We’ve added several features to make our games more accessible to a wide variety of people, including:
- The ability to change all fonts in the UI to Open Dyslexic
- Fully remappable controls for keyboard and gamepad
- The ability to tap to aim instead of holding
- Invertible aiming controls
Full Controller Support
Bloom: Roots of Renewal is now fully playable on controller. Xbox and DualShock controllers are currently supported.
Steam Features
- Bloom: Roots of Renewal now offers 19 unlockable achievements. These include story-based challenges, such as completing all the levels, as well as hard-to-tackle challenges, such as getting 3 kills at once with the shotgun.
- Bloom: Roots of Renewal takes full advantage of Steam’s rich presence to let your friends know what game you’re in.
Minor Changes
- Improved audio compression to reduce the build size by 92%.
- Fixed over 25 null reference exceptions to prevent crashes and improve performance
- Fixed various level geometry bugs
- Adjusted the hitboxes of spiders and flyers to make them easier to shoot
- Fixed multiple soft-lock bugs in the level
- Fixed over a dozen other minor bugs