Very fun! It seems that the ants need some experience before they can be upgraded - It would be nice to have an indicator somewhere of which ants are ready to receive an upgrade.

Thanks for the game!

they cost "AP" (ant power) to upgrade, when you click the upgrade button and hover over an ant it shows it's current level and cost to upgrade. (or, more precisly, the square the ant is in, unfortunately i didnt have time to do more proper ant animations so they just kinda hang out where they last attacked something, but their "square" is where you upgrade them at)

It may not be obvious actually, but you can hover over the controls too for a description in the upper left.

I had some problems running on my linux_x86_64 but I managed to play using wine.

Usually tower defenses are fun games and this one is no exception. I like the ants theme. The graphics could have a little more working, for example, on the menu, since it makes the game a little confusing at first (making prices and turret types more visual would be really nice).

Thanks for the great game :)

Pretty fun tower game! It did seem balanced, though it was hard to see which units were specifically attacking at any time. It was very satisfying to watch my red ants beating the other ones :)

I really enjoyed it. Nice work!

thanks, i wanted to do better attack animations but due to lack of time i settled for just drawing the red ants closer to who they were attacking. For anyone interested too, the files stage1.xml - stage4.xml define the enemy waves and the paths the ants follow, you can have up to 40 waves and 40 path nodes, and 100 enemies per wave.

Ooh, someone else who made a tower defense.

I like it. The attack animations make sense to me.

I couldn't survive for more than a few waves though, and I tried a few different tower strategies. But even so, you got me to play it four times. That's a success in my book.

:) pretty cool!
What are the stats of the towers, need some text somewhere to know.:(

couldn't get the linux-64 build to run (ldd shows issues with libSDL_mixer-1.2.so.0 and libSDL_ttf-2.0.so.0).

what issues with them? and are you using your system ones or the packed ones?

A speed up button would be nice! The idea is very cool :)

Basic graphics, but I never know when to upgrade ants... still fun :)

I loved the audio! I think the ants are an interesting way to display the theme and a great idea for a tower defense game!

This game was amazing! I love the mechanic, a nice version of tower defense.

Pretty cool game. And kudos for using something like C++/SDL for the ludum dare ;)

I really liked it. Fighting bugs is just fun I guess. It all worked and was pretty straight forward to figure out.

I'm not sure if I'm addicted to tower defense (I've only played such games a few times, but enjoyed them) or this particular take on it. I'm also not sure if I want to see it fixed up or not (the graphics are endearing and figuring out that ants exist in a square is cool, even though it "should" be intuitive). (Although I'd like to see the price check fixed -- you can't spend down to 0 AP when upgrading).

Did anyone find a strategy that worked that depended on anything other than fast ants?

My strategy: fast and near hole, fast ant near entrance. Upgrade and near hole so you can survive, then upgrade ant near entrance, to take dudes out faster. Anyone find something that works faster on the completely big ant wave? The front guy isn't upgraded enough in time for it.

Good game! I'm not too fond of Tower Defense games, since they're mostly samey samey, but yours plays good.
Well done!

A very fun game. Old concept but implemented cool.

Using ants for a defense game was a clever idea, it also matches the theme. Cheers!

Liked this one, but it deluded me into thinking I was doing awesomely, then kicked my arse -_-

*Mission Accomplished!*

Unlike my LD22 entry though I promise that with a good strategy it IS beatable. (My LD22 entry looped and got harder, you had to die eventually)

The stats you listed here would have been helpful in game, maybe as bars relative to other unit stats. I couldn't tell right off the bat what each unit would be best suited for. Love the concept though. Nicely done. :)

I'm really bad at TD, but I enjoyed it. Managed to get to the boss (atleast I think it was the boss) wave on each map before dying.

A funny and well executed by-the-book TD, with a nice interpretation of the theme. Nicely done! Some more visual helpers could've been nice, but it's a good game :D

First, good music. And I really liked that the ants actually walk and beat up their enemy, never saw "moving" towers in a TD before.
Sometimes it was hard to tell how to do something, for example you just had to memorize in which square your ants were built, just a small anthill for the "building site" would have helped a lot, earlier in the game at least. This would have made it easier to upgrade.
Nice game though!

