LudumData

An Ant World by wolar

[raw]
made by wolar for LD 38 (JAM)

An ant world

Manage you ant colony, consume everything around. But beware of giants.

An Ant World_04.png

An Ant World_03.png

An Ant World_01.png

An Ant World_06.png

Game principles:

  • You have four types of ants. Nurses, taking care of larvae thus increasing birth rate. Builders, whose maintain your ant-hill. Foragers gathering food and building materials and soldiers that fight carnivore beetles
  • Harvest food and materials to maintain colony alive.
  • Ants navigate themselves by pheromones. You have two pheromone spray.
  • Pink to attract ant to desired trail and blue to discourage them from certain area for time period.
  • Ant soldiers can be controlled directly by sending them to specific location.
  • By the way, ants can die to old age.

Controls:

  • WASD / Arrows: Camera move
  • Mouse Scroll: Camera zoom
  • F: Feromone spray (also can be actived with UI button)
  • E: Ant repelent spray (also can be actived with UI button)
  • C: Soldier targer placement (also can be actived with UI button)
  • Esc / Right Mouse Button: Cancel spray / soldier targer

Team Twitter:

We have worked in a team of 3, only on saturday and sunday * @wolar Programming & Sound Effects - Twitter * @zuzupd Art & Music & Ant Research * @drlizard Thinking & Math & Whining

Tools:

Unity, TexturePacker, Photoshop, Soundation, Spriter (+ coca-cola, pizza and lot of bananas)

Downloads:

Original URL https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/an-ant-world

Ratings

Overall 324th 3.458⭐ 26🧑‍⚖️
Fun 423th 3.083⭐ 26🧑‍⚖️
Innovation 185th 3.542⭐ 26🧑‍⚖️
Theme 83th 4.04⭐ 27🧑‍⚖️
Graphics 562th 2.92⭐ 27🧑‍⚖️
Audio 327th 3.045⭐ 24🧑‍⚖️
Humor 477th 2.316⭐ 21🧑‍⚖️
Mood 536th 2.95⭐ 22🧑‍⚖️
Given 40🗳️ 24🗨️

Feedback

davidthelazar
01. May 2017 · 16:58 UTC
I couldn't get the mac version to work :(
🎤 wolar
01. May 2017 · 17:35 UTC
@davidthelazar Could you please specify the issue so I can try to fix it?
tdennist
01. May 2017 · 18:03 UTC
I also made an ant game -- ant buddies! I like the direction of this game, and I'd definitely play a fleshed-out version if you guys continue development. I found the ant production sliders a little confusing, and although I played a few times, I was never able to figure out how to produce enough soldiers to defeat the enemy (who ate all of my ants). Edit: never mind, I think I just got unlucky the first time with the big guys attacking me. I'm figuring it out now!
🎤 wolar
01. May 2017 · 18:15 UTC
@tdennist Thanks for a rating, to be honest, we have kinda overscoped (our usuall problem) and then we had problem to finish everything in time (like building the ant hill and fixing it, preparation for the winter, some better visuals / explanation for the sliders, tutorial and so on). Also we made the Ant AI too smart and it played for itself pretty well without need for player interaction so we then struggled with making the players decisions more meaningfull :D
berkano
01. May 2017 · 18:16 UTC
I love simulation type games so this was a real treat to play (reminded me a lot of SimAnt, obviously!) Before long I had foragers and soldiers all over the place. After the initial learning curve it wasn't too challenging. Maybe more enemy ants would have made it harder. Nice job!
Izunah
01. May 2017 · 18:21 UTC
As it turns out, I am quite bad at this kind of game. Took me a few tries before I was able to survive the onslaught of the first ant. Interesting kind of game, I enjoyed the sounds as well as the art style. The first time the screen shook it took me off guard, and after it was over I thought to myself 'neat'.

I would have liked a small mission early on to ease me into the core experience; as it seems quite difficult until you get used to the mechanics, but overall it is well done,
Hadik
01. May 2017 · 18:25 UTC
Adictive strategy game :)
davidthelazar
01. May 2017 · 18:54 UTC
@wolar Sure. When I try to launch the game it pops up a window that says "You can’t open the application “AntWorld.app” because PowerPC applications are no longer supported."
Chronosv2
01. May 2017 · 19:06 UTC
This is an interesting idea that I'm really bad at. I didn't die very quickly or anything but it seemed to take me a while to get up to speed (and I sent my soldiers to their deaths very early on and didn't realize I had sent them against a beast of an insect).

