Ants Save The Queen by Filip Vannfält
The queen has gone missing and the anthill is in turmoil!
Ants Save The Queen is a roguelike in miniature format. Steer your troop of brave ants through treacherous lands, filled with dangerous bugs, to find and save the missing queen. On the way you may find rewards in the form of captured allies or powerful upgrades, but be certain of your choice as you can only pick one of the rewards!
Each ant is both health and ammo, so be careful not to lose too many. We hope you enjoy our game!

Controls:
WASD - control the ants
Arrow Keys - hold down to fire ants in the held direction
ESC - open the pause menu
Gameplay by: deox, Filip Vannfält, Boodle
Art by: Raz253, Boodle, deox
Audio by: Filip Vannfält, Boodle
Music by: Xpizt
(known issues: sometimes when changing rooms some ants can get trapped in the old room behind the rocks, which restricts your movement. You can try to press up against the rocks to go back to the old room)
| HTML5 (Web) | https://felp.itch.io/antssavethequeen |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/ants-save-the-queen |
Ratings
| Overall | 326th | 3.763⭐ | 40🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 355th | 3.605⭐ | 40🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 98th | 3.947⭐ | 40🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 65th | 4.329⭐ | 40🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 533th | 3.684⭐ | 40🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 252th | 3.684⭐ | 40🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 492th | 3.135⭐ | 39🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 597th | 3.459⭐ | 39🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 48🗳️ | 61🗨️ |
I saved the queen, great game otherwise!
The art style is also nice, a fun little game overall.
The game has a nice fitting music and a good climax in the end to wrap up the whole thing. I lost 90% of my swarm in the last room.
Good work, it was enjoyable!
**Regarding gameplay**: Challenging but not too difficult. The idea of ammo = hp is fun and creative, but there is some room for improvement, as it does have a snowball effect: if you don't get hit, you steamroll the enemies. But the less ants (hp) you have, the more difficult it is to fight the enemies, therefore more chances to get hit again, so it's easier to restart the game than to continue with 3-4 ants. The upgrades and more ants that are here are appreciated though!
**The feel**: wow, every system is made with care. The artstyle is consistent, functional and beautiful, SFX helps telegraph the enemy attacks and gives great feedback, the rhytmic but non-interruptive music just makes playing the game a meditative experience.
Love it! Certainly one of my favourites so far. 5 stars is a no-brainer!
Well done!
I played a few minutes, and got REKT pretty quick, but I'm very impressed by the concept, must have been complex to make those ants move "together". Congratulations!
I thought that you can't shoot when the enemy become ball, turn out you can.

Interesting mechanic, having the ants be both health and ammo. I sure lost a lot of soldiers during the war, most during the final beetle battle. But in the end, three ants survived and saved the queen. I hope she rewards them for all they went through.
By the way, I got so many fire rate upgrades, I had the ant machine-gun.

the fact that every enemy type has their own attack pattern feels super impressive, especially for a ludumdare game! Makes it feel very polished. If i had to add a complaint, it would be that i wish the ants were slightly faster, as it got slightly boring moving between rooms, other than that tho i can't really come up with anything. anyways, had lots of fun playing! Looking forward to see what you guys do next ludumdare!🤟