Event Links: [ MiniLD 50 | Warmup Weekend | Real World Gatherings | Ludum Deals | Wallpaper ]
Manage your Anthill colony. Dig galleries and find food to harvest. Caution of starvation!
HOW TO PLAY:
You need to assign some "Architect" if you want ant to dig. Click on the dirt to assign dig task. You can also drag with the mouse.
You need to assign some "Harvester" if you want ant to (automatically) harvest.
The assignment can be done via keyboard hotkeys: "I", "K" for the Architect, "O", "L" for the Harvester.
See the "Menu" for further information.
Libraries & Software:
- HTML5 & Phaser.io
- GIMP
- SunVox
- VIM
Kudos, credits and inspiration:
- The awesome game "Banished"
- @mrspeaker for giving me the idea to inspire from the music "Koyaanisqatsi"
Conclusion:
This weekend was for me an awesome and unprecedented moment: this is the first time I do LD while being a father and this LD gamedev was fun!
About the game, my initial goal was much much more ambitious than this entry version, but I'm quite ok with this version that I try to polish and bugfix. I may try to continue the development depending if you liked it or not. Anyway, I had a lot of fun making my first simulation game.
You can checkout my timelapse compressing 47 hours into 9 minutes!
Downloads and Links
Ratings
 | Coolness | 100% |
| #67 | Theme | 3.93 |
| #278 | Overall | 3.47 |
| #330 | Fun | 3.30 |
| #333 | Innovation | 3.39 |
| #371 | Audio | 3.04 |
| #514 | Mood | 3.03 |
| #700 | Graphics | 2.94 |
| #769 | Humor | 2.15 |
Comments
Very addicting. Nice job allowing the user to click and drag to make a trail, usually games seem to forget how helpful that is. Great Job! :)
Very well made. I love the idea of managing a colony of ants!
Ahh, I didn't know you could drag to make tunnels the first time. Maybe make that more clear? It makes a huge difference.
I've just released an important bugfixes pass, the release note is in the commit: https://github.com/gre/ld29/commit/0492fb186e1dc40083ee0cdb1ad95eb2dcca4042
BadgerPriest: Thanks for the feedback, I've updated the description here
Nice game and great idea for the theme. On my first playthrough all my ants but I did better the second time. Though at one point I stopped getting new ants. Is it because my queen died? Is there anyway to reverse this situation? It gets very repetitive after that.
I enjoyed this. It is well made, although it has some inherent flaws.
First, I think that jobs should be assigned on proximity. Too often I had ants walking from the other end of the map to dig a hole when I had a perfectly good architect standing next to it.
Second, ants that die while on the job are not replaced by other ants. So tunnels that were being dug when an ant dies are in a perpetual state of waiting to be dug.
Third, I almost reached starvation once. I started losing a bunch of ants, but once most of them were dead, there was enough food for everyone and I pulled through with a dozen ants remaining. However, once food was plentiful again, new ants were never born. So I remained with my dozen ants from day 20 to day 100 with > 1000 food.
I love this concept and the way you've executed it. I played a lot of SimAnt when I was a kid, and would like to see this continued.
Really good. With some polish you could take this to a full game.
Danvil: what do you mean? What are the bugs? I released bugfixes yersterday.
Miltage: Thanks for the feedback, yeah actually there is already a "proximity" search but between tasks, not ants... (a ant search the closest job). there is something I missed in my "find job" algorithm: basically I'm doing "foreach ant, find the closest job" where I kinda should do "foreach job, find the closest ant", or even maybe try to mix the 2 approaches.
I really enjoyed this game! It took me a while to understand how to get them to dig but once I figured that out I was fine! :)
I was a huge fan of sim ant back in the day. Not much in the way of challenge though. Maybe add some conflict.
CMaster: does it put any "clock" on it? if not, do you even have some hover feedback on the dirt?
Otherwise did you affected some Architect?
Really like the AI pathfinding etc in this one - for an LD entry it's sophisticated! Crashed on Day 83 with a "Uncaught TypeError: Cannot set property '93' of undefined", but I had 3000 food at that point so I think I had played enough of it.
