Anthill by gre

[raw]
made by gre for LD29 (COMPO)
Manage your Anthill colony. Dig galleries and find food to harvest. Caution of starvation!

HOW TO PLAY:

You need to assign some "Architect" if you want ant to dig. Click on the dirt to assign dig task. You can also drag with the mouse.
You need to assign some "Harvester" if you want ant to (automatically) harvest.

The assignment can be done via keyboard hotkeys: "I", "K" for the Architect, "O", "L" for the Harvester.
See the "Menu" for further information.

Libraries & Software:
- HTML5 & Phaser.io
- GIMP
- SunVox
- VIM

Kudos, credits and inspiration:
- The awesome game "Banished"
- @mrspeaker for giving me the idea to inspire from the music "Koyaanisqatsi"

Conclusion:
This weekend was for me an awesome and unprecedented moment: this is the first time I do LD while being a father and this LD gamedev was fun!
About the game, my initial goal was much much more ambitious than this entry version, but I'm quite ok with this version that I try to polish and bugfix. I may try to continue the development depending if you liked it or not. Anyway, I had a lot of fun making my first simulation game.

You can checkout my timelapse compressing 47 hours into 9 minutes!

Ratings

Coolness 100% 1
Overall 3.47 278
Audio 3.04 371
Fun 3.30 330
Graphics 2.94 700
Humor 2.15 769
Innovation 3.39 333
Mood 3.03 514
Theme 3.93 67

Feedback

mrspeaker
28. Apr 2014 · 03:05 UTC
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
28. Apr 2014 · 08:34 UTC
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
28. Apr 2014 · 09:30 UTC
took a while to get it - i like the little dead ants :D
CareForceOne
28. Apr 2014 · 17:35 UTC
This game is great! Very addicting.
yetanother
28. Apr 2014 · 21:17 UTC
Cool music, nice to play.
lonewookie
29. Apr 2014 · 02:34 UTC
Very well made. I love the idea of managing a colony of ants!
jeffz
29. Apr 2014 · 09:42 UTC
excellent fun, especially the music!
Jared Sartin
29. Apr 2014 · 12:31 UTC
SimAnt! Nice work! Can't wait to see more.
Tanner
29. Apr 2014 · 12:32 UTC
Really nice game :)
pancakecity
29. Apr 2014 · 14:00 UTC
Fun game, it has good atmosphere!
NoNoBattle
30. Apr 2014 · 00:45 UTC
Really awesome idea and gameplay!
BadgerPriest
30. Apr 2014 · 19:14 UTC
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
30. Apr 2014 · 21:25 UTC
I've just released an important bugfixes pass, the release note is in the commit: https://github.com/gre/ld29/commit/0492fb186e1dc40083ee0cdb1ad95eb2dcca4042
🎤 gre
30. Apr 2014 · 21:31 UTC
BadgerPriest: Thanks for the feedback, I've updated the description here
Thorig
01. May 2014 · 07:04 UTC
Great sim! One of the better sim of this Ludum Dare.
miwuc
01. May 2014 · 09:59 UTC
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
01. May 2014 · 10:27 UTC
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
01. May 2014 · 14:05 UTC
Really good. With some polish you could take this to a full game.
Danvil
01. May 2014 · 15:44 UTC
Game is very buggy :(
🎤 gre
01. May 2014 · 18:07 UTC
Danvil: what do you mean? What are the bugs? I released bugfixes yersterday.
🎤 gre
01. May 2014 · 18:11 UTC
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
01. May 2014 · 18:13 UTC
(and there are limit per job, so the "older" ant lock the job..)
anissen
01. May 2014 · 18:50 UTC
Has a bit of a Dungeon Keeper vibe to it. Nice :)
CeriseGhost
04. May 2014 · 09:28 UTC
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
04. May 2014 · 09:40 UTC
nice idea. a good start for a real game...
CMaster
04. May 2014 · 12:53 UTC
Clicking on the dirt does nothing for me (Firefox 28)
mechabit
04. May 2014 · 13:01 UTC
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
04. May 2014 · 13:27 UTC
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
04. May 2014 · 14:05 UTC
Enjoyed this, very well executed
Hippolyta
04. May 2014 · 14:15 UTC
Very nice game - good job!
dector
04. May 2014 · 16:18 UTC
Love the soundtrack. Very nice entry. Well done!
Toby Pinder
05. May 2014 · 00:51 UTC
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
05. May 2014 · 06:22 UTC
Great job on this game! I really liked it! A fun little concept which worked really well, reminds me a bit of "banished".
Agecaf
05. May 2014 · 11:21 UTC
Very fun and addicting game. It's crazy how sometimes you get tons of food, and sometimes food supplies begin to lower drastically.
MintArcade
05. May 2014 · 12:41 UTC
Nice ant sim. Very addicting.
InvisibleWonder
05. May 2014 · 15:32 UTC
I couldn't dig for the life of me. No dirt tiles would light up when I clicked on them.
🎤 gre
05. May 2014 · 19:57 UTC
Sorry about this bug, it should be fixed now (Firefox)
littleball
05. May 2014 · 21:17 UTC
Good game. I would like to see it developed further. Well done.
JimmyBoh
05. May 2014 · 21:36 UTC
Really takes me back to the days of SimAnt! Great work! More specializations and optimized task setting would make this truly spectacular!
CMaster
05. May 2014 · 21:45 UTC
No clocks, no hover behaviour. Works on my pyher machine with firefox though...
rojo
06. May 2014 · 04:13 UTC
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
06. May 2014 · 16:45 UTC
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
06. May 2014 · 18:58 UTC
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
07. May 2014 · 14:21 UTC
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
09. May 2014 · 19:33 UTC
Nice game
hnjslater
11. May 2014 · 21:35 UTC
Good fun, kinda meditative.
Jupiter_Hadley
12. May 2014 · 01:50 UTC
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
13. May 2014 · 11:49 UTC
I always loved games about ants and ant societies! Very nice smooth colors also. Wish there were more challenges though.
lucidlarva
13. May 2014 · 15:12 UTC
I spent way too much time playing d: very good.
Gamepopper
13. May 2014 · 19:07 UTC
Reminded me a lot of SimAnts, but I think this is built better. :)
crocantidepollo
13. May 2014 · 22:21 UTC
Good work! It's strangely mesmerizing
Raiyumi
15. May 2014 · 05:35 UTC
Argh.. those dead ants! It's a nice game.
Nanolotl
17. May 2014 · 12:26 UTC
Great idea and fun to play. Music was nice too.
BMacIntosh
17. May 2014 · 18:09 UTC
I got the crash error, too: "Uncaught TypeError: cannot set property '59' of undefined (game.js:32)" (Day 65 Ants 165)
end3r
18. May 2014 · 13:42 UTC
Addicting, enjoying and can be played for some time without getting bored - congrats!
Xaychru04
19. May 2014 · 19:40 UTC
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! ... :>