Entomologist here; for farming I’d suggest drawing inspiration from real life cases: some ant species farm and protect aphids that feed on sap from live plants and release sugar which the ants feed on. Other interesting farming case is the renowned leaf cutter ants which cut fresh leaves and flowers and use them to feed a special fungus which in turn produces protein that the ants harvest. And there’s a family of Asian ants that deliberately cultivate a kind of plant that grows on trees and make shelter and food for the ants.

i think you should change the color of the pheromone trails based on what type of ant it is. Like archers have a different color pheromone trail than the basic ants.

I think a fire ant would be a great way of introducing a little bit of magic in the game, and have more rock paper scissors for the combat

I like that the attacks are just less effective, rather than the enemies being immune to certain attacks.

5:01 mom im on tv

I love the visual of Chucking a bay into an archery range to make them into archers lmao

This is starting to look so exciting! I recommend looking at both StarCraft and Pikmin for ideas. The campaign could have so many varied maps: - Conquer an enemy base - Hold out against a tide of enemies - Explore a cave and return some cool artifacts to your lair - Defend a weaker ant colony - Solve a tough fight with limited resources - Avoid special hazards unique to the map, like periodic floods, wind or unkillable anteaters - Capture the flag - Fight a boss with unique mechanics - Tower defense - Control both the overground and the underground - Get back before dark when the monsters come ... you are gonna make a campaign, right?

Lovely. A few suggestions on Victory condition? Maybe the win condition is to gather enough of specific items in order to grow a new Queen, which will eventually leave the nest to fly away and start a new colony somewhere else. It seems to me that the entire purpose of these adorable ant creatures is to expand their kingdom, and in order to do that they need to prepare the next generation; i.e. the next Queen Ant. And thus, imagine a "world map" where the player picks the location of the next colony, where the Queen Ant will travel to with a small group of workers; and of course, the map will feature biomes with special setbacks and benefits. It would also help if the global difficulty increases with each new colony built. It could also bring a small roguelike element to it, with the chance to unlock new features or improved bonuses as new colonies are built. The true game victory then happens when a global percentage of the "world map" is achieved, like, 90%. By the way, I keep saying "world map", but in fact I'm picturing a playground, or a garden. A very Pikmin thought, if you please. Anyway, adorable game concept so far. Keep it up!

Slow but steady we're getting Age of Antpire

1) Have you tought about adding drops from enemies? 2) Will you add enemies with ranged atacks?

Ants should also have a "chemical" or "acid" damage type. I mean, they're ants...

The tomatoes and bread and stuff could have a reason to be there so something like the tomatoes fall from a tomato plant that grows there and sometimes passing people drop things, this could lead to further locations with different foods and enemies and other benefits/deficits. You could also include that in the day to day cycle so that every time a day passes a couple tomatoes fall or maybe have a random chance that a person drop some food or resources. edit: Another cool addition is the chance for raindrops to fall with some special use.

i really adore the style you draw the buildings in, theyre so charming and cozy looking!!

This honestly feels like it would make a great civilization like game with real time pvp and pve. Almost like clash of clans crossed with BTD and Polytopia.

Absolutely loving thoose devlogs of yours! I can't wait to try out this game 😊

You could have some of the enemies be other ants, either with a bit of a different design or just a different color

I think it would be really cool if there were ants that couldn't do damage but instead they could carry a big leave over their heads as a sheild for the other ants. Maybe enimies could be programmed to target thise first. The ants could line up and when maybe 5 are ready they could get a leaf (You can experience with diffrent amounts of ants to balance the game) The leaf could have a visual representation of how much healt it has left. Very nice video!