I think the UI needs a bit of work (clicks/hovers not always registering, simple black text of assignment stats etc.) and I'd have liked to have seen more roles, but there's definitely a solid game mechanic there!
Would like to see something like enemies that your guys must fight (through assigning to "warrior" type) and perhaps some sort of "sustainability" role that somehow increases the availability of food in the lategame.
Regardless, it's a very fun game as is!
Great job on this game! I really liked it! A fun little concept which worked really well, reminds me a bit of "banished".
Very fun and addicting game. It's crazy how sometimes you get tons of food, and sometimes food supplies begin to lower drastically.
I couldn't dig for the life of me. No dirt tiles would light up when I clicked on them.
Good game. I would like to see it developed further. Well done.
Really takes me back to the days of SimAnt! Great work! More specializations and optimized task setting would make this truly spectacular!
No clocks, no hover behaviour. Works on my pyher machine with firefox though...
Nice base for a larger game. Seemed to run a little laggy in Firefox for me, so maybe there could be some optimizations there.
It should now run smoother on Firefox, thanks for the feedback!
FYI: The food/ant/days display was still using the Phaser Debug which is very laggy comparing to a Phaser.Text.
Very good game, in many games the start is too hard and you die soon but in this i had time to learn how to play.
Cool entry. I like the simple and effective mechanics.
Unfortunately, the game wouldn't load, I had to execute game.state.start('Game') manually
There was no JS error, and all assets were loaded, I don't know why this happened.
Apart from this issue, nice game, quite addictive !
Simple game, good little ants! I included it in part 25 of my Ludum Dare compilation video series, if you'd like to check it out :) http://youtu.be/06U_lc3kLp4
I always loved games about ants and ant societies! Very nice smooth colors also. Wish there were more challenges though.
Reminded me a lot of SimAnts, but I think this is built better. :)
I got the crash error, too: "Uncaught TypeError: cannot set property '59' of undefined (game.js:32)" (Day 65 Ants 165)
Addicting, enjoying and can be played for some time without getting bored - congrats!
I liked the atmosphere music, and the game was quite addicting! I found it a little too short though, more goals for the player would have been great.
But anyway, really nice game, I dig it! ... :>
You must sign in to comment.
IMPORTANT NOTE: If you want to place in the final results, you NEED votes. The easiest way to get votes is by rating other games. Judging lasts for 3 weeks following the end of Ludum Dare. For best effect, rate 20 games as soon as possible. Rating more games is encouraged.
MORE TIPS AND DETAILS AT THE BOTTOM OF THIS PAGE
TEAMS: Teams entering the Jam should pick a single representative to submit your game, or create a team specific account you can share. We currently do not support Team Voting, but sharing an account and together playing and rating games is acceptable.
NOT LOGGED IN?: If you get a message about not being logged in, even though you are, it’s because your web browser cached the non-logged in page. You can fix this by either refreshing your cache or clearing your cache. CTRL+F5 in many browsers. Chrome is a bit more work. Press F12 to enable Developer Mode, then you can right click on the refresh button and select “Empty Cache and Hard Reload”. This option is unavailable if you are not in Developer Mode.
PORTS: Ports to other platforms can be done after the deadline. That said, the sooner you finish your port, the sooner people can play your game, improving your chances of placing in the final results. For best results, provide a Web version of your game, or a Windows version with no dependencies. Also be sure to rate about 20 games to improve your visibility.
MY GAME DOESN’T SHOW UP: If you can’t find your game, it’s usually because the URL to your downloads are missing ‘http://‘. Fix your URLs (http://mysite.com/mygame.zip) and you will show up.
MY GAME CRASHES, IS UNBEATABLE, OR I MADE A TYPO: We allow you to fix crash or win condition bugs after the deadline (in a sense, like “porting” to support more players). We also allow “typo” bugs. I.e. A true that should have been a false, a word that should have been a different word, very tiny changes that you would have caught if you had more sleep. We leave this open to interpretation, but generally speaking your game should be identical to the game you submitted. No new features, just things you messed up last minute. Typos.
I love this entry - ended up playing it for a really long time. It took me a while to figure out what was going on (at first I was just clicking around randomly) but once I got it it's addictive. Well done!