AntWars by Wukkopi
You control an ant colony. Get food and evolve those ants!
Keys: q, w, e, a, s and d will make 'new' ants stats better, stronger and faster in exchange for food . Space bar will create a new ant for 5 food units.
Use your mouse to select and command those ants!
Conclusion on this project:
I started a bit late (timezones) and didn't get any ideas for the first 12 hours of this jam. so t-36 h and no idea.
Then I came up with the idea of ants fighting from hive to another. Made some concept arts and it turned out to be quite an awesome idea. I started to implement basic functionality and realized that this is going to be too big. After that I tried to simplify this as much as possible, and after that simplification it turned to quite poor game :(, basic idea is still awesome - sidescrolling RTS with dynamic environment - but this can't be done in this time. So the lesson of this story. Plan and reason more before furious coding.
Keys: q, w, e, a, s and d will make 'new' ants stats better, stronger and faster in exchange for food . Space bar will create a new ant for 5 food units.
Use your mouse to select and command those ants!
Conclusion on this project:
I started a bit late (timezones) and didn't get any ideas for the first 12 hours of this jam. so t-36 h and no idea.
Then I came up with the idea of ants fighting from hive to another. Made some concept arts and it turned out to be quite an awesome idea. I started to implement basic functionality and realized that this is going to be too big. After that I tried to simplify this as much as possible, and after that simplification it turned to quite poor game :(, basic idea is still awesome - sidescrolling RTS with dynamic environment - but this can't be done in this time. So the lesson of this story. Plan and reason more before furious coding.
| Windows | https://dl.dropbox.com/u/38684958/AntWars.rar |
| Source | https://dl.dropbox.com/u/38684958/AntWars_Src.rar |
| Original URL | https://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=4857 |
I hit Space bar a bunch to get ants to spawn, but that never happens.
Now obviously, this game is far from feature complete, it would have been nice for there to be at least one more thing to do, like another swarm of ants or even just one big tough bug to kill, and some kind of victory condition based on doing it.
A few suggestions for a future version:
- Make the upgrade controls mouse driven (keyboard shortcuts are cool, but with a game this simple, why not just have an small array of buttons at the bottom)
- Make it so upgrades are free, but ants with lots of upgrades cost more to build.
- Have it so we can make more than one kind of ant, saved as "presets"
- Communicate with the player more, maybe have the ants scuttle around when they don't have orders yet, it's hard to see that the ants are under the flag.
- Allow selection of multiple ants.
- Work on the pathfinding AI, make ants use pre-existing tunnels to get where they're going
I hope you make a more feature complete version of this, I have a feeling that something good can be made with this simple mechanic.
TehSkull: Ants does spawn right beneath the flag, and it can be quite hard to spot them.
Gaeel: I struggled a lot with pathfinding (A* doesn't quite like when it is given this much cells (pixel = cell) to check). Also i didn't have any upgrading code done when there was only 10 hours left and I was very tired by that time too. So I rushed with keys :).
I'm not planning to improve this prototype further, but I'll definitely will redesign and rewrite from scratch (when i have more spare time).
garygreen: Basic idea I tried to get here was that, ants will live for a certain amount of time. And while they'd be alive they should collect food so you can make stronger and faster ants which in turn can gather more food in their lifetime.
Once more, thanks for you constructive comments.