Still, for over-scoping as you've admitted that was really impressively done. Reminds me of the idea behind the ancient Maxis game SimAnt.

Keep up the great work!
🎤 wolar
01. May 2017 · 20:31 UTC
@davidthelazar I will try to look into that, never encountered such problem. Are you running the app from the Application folder or some other? I have googled someone having this issue when having the app from the Application folder. I can also try to make new Unity export for the mac with different architecuture, it's possible I have choosen incorrect one.
🎤 wolar
01. May 2017 · 20:31 UTC
@davidthelazar I will try to look into that, never encountered such problem. Are you running the app from the Application folder or some other? I have googled someone having this issue when having the app from the Application folder. I can also try to make new Unity export for the mac with different architecuture, it's possible I have choosen incorrect one.
iamteekay
02. May 2017 · 15:37 UTC
woah! this is kinda addictive! nice game :)
Shubham Gupta
02. May 2017 · 17:34 UTC
I loved the idea of the game and its much different from many of similar ant games.
Some of the game elements were bit confusing and clumsy otherwise a good one
Pedro Henrique Cesar
02. May 2017 · 17:53 UTC
• This game has a good innovative in matters of gameplay.

• With this small world of ants it fits perfecly in this year's theme.

• The music is original but a little bit repetitive.

• The graphics is original but not eye candy.

• Overall the game is fun and innovative, I hope you guys keep working on it!
Mutfak Studios
02. May 2017 · 18:48 UTC
Its a compelling game. It just needs a little more content for the and game. It felt really unfair at the start of the game a hungry bug came out and eat all of your ants and you dont enough soldiers or fast birth rate to kill it. I wish a button for return to the ant-hill for this kind of emergency stuff.
philomory
03. May 2017 · 08:19 UTC
This seems like a pretty cool entry, but I felt like I didn't have very much control over what my ants did. In particular, I had a hard time getting the sprays to work properly; sometimes the audio effect that accompanies the spraying would get stuck playing without any spray coming out. Not really sure what I was doing wrong.

Regarding @davidthelazar problem, modern Macs can no longer run PowerPC applications, that capability was removed in OS X 10.7, which came out in 2011. That said, you've clearly fixed the problem by now, since I was able to run it just fine (honestly, I didn't even know that Unity was still _capable_ of exporting PowerPC applications)
those-30-ninjas
04. May 2017 · 00:41 UTC
Reminds me of simant (I'm sure someone said this already). Felt like it was maybe a bit out of scope for a jam setting but I'm impressed with how much is here. Took me a bit before I had a handle on everything that was happening.
matita
04. May 2017 · 15:59 UTC
Wow, I wish my game was like this...

Maybe some "goals" or winning conditions would have been good.
Also I think I ran out of every resources, but the hive didn't seem to suffer for it.

It's impressive how much work you guys have done in just 2 days!

Very inspiring!
StaNov
06. May 2017 · 21:24 UTC
The big guy just come to my base and ate all my ants. I wasn't able to get any big number of ants like on screenshots :D

The graphics are great, idea also, and I like it because I made a game about ants too :)

You can watch me playing the game here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5x4fRX8yrw
Brothers Arcade
07. May 2017 · 20:30 UTC
Oh wow, we had such a similar idea when we did or brain storming early on. Glad we didnt pursue it, you would have put us to shame. Seeing some of your solutions to problems we had in our early design phase was very educational.
Nice job!
secret-tunnel
08. May 2017 · 00:56 UTC
Woah, I dug this a lot! Really cool game, nice spin on the RTS genre. It's fun watching all the ants run around, haha.
TacomaBert
08. May 2017 · 07:36 UTC
Game was a little too tricky. The beetle was just eating all my ants. I had four warriors, and it just ate them too. Not so fun when your colony is decimated right away. The sliders did not make much sense. The text had a lot of spelling mistakes.

Good start, but needs to be more balanced, especially against the beetles.

BTW, works fine on my Mac running macOS 10.10.5 Yosemite.
Dopple-Danger
09. May 2017 · 16:22 UTC
This is a pretty chill game, not a lot of tension. I found that as long as you avoid the giant ants (beetles? after skimming other comments) it's fairly forgiving. I never quite figured out how ti interpret the left half of the top UI bar though.

If you want to see me play through it, I put it here: https://youtu.be/51dJAFuuppQ
gelisam
13. May 2017 · 13:10 UTC
I got killed by termites a couple of times, played better and killed a few termites, and then I got bored because it didn't look like exploring or killing the rest of the termites would do anything.