Nicely balanced wave/ap system but a bit to slow paced for me. I liked the fact the ants moved to their enemies

Better descriptions and in game info would have helped a lot. Pretty good tower defence when you figure out what's going on.

I would play it if you had a web or osx version.

I made a makefile for OSX, it's in the source, but I can't find anyone to compile it for me :/

If anyone has SDL set up on OSX and wants to give it a go that would rock!

Huh, pretty cool - I'm not up on my tower defense, but I've never seen the "melee towers" thing done before. It's a nice twist!

Wow. Nice game! Good job.

wish I had unity..

what's unity have to do with...anything? This was raw C++/SDL, no engine used.

fun game.

Cool man!

Very well done little defender game! Plus, love the tool-tips, which are always welcome in LD games :D

A simple but addicting tower defense game. Ants fits the theme well.

Unfortunately, I couldn't run neither the x86_64 nor the i386 version of the Linux build; I had to use a Windows box.

I tried at least 5 times and I always lose at the 4th wave or so (the one immediately after the small but fast ants). I guess it is too hard for me, but I enjoyed trying it.

The graphics are a bit too simplistic in the sense that the big ants are the same but scaled up and it is clearly visible, but they are OK. The music doesn't get in the way and although a bit repetitive, I didn't hate it :-D

good fun, could have used some music!

Lots of fun but sometimes if a single enemy gets to the end it won't disappear and your hp just keeps going down.

enemies dont disappear at the end, they continue to attack the anthill until you kill them, unfortunatley the graphics are incomplete so they tend to stack on top of each other.

I enjoy tower defense games a lot, this one is very nice and fun. Well done, congrats.

Let me first start off by saying it's pretty awesome that you got this done in 48 hours with C++! But is there any reason why you chose C++ over something more suited to rapid development like Flash?

Now onto the game, it's a pretty cool tower defense game, but I feel the coolness stops there. I'm not sure how the technical side of the game went (if this was the first time programming a tower defense like that with C++, then kudos to you!) however if you'd like to develop this further, why not try something different?

How about a tower defense with you playing as the *ants* instead? And with the enemy setting up defenses? Perhaps you can control the speed and type of ants that come in and try to take over the enemy's "tower"?

Just some food for thought!

Flash has no working dev environments on linux and imho isn't really any faster than c++ if you know what you're doing. (that and actionscript has some shortfalls that as a programmer drive me insane)

There wasn't really a plan going in, I just stuck with the tech I knew best and did the first thing that came to mind from the theme.

Good game. Defense games aren't my thing or I would say more, but it is good. Much harder than I expected.

It could be a little addictive TD game, if added some polish. I liked the concept of ants moving, instead of having classic static turrets.

Really enjoyed it. Once the ant is level 5, it seems to be the equivalent of Rambo. Would be good if they reset back to their place when done so it's easier to find them to upgrade.

yeah...i thought of that, resetting them to their starting spot when not attacing IMMEDIATELY after the deadline as I found myself wishing they did that as well. It definitely could have used some more time balancing units...you should have seen the magic ants before I nerfed them (nerfed too far I might add) They'd spam slow on everything as it came out and the game was a cakewalk O_x

Probably going to do an enhanced pc version and an android version soon, using a lot of the feedback from here and finishing up the ideas i didn't get to implement for LD (powerups you can place on the map to increse effectiveness of nearby units, etc..)

It's been a while since I had so much fun with a TD game. I second what some people have said here; units should go back to their position when not attacking. A nice take on the game with a catchy background music. A solid entry overall. Congratulations : )

I've mentioned this on some other tower defense games: The game would be more enjoyable if you gave more information on ranges, health/damage, etc. Still a solid game.

More HUD stuff would be nice. A fast forward button would also be nice. Ants are cute.

Interesting take on Tower Defense. I foound it quite hard to beat. Maybe the big enemies should award more than just one point per kill. (I just read that they do, probably mislooked during play)
Nevertheless quite fund to play with very nice music.

Fun little tower defense game! Pretty challenging and felt well balanced. Nice variety in the enemy types.

Nice tower defence. I liked the fighitings hehe
Good job!