AInts vs Robots:

AInts vs Robots is kind of an RTS.
You play the robots, the AI the ants, who want to destroy all of you robots.

UPDATE #1:
Found the performance bug:
I added each breeded ant not one time, but always, that is fixed now and the game runs smoothly (at my notebook).
Some other performance optimizations done.
Added XNA Reach version.


What about Evolution?
The ants - starting with just two of their kind - grow and change like natural evolution works. If you kill just the weak ones, the new ants will be stronger, if you kill the strong ones the weak ants will breed.

How do the robots work?
Each robot consist out of parts, needing at least a core (body) and one other part to survive.
There are two buildings, a stealmine and baracks, and two materials, steal and synthetics.
Each robot produces synthetics - more, if he has a "Syntheter" - steal is produced inside a stealmine.
You can build a stealmine on stealdeposits (black), and baracks on grass (green) or stone (gray).
To create a robot you need to produces enough parts (inside a barack) and then create a robot out of it. Each robot can have at most one part of each type.
Robots can stand still, move to a point and attack ants.
If a robot does not have enough energy, he can't move. To get more energy (weapons and the syntheter need much) the robot can contain a "reactor" or be near baracks or stealmines, because nearing to buildings there is more energy. A full robot - with a core/body, legs, reactor, syntheter and both weapontypes needs to have baracks near to have enough energy.

The ants decide themselves to idle, to move, to attack or to breed - that's the reason the game is called AInts vs Robots. Ants need no ressources.
The Robots have less AI, but shoot themselves when they shall attack.

The game is controlled nearly complete with the keyboard:
Arrows: Move Camera
Mouse Wheel: Zoom Camera
W,A,S,D: move cursor (green block)
Change module to produce: N
Build: B (stealmine on stealdeposit, baracks on grass/stone)
Produce module: P (while the cursor is above baracks)
Create robot: R
Move robot (to the cursor): M
Attack ants (near the cursor): T (like "tackle")
Equip robot: E (while it is in baracks)
Change robot selection: PageUp, PageDown

The selected robot is shown at the top of the screen in the middle, at the side of it the next robots to change to with PageUp and PageDown.
In the lower left corner the current selected module to produce is shown, right of it all modules lying at the baracks (selected by the cursor).

I have prepared four maps (which are stored as images), because of the lack of a menu a random one is chosen.

For the game I used my own little XNA frontend library (so C#, XNA and .NET).
Because of the lack of time (and what you can read below "Annotation") I was not able to release a version with Mono/MonoGame for Linux/Mac.


Annotation:

Since I have huge performance drops since today evening (when I added breeding), I was not able to add many sounds, a menu, more animations or any music. The game may not be playable if I do not find the bug the next days and upload a new version. I have already profiled the game and removed/changed everything which needed a lot of time, but it has not become better (strange, because I did not add time intensive code before the first performance drops came).

Unfortunately I did not commit the last perfectly running version to SVN, which did not had breeding (so no evolution), but was a nice RTS (with robots, ants, production and fighting).


Conclusion:

It was a lot of fun to program a whole weekend, even if I am not satisfied with the result. 48 hours are enough for a small, neat game, but not enough for a huge project, so I need to plan to do less next time. I needed a lot time to create the models, so I am going to write a blender export script for my own XML model format, because with blender I should be able to create models faster. Maybe I will use 2D graphics next time, for sure I will take some more looks at Mono and MonoGame.

I hope, you (who have read the text till the end) will have fun playing the game (if that is possible - I hope I will find the bug).