Nice game. I liked that going near a dangerous swarm was more forgiving than it could have been.

Loved the idea, fun game. The name of the game is pretty awesome too ;)​

That was great, one of the first semi-strategy based games I've reviewed too! Imma need at least 5 more hours of gameplay pls :weary: Somewhat reminded me of Eufloria

@joseph-yannessa The map was going to be much bigger originally. And I wanted to make the sand castles mandatory to defeat before the queen spawned. But there was just no way we were going to be able to balance everything in time. Even with the smaller map, the game is pretty unbalanced as it is XD

it made me itchy

@5n1p3r-4r73m1s hahaha

@joseph-yannessa @binarysystem We might keep tinkering with it but unfortunately 5 hours might not happen. D: Still, I think it's got some potential and I'm going to tinker with it a bit more.

Good game. I like how you amass your army and become the great Antexander. It felt like more of a puzzle trying to figure out which ones to try and absorb next.

Good game. I like how you amass your army and become the great Antexander. It felt like more of a puzzle trying to figure out which ones to try and absorb next.

I see how you did the early progression haha, almost turned me away, but i'll be back to check on it later!

So i must say... WOW i love it haha! i love the style, and i got a guilty pleasure for ants, fascinating creatures. i wish you weren't so strict with the early progression i wanted more to do, took me a couple of tries before i went downwards to annihilate and consume the south part of the map, right before i went on to the queen's land. her towers where no match for me...

**Antexander the great!**

*sadly she bested my army of a million ants....*



I found myself wanting to play as Antexander tho haha would be fitting if the cursor was replaced by Antexander himself, crawl around in my blossoming ant colonies plotting my enemies demise interacting with my common ants and whatnot

And the music was Amazing! i let my possy of ants dance around me for a while as i enjoyed the track

It has good graphics and gameplay but I think it is a bit hard. You may need to give a helping hand to player like an easier level or something else. I think I understood the mechanic but I couldn't manage to do it. Also, controls can be more direct.

Interesting concept. It was pretty difficult to me to understand how you call new ants for your armie, and then go fight for the next mob. But then when some ants turn to your side, it gives a good rewarding feedback! Good job!

I usually only got 3 ants, sometimes by luck I got 6, never could get any further though.
I also noticed that sometimes when my ants were attacked, the wrong one would die.
Aisde from that I think it was a cool concept that could definitely be built upon. Graphics and music were nice.

@kekkodude We did bring up the idea of you controlling Antexander directly. I was afraid we were going to struggle to get the movement of it to look as fluid as the other ants so we decided direct our attention to other things. I wish we had pulled it off though. Thanks for playing!

@despdair Yeah the game is very poorly balanced, sorry! We ran out of time to fiddle with the parameters to the fight mechanic and to put more thought into the layout of the map. Thanks for playing and the feedback!

@shaolin-dave So ants with no mounds will convert after they take a few casualties. They also convert outright if you match or exceed them in numbers. Ants with mounds to defend fight to the death and will reward you with more ants once conquered. So you can fight rogue ants that are a bit bigger and be fine. Thanks for playing!

how many frames do you have in your walking animation?
increase or decrease the sprite rotation on A-D and move forward/backwards relative to the direction you are facing?
i presume you could just reuse the draw function from the other ants and whenever you are not moving you can stop the animation and keep the sprite still, put up some artifical barrier around you so that the other ants wont swarm you and maybe limit the amount of ants you can lead to a leadership skill or whatever you deem fitting

upgrades from you colony, but you have to establish one first?
and upgrades within your colony, and if you are daring dump some artifical z levels so you could burrow tunnels haha, im brainstorming...

Thanks for the feedback @kekkodude! The walk animation is only 4 frames. I actually did make an "idle" animation (you can see it here: https://twitter.com/JeddJedd/status/1180296600360378373) but it didn't make it into the game.

We considered the relative turning (we refer to that as "tank controls") but ultimate decided guiding the swarm worked a little better. Mouse support would likely make this more intuitive and it's something I'd still like to add.

We tried to add some zooming to the ants to try and give the illusion of depth but it wasn't very performant. As for burrowing ... a bit out of scope for this jam unfortunately.

Thanks for playing!

Cool game! It's kind of hard to judge whether you can take a colony or rogue tribe, but I got the hang of it eventually.

Really cool movement (reminds me of boids?) and engaging simple mechanic. I did hit a wall after the second hive. Like others said above, it could use some balancing, and became sort of a "puzzle" trying to find the single hive you could next consume. In 72 hours? Impressive to say the least.

"Impressive game, Very cool concepts. I left wishing that there is more.
Had a lot of fun "

Nice game, I found the controls not reactive enough though and it makes it really hard to manage ants in narrow spaces between other colonies. But overall really nice idea!

"We're the ants... sent by king ANTony! We're coming to help... King Graham!" Sorry! King's Quest V reference...

Antexander - great name!

Really enjoyed the game, although it was a bit tricky - I almost gave up after my first two failed attempts. The somewhat indirect control was interesting. Having the camera move ahead in the direction you're going might've been nice as you can't really disengange in time unless you very carefully move, stop, wait for the camera and then move again.

The music was very nice!

Honored to save this game! I enjoyed it a lot. Played for a long time and loved everything of it! The concept is cool and the graphics develop it perfectly. The music is beautiful and I liked that you don't interrupt it when respawning. Hard to build an army, but this game is definitely a keeper! Great job!

That was way more awesome than it seemed at first :)
The beginning is a little difficult, because you get tought that another group of ants will join you if you have at least as many as them. Then I was at six ants and couldn't find any group to conquer and almost gave up on the game.
Realizing that overtaking a mound works a little different than that took some time, but then the game really started to shine. It's just mesmerizing to watch the ever growing amount of ants. The music is quite good too.
Really enjoyed this one after the initial frustration, good job!

really really awesome! The soundtrack is great and the way the ants move is very hypnotic. I was very seduced by the whole thing. My only complaint is that the start felt very linear - like you need to attack each group in a set order, though i suppose that's the point of the game. I would play it!