Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD54 → Fun Ant Game
By elmoeinstein
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 503 | 3.63 | 28 | |
| Fun | 356 | 3.68 | 29 | |
| Innovation | 741 | 3.14 | 29 | |
| Theme | 888 | 3.13 | 29 | |
| Graphics | 481 | 3.75 | 29 | |
| Audio | 435 | 3.40 | 29 | |
| Humor | 388 | 3.26 | 25 | |
| Mood | 582 | 3.50 | 29 |
Big fan of the art and background music. Looking at the options I decided to make for the surface right away and spread myself way too thin the first playthrough haha. Second go around I kept things more compact and had a pretty decent little economy going. Nice chill entry. Good job. Didn't quite get to unlocking Obama though...
This was a neat little game. The interface was difficult to figure out at first. I couldn't find the scrollbar because it didn't fit on my screen. If you are going to use something like that I think it needs some explanation or something to highlight it more. Overall a fun game.
Wow, nice simple fun colony builder, love the ant theme - plays well into limited space. And in year 9 bravo bravo!
@germdog53 thanks for the review! sorry about the trouble with the screen. If you make it full screen it should work but the webgl page makes that hard to find.
@trifectuh Thanks for the review. im just gonna say this now so people don't get mad. Obama doesnt really do anything except sit there gloriously.
@Margoovian thanks for the good review!
Loved this little incremental game! (Although I am biased towards them.)
Played until I got to the surface and having a 120 so ants. Super cute game, love the art and seeing my little ants run around. Some minor bugs but over all very polished. The explore that cost food was never working for me? Sometimes buildings were greyed out that I could purchase, and I think the Queen Ant bonus for surrounding wasn't working for me, but I wasn't sure.
Again, I loved it! Good job!
wish i could reach obama. that was the real driving force behind playing this. that music is great for the vibe. i enjoyed mapping out tunnels to optimize efficiency
@elmoeinstein well its still a fun goofy thing to see in a game about ants so :shrug:
Very cool pixel art and interface! I had a bit of trouble on the first play-through since the Explore tab defaults to being scrolled down to options that don't work at the beginning (Mysterious Dig). Once I realized that, I was able to explore to get food and get things going. Nice job!
solid game, the first screen tutorial thing was cool, it was pretty satisfying to place stuff down. :)
Nice job! Very interesting setting. Didn't know you could scroll with wasd so I was super confused how to get to the surface. And with so many tunnels it would have taken forever to get there. But got a pretty decent ant/food cap. very relaxing and fun game!
You have a great future ahead of you in game development if you want it!
I won't talk about the balancing issues, the inconsistent wording on the different options, or any other results of sleep deprivation and limited time. What matters is the core of this game. I told you I wouldn't be able to play this because it's not how my brain works, but I was actually able to play it just fine, and *I even felt a little proud of my colony*. I had a very food-biased colony. https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/753365892255186947/1158588764902404226/image.png?ex=651ccb5f&is=651b79df&hm=e16ea83be82993d60a67634468a83185397f5c4d0be015b601b6e5080ad2244c&
What you need to do is build upon your skills and develop your understanding of the "why" behind each decision and practice in game dev. This game could be a great learning opportunity to figure out what makes a game great because it has a very strong foundation, but it does not stick the landing if it were a commercial game. That's not strange. It's not a commercial game, but the thing for you to figure out is "Why is that?", because that's how you learn how to see a game through to that stage. But I'll give you some hints:
1. There are no threats. Everything is just positive, and all ants lost are lost off-screen. We'd be more invested if we could perceive the threats better.
2. There's little motive to keep going once you've figured out how to optimise the fun out of the mechanics that are present. The surface isn't some luscious, diverse landscape. Only grass. There is no major overarching goal. No reason for fighting. Nothing to strive for.
3. It becomes monotonous. There isn't really enough variety for the long haul. There's usually only one right answer, or a few where the order of operations doesn't really matter.
A lot of these things would at least be eased by just developing the game further, adding more options to it, etc. But it's something to chew on.
