Ant Runner by unit684
Voting Category Opt-outs: Music and audio was not created by us.
WEB AND WINDOWS VERSIONS: https://tommarsland.itch.io/ant-runner

Ant Runner is a game where you play as an ant through an infinite procedurally generated world, avoiding water and shooting at grasshoppers and evil flying mushrooms!
Press space bar to jump and left click/left ctrl to shoot.
Some of the level generation can get a bit buggy and the grasshoppers can get a bit stuck but we couldn't fix it before the jam end :(
Coding by Tom Marsland and Muhammed Tashfiqul Bari
3D models and Graphics by Tom Marsland
Music from stockmusic.com
Links
- WEB AND WINDOWS VERSIONS: https://tommarsland.itch.io/ant-runner
- TWITTER: https://twitter.com/MarsBard_
- TWITTER: https://twitter.com/LordTashfiq
- ITCH.IO: https://tommarsland.itch.io/
- SOUND EFFECTS: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/17256
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/ant-runner |
Ratings
| Overall | 572th | 3.057⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 577th | 2.8⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 581th | 2.743⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 134th | 3.886⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 443th | 3.343⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 602th | 1.969⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 567th | 2.882⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 23🗳️ | 36🗨️ |
Models were nice, and fitted the theme well (maybe smooth shading instead of flat shading would have worked better given the organic feel...?)
Good job! :D
As others have said, the enemies weren't much of a challenge after I discovered that you could just mash the attack button to achieve perpetual safety. The biggest obstacle in the game proved to be timing jumps as the ant cannot stay airborne for very long.
For further development, I want to suggest few things - new obstacles and controls can be added, for example ducking, option to use fly ant (possibly with a powerup) and new moving directions. New timely events can be introduced, like rain, that you need to avoid by moving left or right and jumping over rain drops. Instead of health, ant could carry pieces of dirt, that could be dropped after hitting an obstacle or being stolen by enemies. For attacks like others suggested you could aim and shoot, with some delay between attacks, or with rechargeable pieces of stones that you can throw and shown on the ui. Before starting new level, the generation can be done in a background and after that option to start it can be shown - currently it is visible at the start that level is generated.
The level could get harder in time, and not only time, but the distance traveled could also be shown after ending it. You can also add option to pickup fruits that could be used for buying further ant upgrades - more control over speed, ability to auto jump above an obstacle, available stones to shoot, speed of projectiles etc.
Rushing around last minute, I forgot to implement a difficulty increase over time! We were planning on just increasing the speed as time went on. Perhaps change the spawn rate of different obstacles and stuff too.
I'm a bit torn, because if you were going for just a relaxing game where you more or less watch an ant crawl around a procedural tree then you probably didn't need the shooting mechanical at all. On the other hand, if you wanted to add some more challenging gameplay then shooting should require some skill.
Theme wise, I get the idea of small world -- that being said, what exactly is the ant shooting? I can't shake the idea that this was originally in a different setting but was reskinned towards the end of development.
Either way I think you made a really interesting game and kudos for trying to do it procedurally in such a short time! Thanks for making it! :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15RvXBjxVuU&feature=youtu.be
@kosmo The 3 jumps at the beginning thing is just luck of the draw I'm afraid. Might be able to implement some less random generation in the future.
The theme was mostly there from the beginning but the shooting was added on later as an extra mechanic. Not exactly sure what the ant is supposed to be shooting, just adds a bit of extra gameplay. We'll probably rework it if we carry on working on the game :)
SQWRRRRRRRRREEEEEEEEEEK!!
As we couldn't manage enough time to complete the game as we were expecting, but we will sure take your suggestion and play-testing those mechanism for the further version.
Specially thank you @jupiter-hadley for adding our game to your video. We really appreciate your afford on making the video.
Cheers :D
Feel free to rate mine if you have time [Not So Small (HTML5)](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/not-so-small)
I think this is a very promising idea, and could be a lot of fun with a few minor changes. Nice job!
Maybe you could also take a look at this cutoff effect, maybe it would be better if it didn't affect leafs under ant's feet.