This is looking great so far! I'm wary about the money system you mentioned - having a building system that just requires you to get money and then plop down new buildings seems uninspired and doesn't really dovetail into any of the existing systems. Perhaps you could connect buildings into the wood and clay resources instead - you place down a blueprint, which then requests a certain amount of wood and clay. If there are no woodhuts or potteries with the appropriate resources, its ants just try to gather those resources from the closest natural source instead. Thus you can build without specifically collecting those resources, but it's more efficient to actually collect them and stockpile them for when you want to slap down some buildings quickly. I also had the thought that you *could* add an extra step to the larvae production chain by having the Castle produce *eggs* instead of larvae, which then have to be incubated in a Castle or Nursery to become larvae. The Castle would produce eggs very quickly, up to a certain cap, but the rate at which it turns an egg into a larva is quite slow, meaning you'd need more nurseries to up your production of larvae. In practice this would be very similar, but it'd be a little bit more realistic, and would also mean you couldn't put down a nursery on the opposite side of the map and have it produce larvae out of nowhere - any larvae production has to have a secure logistic route to your castle, giving you more routes to worry about and forcing the player to keep their base relatively compact without placing an arbitrary limit on where they can build. One thing I will suggest for food is that you imitate how real ants have a "crop" - a sort of special food store in their gut - and when another ant is hungry any nearby ant will feed them from their crop. This means you don't have to make all the ants go eat individually, instead food can radiate out through the populace, being passed on from ant to ant, centred on your food production. Regardless, I'm interested in seeing how things progress from here!

You should add walls as an extra line of defense against large hoards of enemies, but also a burrowing enemy that can dig under them to keep players on their toes. Also a dung beetle that launches its ball like a trebuchet or ballista would also be cool.

Maybe steer the game towards a age of empire like game, where other ant colonies exist and fight each other for ressources, so you have to expand and defend parts of your land against the others. And if you really want then you can make an all out attack to kill the queen.

The little clay helmets are adorable!

These devlogs are extremely satisfying to watch. From the subtle music, to the crispy and cute visual style, to even your speaking voice. Really makes for a relaxing and entertaining video that I look forward to each time you post.

In my opinion, you are a true Indie Game Dev, with trully unique and original ideas and projects, in the contrary of a lot of content we see these days. As a biologist and ant lover, I always dreamed about a good ant-like game, there is so much potential for those little wonders ! I planned to make it myself since I have a bachelor degree in video game devlopement but I lack the time and the coding skills, so maybe I'll share my ideas with you instead !

Im in love with this idea. Reminds me of one of my favorite youtubers AntCanada. This idea of indirectly controlling the ants by directly controlling the environment.

The little pot helmets make me want to cry? This game has amazing vibes, cant wait til it comes out.

I love watching this. It's always fun to see what you add next. And i must say, I absolutely love the organic art style you use for this

Still need a victory to aim for, a goal, some purpose. That will inform your design choices. I really like the exploratory nature of ant colonies - maybe do migratory ants? Starting with one colony (castle) and looking for the next place to set up chop and protect your Queen while she is (slowly) migrating into the next colony from the old one. Sounds like a fun, ever-changing Tower Defense with additional mechanics to me!

I do think that Flying enemies should have a shadow underneath them to give better perspective about where they are!

When planning how to communicate enemy resistances and vulnerabilities, it might be useful to take inspiration from a game like Lobotomy Corporation. In Lobotomy Corporation, there are four damage types, and any creature in the game can have a range from 0-2 that represents how they react to that damage type. 1.0 means they react to it normally, 2.0 means they take double damage, 0.0 means their immune, and 0.6 means they only take 60% of the damage.(resist 40%) In Lobotomy Corporation, each enemy also has a dedicated page, sort of like a coded entry to communicate important things and story stuff. I think it would be cool, in this aspect, to have a codex, from an “adventurer ant” that allows you to right click on an enemy to open up their entry on the side of the screen that includes important information like their resistances and vulnerabilities, and a short text blurb about them as a creature. I think it would all go a long way to making the world feel more alive, and it’s pretty modular so it can expand as your project does.

You should make specialized buildings for enemy parts. Beetles would give upgrades to the (not honey)pot ants, lasting longer, and maybe even having a chance to not use a durability on hit. Not sure for flies and slugs, but having an enemy similar to your ants that fight as a colony(probably termites, a whiter version) to get their supplies and maybe some other rarer items as well.

I love seeing it come together!! Cant wait to see how it will come together in the end

this is starting to look real good!! love your designs!

