Fungus-ified Animals + Unique Zombies

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

I was just thinking about how the fungus needs a bit more diversity in the amount of shapes it grows into. There’s fungal zombies and fungal boomers, and every zombie either turns to one or the other, and everything that doesn’t have one just kinda keels over dead upon spore exposure. Zombie dogs and bears are examples, as well as anything that has no fungus form.

What kind of things should there be besides “Fungal Brute” and “Fungal Hulk” and “Fungal Dog”? Is it necessary to give that many forms of the same creature?

I was thinking about how the fungus could resort to half-measures if a creature’s form is either not ideal for reanimating or just not all that useful due to the creature itself. Instead of making something worthless and weak, it could simply take the lump of tissue and use that as a big mound of non-animate but slightly more productive equivalent of a Fungaloid. Maybe a Fungaloid generator or something. It has to grow and gestate a bit first, but when the creature matures it’s just as good, if not better, at spreading the fungus than the poorly suited original host would have been. Small, frail things like dogs and cats could fit this bill, as well as zombie children and badly damaged (and maybe recently reanimated) zombies. Why settle with a broken body when you can just make something better that works just as good?

It’s that or just put a new coat of paint on everything. Fungal Bears sound horrifying, by the way. So do Fungal Cougars. Fungal infections are scary enough when they don’t leap and bound at you from a screen away.

Thoughts?

2

I’m personally for the fungus slowly transitioning everything into more of some form of itself. I’ve always seen the fungal zombies/etc. more as a leading stage to be honest, one that will eventually transition to a fully fungaloid creature (similar to how the fungal disease on you eventually takes steps to warping you into a fungaloid by destroying your arms).

3

I see fungals as rather clumsy, slow and lightly built. No fungal bears or cougars.
Their advantages are cheap mass production and infectiousness.

Fungal ants and zombies are there mostly because those are simple-minded organisms, easy to control. A mammal would just get infected like the player and get reduced to a crawling mess, spewing spores until death.

Advanced zombies should probably resist fungus. Firefighters and hazmats have gear to prevent it from getting in, masters, hulks and predators are just too powerful for the infection to take hold.

For advanced shrooms, I see stuff like the spires and blooms, except maybe more mobile.
For example:
Fungal Guardian
When it detects a creature not in advanced stage of fungal infection, it fires an infectious, armor-piercing spike at it.
Slow movement, when it has nothing to do, it moves near own allies.
Looks like a large fungal stalk with 3 stubby legs on the bottom and a bundle of spikes on the top.

4

I was thinking something like a Fungal Queen - a massive fungaloid spewing both kids of spores, defended by three wicked barbed tentacles.