good stuff! really satisfying gameplay loop, enjoyed exploring and building up my mushroom farm :) I found the loud spooky sounds that would play occasionally a little off putting, and it would be nice to hold a direction and constantly move/dig


Nice work on this! I saw a lot of your development screenshots on Discord and I was super curious to see what this game was about.

The gameplay feels really solid, definitely has a lot of potential for further development. The goal of the game seems to be to dig as far out as possible and make as big a colony as you can, which is a really neat concept. I spent a lot of time exploring and finding these neat little structures. I'm not sure what they did, but they looked cool so I didn't really worry about that too much. Eventually I found myself hitting a point where I had so many resources that I couldn't dig fast enough to use them all up. That sort of defeated a lot of the point of growing more stuff, especially since as my colony grew, I'd be further away from my crops and would keep hitting unmovable tiles that would disrupt the pattern of my farm, which was kind of annoying and lead me to just stop planting more stuff. I also found digging became more tedious due to how slow it was later on when I had an excess of resources. Maybe upgrading your digging tool could also make digging faster on low tier tiles?

Overall, I found this game really fun. Nice work!

Thank you both for the feedback, it means a lot :)

There is actually a hidden power-up that lets you dig any breakable block instantly, to get it (SPOILERS BELOW):

You need to activate 3 altars by finding them and sacrificing 250 nectar to each. Each altar improves your digging in a way - the first lets you break stone, the second lets you break glass - and so beat the game -, and the third makes it so blocks are destroyed instantly

Very atmospheric and dark. Reminds me of Dungeon Keeper in a good way.
Would like to see more clear objectives though

Weakest point of the game: farming. It was kinda boring, not terrible but nothing really fun. I quickly ended up with enough resources, ignoring the farming for the most part.
HOWEVER, the strongest point: mood and exploration. Overall atmosphere, audio, graphics and the encouragement for exploration made it a good game.

More technical points: it feels a little bit annoying that you have to wait until you can click something again. Btw, is the mouse really necessary here? I would make the controls completely keyboard-based.

To sum up: mediocre harvesting game, but a good game in general. I'd love to see more of your (especially exploration-oriented) games in the future, this is really promising.

Wow, just wow. I LOVE the mood in this game. Just this deep unsettling dread of what has happened and what might be in store for our little guy. I got obsessed with the lore snippets so I dug up the whole playing field. Loved the fungi meme at the bottom, and the implications of some of the lines. So well written and well executed. If I were to give some feedback it would be to maybe add a lerp to the movement, cause sometimes it's a bit disorienting if I accidently hit a key but don't know which way I went. But overall I loved it. Thank you for making this!

@fallcresthero agreed. If we continue developing this after LD we'll make sure to signpost that more clearly, thanks for the comment!

@dod108 thank you very much for the frank feedback. We are actually discussing continuing development after LD is over and perhaps address those weaknesses which you rightly pointed out :)

@lottaunicorns thank you very much, that means the world to us

Managed to escape.

Movement without proper screen scrolling is bit jarring, otherwise it feels pretty good to play. Sound design is solid though could use few more sounds for different kind of pickups and plants. Did not found if you could lose, but it was fun little time waster while it last.

good game, but not fun. The ant have no threat so I can do what I want and never die. By the way, the totally same fungi makes me dizzy.

Played through! Interesting premise, mapping that kind of elegiac apocalyptic Lovecraftian vibe onto a patch of earth that's hosted countless ant colonies. Nice dark atmosphere reminded me a bit of old rpgmaker stuff that did a lot with a little.

Minor criticisms/feedback: near the end, the "snap" camera scrolling from one tile to the next made me start to feel a little dizzy once I was moving the ant around very quickly. Perhaps smooth camera scrolling from one tile to the next would feel slightly better? Also my fingers started to get tired with all the tapping on WASD, had to switch to the other hand a few times lol.

As the guy above me said, maybe it could use some sort of enemy? When I was playing, I was wary about planting any seeds near a spider den, because I half expected that spiders might become a threat at some point or steal the seeds. Maybe spider dens could be an actual threat like that if this was expanded into a full game? It'd give reason to be careful where you put your seeds, as they could attract predators as well who would aggro and chase after you if you got too close.

But yeah, overall was a nice experience. Thanks for sharing! I wonder what mysteries await the lonely ant beyond the tunnel?

Looks and feels great! Loved the audio and mood it set, too. I enjoyed playing, although after a while I started to wonder what the goal really was, as I didn't realise how to beat the game until I stumbled upon the exit by chance. Also I feel like it could use a little balancing, it was quite simple to just dig, plant stuff along the way while looking for altars. No real issues like getting lost or running out of spores/water/nectar.
Still a really fun entry, thanks! :)

wowow!! this game is so cool!! the atmosphere is TERRIFYING i was on edge the entire time and was so anxious about what was lurking everytime i dug a tile, i found the upgrade altars and kept going around making my little plants until i found the exit, i legitimately thought i was going to die the entire time, amazing horror game!!

I love this game. Excellent atmosphere, core gameplay loop was satisfying, and I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of lore and flavour you put into all the little things you could discover. Exploration and reading the flavour text was a highlight. I got to the end and had a lot of fun.

Love the dark and gritty atmosphere. Excellent job done here. The overall mood was great and exploring around was a lot of fun.

Really interesting, it took me until I was just playing around after beating the game to realize digging actually took nectar. Wished there was some threat or challenge to it. Figuring out I'd want to basically plant paths was neat(but not sure that should be desirable, if it isn't could make it so you move slower/trample when moving over plants but auto harvest/treat orthogonally adjacent tiles to encourage leaving clear paths but surrounding them with plants).

This is a truly excellent game. I had a lot of fun and played through to the end. The music, graphics, and snippets of lore really came together to make a lovely desolate atmosphere. Very well done!

A few notes:
-The way the ant jumps instantly from cell to cell without animating really started to hurt my eyes. The change is too abrupt to handle for long play sessions.
-When my beak (?) was sharp enough to exit, the ruined altars I found just stopped responding to right-clicks. Probably because I was able to finish the game at that point, but I couldn't tell. I thought I had to find and fix up all the altars first.
-I couldn't tell what the water resource was for... planting nectar, I think? Felt a bit superfluous.

the atmosphere of the game is sensational.

I really enjoyed the variety of things that appear along the way.

Excellent use of the theme.

Great game!

Thank you so much everyone, I'm glad you enjoyed the atmosphere :D

we'll be implementing a fix to the camera that will hopefully make the dizzyness go away, we felt it too while playtesting and its real bad @_@

I beat the game! Really cool, well-contained concept. I like this one quite a bit, too. Great work!

Perhaps one of the best audio and atmosphere, very atmospheric. The soundtrack even gave me goosebumps. And it was pretty fun to play. It would certainly be great if there were more varieties of all sorts of plants or something else. Very good work.

Really good at setting a spooky and solitary mood.

Took me a while to work out what the orange plants were letting me do.

The instant movement was kinda jarring.

This is a pretty funky game! I don't think I've ever played as an ant before :joy:

But it was good! I enjoyed hunting around.
The only thing I would say, is the snapping between tiles, sometimes made me feel more teleporting than moving so I some times had to look back at the previous tiles to make sure I did move where I wanted to
but thats very minor.

Overall I good fun game!

nice job :)

Oh! great entry! I really loved the sprites, and game feel. 5/5