Ideas for development of the game: 1. As the ammount of buildings grows the visual distonction is guing to get harder. Maybe try adding slight bits of other colours depending on building role for example red for military, darker brown for crafting etc. 2. Adding resource progresion Clay could be the most basic resource, then using clay bakery you could turn it into baked clay neded for more advanced crafting buildings. Clay mixed with red flowers(as it seems you will add more plants to the game) could give you red clay, and red clay then put into clay bakery would give you red baked clay used for military buildings. This would add nice simple chains of resources serving as currencies. Clay > baked clay Clay > red clay > red baked clay This would also add more resources without adding more building because bakery would make and store both types of baked clay. 3. I think it would look cooler if nurseries crafted ants the same way military building do. 4. Weapon: clay bombs that could be made of baked clay, wood and red flower. They would deal area damage with the drawback being that the bomb cap per building would be 3 (instead of other warrior type ants cap of 10) and their crafing being more advanced. Their role would be countering big crowds of weak enemies(perhaps oposing colony in the far future?) 5. Production buildings. Their recognisable colour could be slight blue, thus adding blue flower, blue clay and blue baked clay. Again expanding chain without addind too many buildings. As oposed to crafting buildings they would slowly produce specific resources after initial investment. So mines/ farms this would let you turn down resource respawn rates also the blue flowers could be really rare or even limited(not respanwning at all or doing so very slowly) thus pressuring players into expanding/exploring further in search of these blue flowers. 6. Obstacles, you already made the pathfinding so maybe add some sort of unbreakable walls to path around. These could have a brakable parts that would be possible to attack and break( bomb could deal bonus damage to them) 7. Have fun and good luck with the development!

Crazy how much you've got done in what seems like such a short time. Looking forward to your next devlog for sure.

Maybe shadows for anything flies? Awesome vid! Really look forward to these each week!

I'm sure people have pointed this out to you already, but Microtopia released a demo on Steam recently. Quite different in some aspects, but they do pathing to manage your ants and some other elements in an interesting fashion.

Just subbed to this channel specifically for this project, it looks great!

lmao the pot ants i love them :D

Something I always like to see in city building games like these is leveling up the city hall or central building, unlocking more buildings, upgrades, or resources. That might also be a good way to ease players into the mechanics of the game and scale enemy difficulty.

Loving the look and the systems you've developed so far. Looking forward to seeing how it turns out ~

I love your game, such a unique idea!

It looks like youre starting to hit your stride! Now that the base concept is decided, you have room to work on features and details. I love the change to the bow color. Im hoping maybe someday there will be multiple colonies with different colored houses! Like a pink flower petals colony vs a green vines colony vs a fall leaves colony.

I like that the enemies are not just invulnerable to the wrong type of attack

I do like the new bow color and I think it would be good to use the clay as a building resource so when you build it the ants grab the resources and haul it to the building location. Another unit that would be good is making a worker ant that specializes in building,harvesting, and hauling.

From what I've understood, you have three main types of buildings, and I'm not sure what this separation serves: - The Castle and Nursery come with their own ants, and can be ordered to gather food along a path, which produces larvae, which they automatically distribute. - The Wood and Pottery stations must be provided larvae before they can operate, and can be ordered to gather one type of resource along a path, which they automatically distribute. - The Archery and Armory stations must be provided larvae before they can operate, and can be ordered to spend a resource along a path (i.e. spend ammo to defend an area) The one thing that seems odd to me is how worker ants are abstracted away, yet larvae are a resource. There also doesn't seem to be much of a point to the castle/nursery distinction. I'm curious to see where the design will go next, especially considering the shape of the colony will be influenced by the way resource gathering and pipelining of resources works.

An additional mechanic for the enemies could be they attack nearby ants on their path to the castle. Ants who are killed would need to be replaced with more larva at their home building. This also could lead to more variety in enemy types by modifying how much they will prefer to attack nearby ants vs beelining to the castle

A gameplay idea, you could have some enemy types go after the resource nodes instead to represent other animals competing for resources

Woah the pot ants are kinda like soldier ants who usually have big heads Good job this look great

Definitely looking forward to playing this one! Oh, and the brown bow is definitely an improvement!

A cool Idea for the enemies would be that they all target different things, for example the slugs could go straight for the castle but the flies would also attack your units.

