floonace 2026-04-20 08:15
An interesting interpretation of the theme. I've been looking forward to try it since I saw your post. It's a little hard to understand but I like it. Music is pretty nice btw. And no, game doesn't feel slow.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD59 → Antwork
By thoastbot
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 94 | 3.64 | 23 | |
| Fun | 101 | 3.52 | 23 | |
| Innovation | 55 | 3.81 | 23 | |
| Theme | 84 | 4.02 | 23 | |
| Graphics | 129 | 3.57 | 23 | |
| Audio | 50 | 3.78 | 23 | |
| Humor | 133 | 2.60 | 22 | |
| Mood | 109 | 3.59 | 23 |
An interesting interpretation of the theme. I've been looking forward to try it since I saw your post. It's a little hard to understand but I like it. Music is pretty nice btw. And no, game doesn't feel slow.
Fantastic submission, truly impressive what you managed to accomplish with a weekend and only JavaScript!
Really happy to see someone is making an RTS like game which is very chill and about building up a network. The tutorial is good although I didn't realise the three ants together in the nest were an interactive button at first, perhaps having them a different colour from the inactive buttons could have helped.
The layered music is very nice and gave a reason to unlock all the ant types. The signalling mechanic is neat with you having to adapt your network for each additional ant colour unless you are lucky and get an ant of a single colour. Actually once you've branched off one colour pheromone ants with only one band of that colour are useful.
The mouse zoom was executed perfectly and there are just so many ants on screen with no slowdown. It might have been nice to have a minimap or more variation in the terrain to make it easier to tell where the camera was. The stat page is very indepth and could be used to get highscores.
Again it is amazing that this was made in such a short amount of time and is so fully featured, congrats :D
cool game, i got a bit confused but im sure thats on me. i thought there was a bug at first but i just needed to click the queen ant i think. couldnt figure out how to get the ants to the food, but RTS is not my genre so this did not affect how i ranked the game.
parroting Alex above, super impressive work. and your english is great!
Could you please tell me what the controls are here? I wasn’t able to direct my ants no matter what I tried. The most I managed was choosing a direction using the queen, but my ants still couldn’t reach the nearest mushroom. The music is pleasant. I’d really like to be able to play this game.chrome_RMM6W5HdWV.png
All this in 48 hours? Very impressive, had a lot of fun growing the colony and unlocking different ant colors and those being tied to randomized pheromone ants was interesting. Good job!
This is a really great game! I like that it's relaxing. The purple ant music goes hard, lol.
I like the wordplay in the title and logo. Enjoyed playing around with the mechanics. Sometimes you high roll and get the perfect pheromone ants which is very satisfying, especially when they setup on permanent food sources. I liked the idea of the temporary resources, but it wasn't very clear to me if they provided more food or what their benefits were.
The best tutorial I've ever seen! Keep up the great work!
@miclefirst i cant see the ui in your screenshot :o There is actually a tutorial at the top right that one can follow to learn the whole gameplay - with it you unlock special pheromone ants and those you can use to direct your swarm of ants to collect food. In the gifs i posted about this game you can see how the ants are getting directed as well as a gif with the whole ui - can you see any of that ui?
@hammeredzombie thanks! One question, could you see the tutorial and it was just that it wasn't enough to explain the gameplay, or did you also not see the ui?
@helslo yeah, looking at it now i should have added a status window like the one i got for the pheromone ants for the resources (and maybe even normal ants) aswell. Initially the idea for the limited resources was a system where you have to gather a set amount of ants of different colors to pick those up and bring them back to the anthill, but time made me cut it short and made them like mushrooms with a timer on top x) And yes, the mushrooms do indeed give way less than the limited resources.
@thoastbot i could see the tutorial, im just a dummy and get confused by instructions and lost in games often.
i think an easy fix to help people like me is during the tutorial make the thing you want me to click pulse or glow. im the kind of person that can only learn a board game by playing it for example, so reading the text only gets me half way there, unless you tell me to go look in the left corner for the symbol and click it ill be guessing and spamming
@hammeredzombie ok thats good to hear, feared i messed something up with the ui since multiple people talked about not getting the gameplay.
And you ahve a good point, giving some indication like a highlight or an arrow that shows stuff could help, gonna keep that in mind for the next time. Thanks a lot for the feedback!
Very fun game, I was playing for more time than I espected xD
Nice game. I've always liked games about ants. I don't know if there was any end to it, but I enjoyed the flow state quite a while. Nice idea about the pheromone ants, fits the theme nicely. Tutorial was good, it felt like coming into a new rts game and quickly learning the ropes.
Pixelart was mostly nice. The upgrade ui looked a little rushed compared to other art in the game. I liked the dynamic music that kept my mind on flow as I managed my ants around.
All in all, good game. Expanding this could get interesting. If there were enemies, it could become great in the same lines as Creeper World or Particle Fleet: Emergence.
antwork_Clipboard_04-23-2026_01.jpg
Quite a neat game. Needed a bit to figure out what to do when and how, but I know how annoying and complicated tutorials are, so really don't want to complain here. After a while, I lost a bit of long-term motivation; it just didn't feel that growing the colony would really be "worth it", if you catch my meaning. Still, kept me playing for quite a while, and cool interpretation of the theme!
Really cool idea, well done! I like that you included a proper tutorial, thank you
I finally found a game for myself in the current LD
With a few more features and some hard puzzles this could be a lot awesome, but it started to feel like an idle clicker after you have all the ants set up and all color ants. Great music.
Excellent game. I played it for far too long. The ant control is easy to understand and I really liked the UI.
Great game. I can't believe you completed all these in 48 hours. It's so cool to manage an ant kingdom.