Additional notes: I liked the idea that they live in houses and apartments. That's sweet. The game has an optimism to it that's nice to experience. Ant house :)) I liked that your fate is in your own hands, even if there isn't any threat. You get to design the colony to make it more efficient - you get bonuses for using your mind. And you're good at spritework. Very smooth and clean stuff, especially for a youngun.
Good job!
i am a sucker for idle(ish) games and i won't pretend i didn't fall into the feedback loop again. played this for longer than i think any jam so far. what stopped me from getting to obama was the pace - felt too slow (at least, for too long. if it speeds up, it took too long before i noticed a shift in the pace and my assumptions led me to believe it wasn't going to happen . i think indicators of what's ahead for incremental games do a huge sum of player motivation)
fun though! very nice looking game - i am a fan of the ui (it's clean!) although one nitpick would be that having explore and build both beside each other wouldn't have taken up too much space i think
… I may have spent too long playing this. The game does what it says on the tin, there are ants and the game is fun. This is a very interesting combination of idle game and city builder that I don’t think I have run across before, I enjoyed it a lot. Some of the scaling prices had be getting worried for a little bit that it was set up to not allow me to get to that 3000 food cap, but that turned out to be because I was trying to only build the large storages. Once I started building the less expensive stuff it all worked out. I will admit I was a bit disappointed that unlocking Obama did nothing, but I didn’t really need it to by that point.
The art in this game was great, I liked how as the ant population grew they filled out the nest until I sent them out on their one-way missions. It did seem to me that the ants only spawned from the initial Queen, I think that it would have been cool if I could have used the location of more Queen rooms to spread the population out more. The music was nice and chill.
Overall I had a lot of fun playing this one, well done!
@WFMG yeah if i had a little more time i would have loved to add some more mechanics for the surface, new threats and so forth but i overscoped a little bit. Also i didn't want the game to be intense as i was taking inspiration from games like cookie clicker which is a calm and fun idle game. Thanks for the long in depth review, I appreciate the feedback.
@qdyer the explores grey out until they are finished so you can't spam them. they have a timer on them. also im pretty sure the buildings cant actually grey out, only the explores. Thanks for the feedback!
@smilewood yoo my man got to obama! i appreciate the time you put into and thanks for the review
I love ants, colony builders, and idle games. this was a ton of fun. Although I did find the scaling a little slow at the beginning! as far as I can tell, the primary exponential scaling factor is the queen and that took pretty long for me to get. maybe that's intentional. very impressive!
I got to obama, although it sure took a while! I think the optimal storage+queen pattern is similar to the water+sugarcan pattern in minecraft. after such a long time playing the audio track did get slightly repetitive, but what audio loop wouldn't!
Very fun and chill! Though I realized at one point that my attempts to maximize my efficiency were all wrong lol.
Great job on the simple tutorialization. The game is a fun idler/clicker. Might be cool to have a "buy on cooldown" checkbox on the explore options. Once I had enough queens I always had ants to buy stuff, and I was just waiting on cooldowns. Played for way longer than I should have for such a simple game lol, good job!
I was hoping Obama was going to make me overpowered and let me break the game, but he did.... nothing? lol
ants.png
addictive, very good. It took me a while to understand how to play, but you were brilliant. I had problems with the side scroll bar. I just think it could be tighter to fit the theme better. But I have to test other games and I'm stuck here. The music could vary between two or 3 themes, but it is pleasant. But the game is addictive. Congratulations, good entry.
@ismael-rodriguez Thanks for playing so much! I really didnt think anyone would have the modivation to get to Obama so I kinda added it as a joke. Thanks for the review
So many people are giving reviews! Thanks everyone
It took me a minute to understand what to do, but after I got the hang of it I enjoyed it. Maybe I missed it, but it took me some time to understand that I had to build storage to increase my food. It also seemed like the additional queen ants were not working.
Always get addicted in such jam idle games...
Time to get some waffle. XD
@JasonM I booted up the game to test if the queen ants work and they worked on my end. Maybe its an issue on your end. sorry for the trouble
@xlores-liang thanks! glad your enjoying it
lovely chill game, the music and graphics are really nice! i did get a bit confused about whether buildings placed were actually affected by buffs or debuffs (lack of visual feedback) - a small arrow up/down indicator on buildings (upon hover, it shows the stat +/-50% ants) would be super helpful!
