LudumData

TranscendAnts by JudJudson

[raw]
made by JudJudson for Ludum Dare 59 (JAM)

One intrepid colony of ants has finished their magnum opus - the smelloscope. And immediately, it lit up with aromas that could not possibly be of this world. This can mean only one thing.

Ants are not alone in the universe.

Set out from the anthill, signaling your ants towards the good and away from the scary with the power of pheromones. You can't control your ants directly, but you can inform their decision making. Together, you will build a rocket!

INSTRUCTIONS

Place pheromones with the buttons on the left side of the screen. Remove pheromones with the space bar. Ants will decide randomly between pheromones depending on how close they are, how much the ant likes the smell, and how many dangerous pheromones are around it.

Ants cost food, and consume food steadily. You'll need a constant stream of food to support your ant population.

Press spacebar while hovering over a pheromone to remove it.

WASD to move the camera.

Zoom in and out with the scroll wheel.

The Good Smell(tm) attracts ants of all kind towards it. Worker ants will only prefer food (or... things that smell like food?) over Good Smell.

The Danger Smell tells workers to steer clear, and soldiers won't come near either. But carpenter ants know a problem when they smell one, and they'll come right in to fix it!

The Enemy Smell is the call of duty to a soldier ant. Other ants mostly appreciate warm meals and staying alive, so they'll avoid spots near Enemy Smell.

Carpenters can close up ant traps, and soldiers can kill antlions. And workers... are cheap! It'll take a mix of all three, clever pheromone placement, and some patience to build this rocket! Good luck!

Link https://github.com/JudsonEsq/RiseOnLD59
Original URL https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/transcendants

Ratings

Overall 504th 3.481⭐ 54🧑‍⚖️
Fun 597th 3.098⭐ 53🧑‍⚖️
Innovation 117th 3.894⭐ 54🧑‍⚖️
Theme 246th 4.039⭐ 53🧑‍⚖️
Graphics 484th 3.644⭐ 54🧑‍⚖️
Audio 463th 3.147⭐ 53🧑‍⚖️
Humor 331th 3.04⭐ 52🧑‍⚖️
Mood 680th 3.133⭐ 51🧑‍⚖️
Given 35🗳️ 81🗨️

Feedback

Alex O
Apr 21st · 01:24 UTC
Really interesting concept and game
PastMoments
Apr 21st · 01:25 UTC
I love the interpretation of ant's chemical signaling. It's a bit hard to tell if I'm progressing, but I'm enjoying seeiog the ants run around regardless.
breadstick
Apr 21st · 01:59 UTC
What a fun game concept! I always enjoyed having an ant farm as a kid, so I greatly enjoyed watching the ants run about following the trails I've charted... the world also has that same sort of whimsical feeling of miniature that makes me enjoy games like Grounded. Nicely done!
Ryley Forwood
Apr 21st · 02:19 UTC
Ants :)
🎤 JudJudson
Apr 21st · 02:21 UTC
Ants :)
Tinker1175
Apr 21st · 02:25 UTC
Ants :)
mugenzerox
Apr 21st · 02:30 UTC
Ants :)
Lizz
Apr 21st · 02:38 UTC
Oh! I was just not seeing the ants, now I feel a bit like a dummy. Quite a big group worked on this? It certainly fits in the theme, I have not finished the game as it was kinda difficult to keep track of the ants and the relation with the resources. Do wants to see if anyone manages to make that rocket :smile:
Eridani
Apr 21st · 02:39 UTC
Ants :)
Caelestial
Apr 21st · 02:43 UTC
Love the concept <3
maximevincent
Apr 21st · 02:48 UTC
Cool concept, it's an interesting take on the signals theme that I don't see done much. Congrats on your first jam!
Steven Garberg
Apr 21st · 03:13 UTC
The mixture of art styles is pretty neat. Overall, very cute, solid entry. The movement of the ants felt a little jerky at times though, like it's tied to a separate framerate than the rest of the game.
🎤 JudJudson
Apr 21st · 03:17 UTC
@steven-garberg The ant movement is synced to the BPM of the music. They pause for a moment on every downbeat, to try and make for a satisfying sort of synced movement across the colony. Our sound designer was honestly incredible, it was my first time working with her. She made parameters for the time signature, BPM, and an event that triggered the frame any beat occurred. It was super interesting and fun making a living soundscape with her!

