FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD29 → Anthill

Anthill

By gre

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CategoryRankScoreCount
Coolness1100
Theme673.93
Overall2783.47
Fun3303.30
Innovation3333.39
Audio3713.04
Mood5143.03
Graphics7002.94
Humor7692.15

Comments

mrspeaker 2014-04-28 03:10

I love this entry - ended up playing it for a really long time. It took me a while to figure out what was going on (at first I was just clicking around randomly) but once I got it it's addictive. Well done!

iamspencer 2014-04-28 08:39

Very addicting. Nice job allowing the user to click and drag to make a trail, usually games seem to forget how helpful that is. Great Job! :)

snooze82 2014-04-28 09:35

took a while to get it - i like the little dead ants :D

careforceone 2014-04-28 17:40

This game is great! Very addicting.

yetanother 2014-04-28 21:22

Cool music, nice to play.

lonewookie 2014-04-29 02:39

Very well made. I love the idea of managing a colony of ants!

jeffz 2014-04-29 09:47

excellent fun, especially the music!

jaredsartin 2014-04-29 12:36

SimAnt! Nice work! Can't wait to see more.

tannernetwork 2014-04-29 12:37

Really nice game :)

pancakecity 2014-04-29 14:05

Fun game, it has good atmosphere!

nonobattle 2014-04-30 00:50

Really awesome idea and gameplay!

badgerpriest 2014-04-30 19:19

Ahh, I didn't know you could drag to make tunnels the first time. Maybe make that more clear? It makes a huge difference.

gre 2014-04-30 21:30

I've just released an important bugfixes pass, the release note is in the commit: https://github.com/gre/ld29/commit/0492fb186e1dc40083ee0cdb1ad95eb2dcca4042

gre 2014-04-30 21:36

BadgerPriest: Thanks for the feedback, I've updated the description here

thorig 2014-05-01 07:09

Great sim! One of the better sim of this Ludum Dare.

miwuc 2014-05-01 10:04

Nice game and great idea for the theme. On my first playthrough all my ants but I did better the second time. Though at one point I stopped getting new ants. Is it because my queen died? Is there anyway to reverse this situation? It gets very repetitive after that.

miltage 2014-05-01 10:32

I enjoyed this. It is well made, although it has some inherent flaws.

First, I think that jobs should be assigned on proximity. Too often I had ants walking from the other end of the map to dig a hole when I had a perfectly good architect standing next to it.

Second, ants that die while on the job are not replaced by other ants. So tunnels that were being dug when an ant dies are in a perpetual state of waiting to be dug.

Third, I almost reached starvation once. I started losing a bunch of ants, but once most of them were dead, there was enough food for everyone and I pulled through with a dozen ants remaining. However, once food was plentiful again, new ants were never born. So I remained with my dozen ants from day 20 to day 100 with > 1000 food.

I love this concept and the way you've executed it. I played a lot of SimAnt when I was a kid, and would like to see this continued.

jotson 2014-05-01 14:10

Really good. With some polish you could take this to a full game.

danvil 2014-05-01 15:49

Game is very buggy :(

gre 2014-05-01 18:12

Danvil: what do you mean? What are the bugs? I released bugfixes yersterday.

gre 2014-05-01 18:16

Miltage: Thanks for the feedback, yeah actually there is already a "proximity" search but between tasks, not ants... (a ant search the closest job). there is something I missed in my "find job" algorithm: basically I'm doing "foreach ant, find the closest job" where I kinda should do "foreach job, find the closest ant", or even maybe try to mix the 2 approaches.

gre 2014-05-01 18:18

(and there are limit per job, so the "older" ant lock the job..)

anissen 2014-05-01 18:55

Has a bit of a Dungeon Keeper vibe to it. Nice :)

ceriseghost 2014-05-04 09:33

I really enjoyed this game! It took me a while to understand how to get them to dig but once I figured that out I was fine! :)

copain 2014-05-04 09:45

nice idea. a good start for a real game...

cmaster 2014-05-04 12:58

Clicking on the dirt does nothing for me (Firefox 28)

mechabit 2014-05-04 13:06

I was a huge fan of sim ant back in the day. Not much in the way of challenge though. Maybe add some conflict.

