Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD46 → ViolAnts 2: For Queen and Colony
By prakkus, oohoos and Mark A Pressler
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 1398 | 3.42 | 21 | |
| Fun | 1230 | 3.31 | 21 | |
| Innovation | 1873 | 2.94 | 21 | |
| Theme | 1619 | 3.47 | 21 | |
| Graphics | 1927 | 3.00 | 21 | |
| Audio | 1138 | 3.12 | 22 | |
| Humor | 1594 | 2.50 | 19 | |
| Mood | 1981 | 2.89 | 21 |
This is actually a really fun game. Some of the controls are a little funky, but I appreciate the hotkeys being added. It's definitely a tough one! One anomaly I noticed is that if you drag your screen around while playing, audio seems to warp like scratching a record or something. Definitely a fun one, gonna keep trying to beat it.. Good work! As a side note, you should totally add some more content to this game. It's neat.
Hey thanks! The version we ended up with at the end of the jam was definitely on the tough end balance-wise with us as the playtesters. I think the best strategy is probably to use your expansion nodes to distract enemy ants while the shooters take them out, building more shooters on the sides that are being attacked heavily, while you build up nurseries. That strategy is not super intuitive though, and it means you don't actually really build ants for a while. Hopefully we'll do another pass at some point and polish those bits up!
Thanks for the kind words :D
The game is really nice! I like the idea, and the graphics are pretty good, however i think that the UI backgrounds look not the best, I think that the red font on the deathscreen doesn't really fit. Generally, i think it is a really cool game.
A solid strategy game! Bravo!
Haven't figured out the build to win yet.
Issues and suggestions: - ants can get stuck in a perpetual circling move where they can't attack - ants ignore freshly spawned ants - middle mouse button to move the camera is an odd choice. The camera should move, when you get near the edge - minimap (for better overview and camera controls) would be nice - a proper way to exit the game (as far as I can tell only alt f4 works)
This game captured my attention for awhile, well done! Ever since I played Sim Ant as a kid, I've always thought an ant colony is a great inspiration for gameplay. The game is very difficult, it would be nice if there was a smoother ramp up of difficulty, it would probably allow for more variety of strategy. Nice game!
Fun little RTS game! Took me a couple tries to win, I think the enemy base wasn't resetting properly when clicking retry. Could have used some better camera controls though, I missed out on seeing my ant army destroy the enemy.
I didn't expect to play a strategy game at a game jam, as the mechanics can be difficult to get right. However, your team menaged to make the game quite fun and I applaud you for that.
I noticed your entry was a few votes short, so I played it on Twitch and gave some live feedback. VOD is up on Youtube, if you'd like to see it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gi6oja9yekY
As someone who struggles with micromanagement, I like the idea of a strategy game that aims to cut that out! I tried a good 6 or 7 strategies though, and nothing seemed to help against the exponential growth of the lava ant spawners... and I couldn't see a way, whether going full offense, full defense, or even focusing on just nurseries, that I could keep up with enemy ant production. Strategy games where each team is asymmetrical can be tricky to balance, but as a player without an intimate familiarity with game mechanics, it did feel imbalanced. That said, I can be kinda bad at games! I liked the clean, readable hand-drawn graphics; each ant type was easy to distinguish, so props on the visual design there! And I gotta say, every time sounds played when the mouse scrolled, and it warbled from doppler effect... the goofed up trumpet toots absolutely *sent* me. Thank you a bunch for making this game!
@solifuge Thanks a bunch for giving our game a solid go! Yeah, we were doing balance testing at the very tail end of the jam, and turns out @oohoos is just really good at this game or something, because his ability to beat it definitely isn't reflective of mine or most others that have tried haha. But the rate that enemy colonies spawn is on its own curve that could very easily be tuned to have it not be so crazy, we just didn't want to change anything post jam in the jam spirit! But we'll definitely take this lesson moving forward— if there's only one difficulty setting, tune on the easier side, not the more difficult lol.
Sound-wise, that warped doppler trumpet was accidental, we were using 3D sound effects for all of the ant sounds, but attached the background music to the camera so it wouldn't be affected by the camera movement. However, the 'new enemy spawner has appeared' trumpet sound was attached to the new enemy spawners themselves, and is the only more melodic sound attached to something on the ground, which is why you get those weird warped trumpets whenever you're moving the camera as a new one spawns in. It is more of a 'global warning' sound though, and as such should've been attached to the camera as well. Glad you enjoyed it though and thanks for the kind words!
@solifuge Ahh thank you for the video! It's really fun to watch people figure the game out, but also especially painful as I'm sitting there thinking "Yeahhhhhh we should have made it _easier_ before shipping, not harder". You figured out all the right moves and the game was still too hard. Ah well, a good lesson for us :D
Building ants early is actually kind of a trap, because they just run into the enemy base and die. So it ends up being about turtling with turrets until you have enough larvae to send in a swarm all at once. In that sense, it's confusing to have the units available from the get-go, which probably explains why RTS games make you progress through a tech tree instead. Next time!
I'm sure the game is winnable, because after we uploaded this build and it seemed too hard, I went in and made sure I could win both with 10 nurseries and by killing the queen. As you mentioned though, I think the RNG makes it tricky because if you get a tough combination of ants coming from a certain angle, or the wrong spawns early, things start snowballing. Nurseries ramp up larvae production a lot though, so the idea is that you can ramp them up at a similar rate as the enemy ant production. It's also worth noting that the enemy spawners pop up based on a ramping up timer and isn't tied to your production at all. It would've been good to have an indicator to make that clearer, I think.
The trumpet sound warping was a happy accident! *tooTOOT!*
P.S. After writing this I decided to confirm again that victory is possible and record some videos to help folks out. Here they are:
[Winning with 10 nurseries](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-sfeJTlebs)
[Winning by killing the enemy queen](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4IBihrDX8A)