For victory conditions I think you could lean into the eta side of the game and have an enemy computer attack with an ant colony that you are fighting for territory. And in the future you can have multiple species of ants to choose from like fire ants, carpenter ants, weaver ants and more.

Man I'm so hyped for this :)

I love watching this game develop! Also, i just realized that i wasnt subscribed to you, if anyone else is in my boat, save youself some time and hit the button now rather then later.

Since you asked: Bows look good. Also, nice to see the game's shaping up.

Give us the spicy ants

Its been fascinating to see the development of this game

as someone who loves base building, i'd love leafcutter ants who add "fences" made of leaves so if there is a wave of enemies they can either be halted, slowed, or atleast funneled. I know that would end up making this a bit of a tower defense game but I don't think that is a particularly bad idea, i think if you have enough unique types of ants/buildings, and perhaps enough types of terrain or obstacles, perhaps even seasons? ocassional challenges? then itll keep the game dynamic enough to be more than just building and defending.

I have no idea how feasible this is - but adding brightly colored outlines as an accessibility option could be nice. In order to reduce visual clutter, you could even make it so when groups of the same type of ant are huddles together, it only outlines the outside of the group, not every ant individually.

I'd recomend using the dnd trinity of bludgeoning, slashing, and piercing for damage types since it'll open you up to more fluctuation of resistances as well as more design space for more ants in the future

Make dirt walls with wooden beams for your colony!

Awesome to see this progress!

The game is looking great so far! It's very pleasant to the eye and the mechanics so far are easy to understand and interesting to play around with. Can't wait to see how it turns out and eventually play it!

This is looking really cool! Like I'm very hyped!

You should add a carpenter and maybe a refinery that separates minerals from clay to make stone, but since stone is heavy a slight decrease in speed maybe?. An advancement system would be nice too. A cultural menu when (e) or a key is pressed opens showing resources, the colony level, and overall well-being.

At some point there should be other ant colonies that you can conquer and expand your colony. Which in turn gives you many colonies to manage.

I like the idea that the ant-people don't really need money to build things, it's just a nice happy little colony of ants building and defending. But if anyone can make ant-people use money in some way, it's you.

“I’ve taught them about industry” Oh no it’s happening again

I love the idea but I wonder how this would look if you were to make the buildings and exploration more like Dungeon Keeper? Either way, can't wait to see more!

You could have a carrier ant of some sort that picks up other ants to take them further. The ant could use a beetle husk or something

I think you should add separate ants to carry resources, making the worker ants more focused on their work task.

Looks great, seems like a fun alternative to a game like Pikmin. Just a thought. Maybe add some grass at the bottom of the buildings that helps ground them and ease the transition to the terrain they are on? The grass could be a separate actor so it doesn't wobble, but just depends. Maybe shadows too, but that could be saved for later, if you even intend to. I almost would love to suggest making it a 2.5d game just to see how beautiful it would be with those extra 3d benefits, but that is a potentially big undertaking depending on the project I understand. May not even like the idea. So this is just a throw away idea. =P hehe

Make a juggernaut :). It has boots in its legs, and when it sees an enemy it runs to it, 50% critical hit

The pot helmet on the ants are quite similar to ants carring pottery around, got me confused for a while. Adding the horns to the helmets could help, but I think the fantasy of the pot head would fail... Hmmmm

Maybe consider making guard towers for the archer ants? Limited ants per tower (~2) and stuck in place, but with higher range and an arrow stockpile in their building meaning they don’t need to leave to restock.

You should really consider making enemies that attack ants as well. It will make the helmet actually function as armour and introduce some more depht without too much complexity

make another building that converts pots not to warriors, but use the pots as tools to improve hauling capacity. (which becomes more relevant over longer distances and gives a trade-off how to use the resource)

I love this!! The pot ants are my new favorite :)

Those helmets should have horns and the enemies should turn into a food source after they’re defeated.

1. I think there should be small paths around or connecting the buildings, or a tint, where most of the buildings are, just visually, so that you can more clearly see where the city is. 2. There should be fire ants, or weaver ants as enemies, like they could start a town, and launch attacks at you, though it could be hard to code 3. You should be able to chose what kind of ant you want, like factions with different traits for example bulky ants, that are slower but hit harder, long ants, that carry more resources but have less HP... etc

Awww, they can have babies now! 💖

very epic bruh, game is shaping up nicely bow change is def a good one

The game is advancing very nicely, well done !!