gre 2014-05-04 13:32

CMaster: does it put any "clock" on it? if not, do you even have some hover feedback on the dirt?
Otherwise did you affected some Architect?

xenosns 2014-05-04 14:10

Enjoyed this, very well executed

hippolyta 2014-05-04 14:20

Very nice game - good job!

dector 2014-05-04 16:23

Love the soundtrack. Very nice entry. Well done!

gigitrix 2014-05-05 00:56

Really like the AI pathfinding etc in this one - for an LD entry it's sophisticated! Crashed on Day 83 with a "Uncaught TypeError: Cannot set property '93' of undefined", but I had 3000 food at that point so I think I had played enough of it.

I think the UI needs a bit of work (clicks/hovers not always registering, simple black text of assignment stats etc.) and I'd have liked to have seen more roles, but there's definitely a solid game mechanic there!

Would like to see something like enemies that your guys must fight (through assigning to "warrior" type) and perhaps some sort of "sustainability" role that somehow increases the availability of food in the lategame.

Regardless, it's a very fun game as is!

jsmars 2014-05-05 06:27

Great job on this game! I really liked it! A fun little concept which worked really well, reminds me a bit of "banished".

agecaf 2014-05-05 11:26

Very fun and addicting game. It's crazy how sometimes you get tons of food, and sometimes food supplies begin to lower drastically.

mintarcade 2014-05-05 12:46

Nice ant sim. Very addicting.

invisiblewonder 2014-05-05 15:37

I couldn't dig for the life of me. No dirt tiles would light up when I clicked on them.

gre 2014-05-05 20:02

Sorry about this bug, it should be fixed now (Firefox)

littleball 2014-05-05 21:22

Good game. I would like to see it developed further. Well done.

jimmyboh 2014-05-05 21:41

Really takes me back to the days of SimAnt! Great work! More specializations and optimized task setting would make this truly spectacular!

cmaster 2014-05-05 21:50

No clocks, no hover behaviour. Works on my pyher machine with firefox though...

rojo 2014-05-06 04:18

Nice base for a larger game. Seemed to run a little laggy in Firefox for me, so maybe there could be some optimizations there.

gre 2014-05-06 16:50

It should now run smoother on Firefox, thanks for the feedback!

FYI: The food/ant/days display was still using the Phaser Debug which is very laggy comparing to a Phaser.Text.

caridorc 2014-05-06 19:03

Very good game, in many games the start is too hard and you die soon but in this i had time to learn how to play.

cawrtz 2014-05-07 14:26

Cool entry. I like the simple and effective mechanics.
Unfortunately, the game wouldn't load, I had to execute game.state.start('Game') manually
There was no JS error, and all assets were loaded, I don't know why this happened.

Apart from this issue, nice game, quite addictive !

paps 2014-05-09 19:38

Nice game

hnjslater 2014-05-11 21:40

Good fun, kinda meditative.

jupiter_hadley 2014-05-12 01:55

Simple game, good little ants! I included it in part 25 of my Ludum Dare compilation video series, if you'd like to check it out :) http://youtu.be/06U_lc3kLp4

mortus 2014-05-13 11:54

I always loved games about ants and ant societies! Very nice smooth colors also. Wish there were more challenges though.

lucidlarva 2014-05-13 15:17

I spent way too much time playing d: very good.

gamepopper 2014-05-13 19:12

Reminded me a lot of SimAnts, but I think this is built better. :)

crocantidepollo 2014-05-13 22:26

Good work! It's strangely mesmerizing

raiyumi 2014-05-15 05:40

Argh.. those dead ants! It's a nice game.

nanolotl 2014-05-17 12:31

Great idea and fun to play. Music was nice too.

bmacintosh 2014-05-17 18:14

I got the crash error, too: "Uncaught TypeError: cannot set property '59' of undefined (game.js:32)" (Day 65 Ants 165)

end3r 2014-05-18 13:47

Addicting, enjoying and can be played for some time without getting bored - congrats!

xaychru04 2014-05-19 19:45

I liked the atmosphere music, and the game was quite addicting! I found it a little too short though, more goals for the player would have been great.
But anyway, really nice game, I dig it! ... :>