I buried obama. 10/10
@crylica thats a great idea, ill add that if i decide to continue working on it.
Congrats on this submission! Very nicely done for a year 9 dev! Have you been doing this for longer? The graphics were cute and all matched together well. The gameplay idea was there, interesting, especially the parts where linking specific "buildings" would increase the effects, but I feel like it could've used some more balancing. At some point it felt like a waiting game to get to my next building, but not much was going on at the same time- not necessarily a point of critique (especially considering the limited time that is a game jam), just my personal experience there! As mentioned before, a little visual feedback would be nice, but I did notice whether things were buffs or debuffs simply by looking at the numbers haha. The audio itself was sort of repetitive, had to mute it at some point, still good job on getting the audio in there esp as a solo dev!
Besides that, we really enjoyed the scrolling tutorial, very interesting setup and we loved the little pixelart on the last slide!
Thanks for your submission!
@Kepsert I’ve been doing this for roughly 1.5 years. I was going to make some balancing changes but i didn’t end up finding the time. Thanks for the review.
Really fun, spent way too long on this game, having some way to automate exploring would be nice!
I played this...for an embarrassingly long time. It was quite addicting and satisfying to slowly but surely build up the colony. I like the concept a lot and I think the game was simple enough to understand and get into right away. The pixel art was definitely a standout and I liked being able to zoom in to see the details and zoom out to get a better look at my colony. I was kind of disappointed that ants only seemed to come out of the very first queen colony that was on the map to begin with, but all the other queens I placed didn't seem to produce any ants, so they were all concentrated at the bottom instead of spreading to all the other areas, especially the surface.
What this game could have used more of is a sense of flow and urgency. As far as idling games go, this one was very manual and having to constantly go back and click on each action and wait for the food to fill up just made for a less engaging experience. The game also didn't really have much of a goal - I know there is a super expensive "Obama" in the shop and I decided to go for it and buy it, but it didn't really seem to do much. Kind of expected I guess, but also kind of disappointing. I thought it would be the end-game. :joy: I know Obama was put in for humour, but it also feels like the humour is too random in-game - the music and gameplay feel a little more grounded and serious and this just doesn't seem to gel that well with the rest of the elements.
Fun Ant Game - Obama.png
I like the idea of having to balance out these different elements of the house, food storage and queens and that placing these elements adjacent to one another can cause them to affect their output. It's strange that the upgraded versions also end up in the shop to begin with - I mean, once you get into the later game stuff, it's hard to justify even purchasing the lower-tier versions of the items.
While the music was nice and fitting enough to be in the background, I did find the short loop in-game to wear out quite quickly especially after playing for a long time. I think the game could have also used some sound effects, particularly when you're trying to do something and you don't have enough resources for it. There's just not a lot of feedback in the UI to sort of guide the player into understanding why they can't initiate an action.
I did notice some wonky UI stuff with the scrolling - moving the map up and down also caused the sidebar menu to scroll up and down, but the scroll wheel itself doesn't affect the sidebar menu options and I have to manually move the scrollbar with the mouse and cursor? :thinking:
Overall, I would still say that my experience with this entry was more positive, if just for the pixel art and concept. It's pretty well done for a game made within 72 hours.
this was a lot of fun i played it for like an hour and then stopped after getting obama lol. really well done <3
Getting obama was really tempting, but worthy. It was fun to strategize the placements of the buildings! I wish there was more liveliness in the game in terms of the visuals and animations, but considering the fact that you only had 3 days, this was pretty impressive on its own!
That was a fun ant game! Most everything worked pretty well, except the Mysterious Dig that seems to have the cost and label mismatched (that's a bug you can reasonably fix post-compo within the rules, assuming it's just a typo on the label). I enjoyed figuring out where to put things, and although I made some mistakes, I think being unable to remove the tunnels I placed made my building more interesting =). Music was nice, but got a little too repetitive. I managed to bury Obama under an ant hill.