I do like this new build that destroys the sources because the last time I played, my map got really crowded with sources and whatnot and I wouldn't be able to build many more if I kept it up. There wasn't any way to get rid of them unless I collapsed them into a bigger unit.

I like the wave system idea, but also as a sandbox game lover this could easily be a sort of sandbox-like game, so maybe think about having the wave system not rush the game if you know what I mean, because sometimes people just wanna play the game slower pace but waves kinda ruin it for them, its your game I'm just giving my feedback on that, but also great video and I'm hoping to see more! (P.s I love the color for the bows now)

Idea: Bombardier beetle that fires ranged explosive attacks. They do area damage, but don't do much damage. Devastating for your groups of weak archers, but the durable melee ants, whose attack method causes a bit more spreading out, absolutely dominate these beetles. Just thought it would make for a good way to set up this sort of type-based favorability, without simply editing numbers. You know?

The game is shapping to be really interesting and fun ! I'm very impressed 😊

It would be interesting to have building or units upgrades, for example that the ants can move faster or buldings have more resistance. I imagine this game as sort or a survival type of game

I love the pots XD!! They are hilarious!!

Try adding Rolly pollies as friendlier and rideable creatures

You could have male ants fly in, which can sell you upgrades, maybe new ant types or some sort of meta upgrade like an overall speed boost or carry capacity.

An idea I had was making the enemies have their own home/colony thing that they come from and the ants have to go attack that spawning location to stop the enemies from coming. Just an idea tho.

I hope some buildings have the option to be turned off or something. Or some way to say send larva to be workers instead of archers based on a pheromone trail. Or In a pinch make them all warriors for a big fight. Also making the damage hit change depending on if it’s normal, effective, weak/miss, or crits. Will help people figure out what’s effective quickly. Like the soft orange hits are normal, while the more bright orange ones are effective. But a crit could have sparkle effects on the hit or something, and could be on an orange or soft orange. While misses could be a little woosh like wind. Because as of now it’s hard to tell the pots are missing from afar.

I think the pot ants should have something that makes them visually distinct even after the pot has broken.

think it could be fun to have opposing ants as an enemy type, should be fairly simple to recolour buildings and ants to fit and have them do raiding parties to try and take over your nest. it would be repetative for the whole game but having it as one of multiple victory conditions would mix up the gameplay decently well.

I love where this is going

I think this is going to become a tradition for me at this point but I shall keep postulating that you bring back the mosslings as some sort of ally/friends to the ants as they were cute and it's sad to part ways with them

Just a funny suggestion. You should add fire as a damage type and have them throw molotov cocktails that are made from pots and oil from an olive like plant this could make managing resources more valuable as an item might have more than one use. Or for fire you could make them collect/mine coal to make torches with sticks and coal and they throw the torches. Or may just a farmable nut that explodes into shrapnel like a grenade. Basically AOE damage is on my mind, but also fire.

I have an idea! What if you could have units that spread honey on the ground to slow down groud-based enemies? Say you don't have easy access to clay early on so can't effectively deal w/ beetles? Honey could add a way to give archers and the player more time to act.

regarding weapon types, I think having ranged and melee is best as a dichotomy unrelated to damage type/resistance. Then enemies like flies could have a flying type, that only ranged units can target. This is a very common trope, so I think it would both be intuitive, and increase the dimension space for combat and supply chains. Certain beetles could be phased to fly in, and 'land' near objectives, where they then lose their flying tag. Flying enemies that launch grounded ones, grounded ones that launch flying ones. Perhaps an enemy type walks in, then at an hp threshold it flies away for backup. Perhaps that's significantly too complex, but the point being it opens up a lot of design space for essentially nothing.

We need a spider that can shoot webs to stun ants by shooting them with webs archers would be good at hitting the spider since their long ranged but i feel like the spider would have a chance of dodging arrows since some spiders are fast. Love the vid cant wait to play the game it looks so cool