Unfortunately, it suffers somewhat in the web build with the limited memory allocated to the game. With higher ant counts, the sound starts to fall apart in the web build. If people are interested, I can make a desktop build and a download link for a higher fidelity version!
dan-whiffing
Apr 21st · 03:27 UTC
Very unique and fun game! I had trouble figuring out how to complete the objectives, but it was fun trying to keep my ants fed and send soldier ants toward the enemies. nice work!
peppersalt07
Apr 21st · 03:37 UTC
Colony sim with cool visuals, one note is that i'm having a hard time getting the objectives to trigger, even though i've found the items
digital bacon
Apr 21st · 03:42 UTC
Interesting game. Loved both the 3D level graphics, and the pixel art buttons, though I'm not sure they really go well together? Great concept though -- excellent work!
LDJam user 424326
Apr 21st · 03:54 UTC
A truly unusual concept and an interesting interpretation of the theme. I really like the visual presentation, and the way the ants move in sync with the music is a great touch. It took me a while to realize that to get an ant to the resource, you need to lay down a trail of pheromones—and I still couldn’t quite figure out how to complete the tasks :(
Seong
Apr 21st · 03:57 UTC
I love ants!! The art is cute and the ants feel good to move around. Hotkeys for the ants and pheromones to make it easier to draw the trails would be even better. I wish I could see why the ants are starving like a supply requirement, I kept making more worker ants to grab food but I guess they just ended up eating even more of the reserves. Really appreciated the detailed game description on the page as well.
🎤 JudJudson
Apr 21st · 04:03 UTC
@seong Our first concept was that gathering food would be a basic numerical affair. Ants would have been "assigned" to a food source, and each ant assigned is +X food per second. But our goal was to have ants make their own decisions, while the player "signalled" them to try and guide them towards *good* decisions. So we needed fuzzier, less predictable ants, which meant that calculating food income rates got complicated.

With the Ludum Dare, it's always a fight what you manage to fit in and what you don't. The thing I wish we had had more time for was tutorialization and UI elements in the game space to help you guys understand what's going on. But yeah, your ants starve when the total food cost of feeding your ants is less than how much food you have. It's skewed to avoid a death spiral because ants that are holding food are never selected for starvation deaths.

I'll look into how we can tweak numbers for a balance change along with any bug fixes we squeak into another build sometime this week. We probably need to look at whether there's a bug preventing the objective items from being interacted with.
BlushingCrow
Apr 21st · 04:18 UTC
Inventive idea and I love the graphics and aesthetic. I didn't get the hang of controlling the ants via smells but I think that was more a me problem than a game problem. Sometimes the ants were difficult to see and find (sure, they are ants) but I would have loved an onscreen indicator or option to maybe flag them? Thanks for a great game.
carterjbx
Apr 21st · 04:58 UTC
This is such a creative interpretation of the theme! I love the 3d visuals, they give it such a unique look!
Isaac Hisey
Apr 21st · 05:32 UTC
Great interpretation! I like the music loop and the art style. Little guys don't so much like to listen but they're doing their best, no? Well done!
Bizzybee
Apr 21st · 05:33 UTC
What a neat take on the theme. :D I love how the ants move to the beat, and I particularly like the sfx for the bad smell / soldiers haha. It's a bit difficult to know if you're on the right track, and what's going on sometimes, but the game is overall very charming. A longer/more varied musical loop would've been nice. I appreciate how well it fits with the concept and visuals. I played for a good while but only managed to have the ants get the pinecone, out of the objectives, despite putting yellow scents around what I believed to be the quest objects. Love the creativity here. :)
gujiufeng
Apr 21st · 07:34 UTC
Love it! The drawings are so cute and overall gameplay experience is very smooth! Alhough putting too much smell on map would mess up the routine, it doesn't affect the enjoyment and after several attempts, it's easy to get professional in this game
Danibeve
Apr 21st · 08:57 UTC
I love the game's concept, a very original idea. Great job!
Juutis
Apr 21st · 09:26 UTC
Yay, my ants have transcended! What a clever take on the theme! It was kinda hard to grasp the mechanics at first but after studying the ant movements for a while I got the hang of it and was able to finish the game. I think a short tutorial could work wonders here.

I love the core idea where you're not directly controlling anything, but rather giving hints to your ants. However, the implementation is a bit rough around the edges. It was very cool to see the ants move to the beat of the music, but eventually it became jarring as the music started breaking and rattling.

Placing a long path of pheromones was a bit tedious as you had to always re-click the pheromone button after placing one. Keeping the pheromone selection active and allowing the player to place multiple pheromones in succession would work wonders here.

The pathing on the ants seemed to be very naive and the ants would turn back if there was anything blocking their way between two pheromones. Sometimes it was tricky to see that the path was blocked, and I had to really pay attention to see why the ants weren't reaching the objectives even though I thought I set up a very clear path for them.

Overall there's a lot to love here! I really enjoyed the experience. Good job guys! :grin:
Kagegona
Apr 21st · 14:26 UTC
nice idea to put the ant's communications in the signal's theme! Liked to lead them to food :D
LDJam user 416499
Apr 21st · 14:34 UTC
LOVE IT. everything here has a "miniature ecobox" look to it. theres some raw joy in just watching the ants taking snippets from a hot dog (does it ever run out???)
this is an awesome entry 😄😄
Evil Gaufre
Apr 21st · 15:38 UTC
liked the idea :) a little hard to dominate in the begining but with patiante I have make a good progress :D the only think, is tedious to select a pheromone, put it, select it again, etc... :thinking:
Tanjou
Apr 21st · 15:43 UTC
Really fun concept, but no audio appeared for me :C
Tineks
Apr 21st · 15:47 UTC
so cool
🎤 JudJudson
Apr 21st · 16:22 UTC
@deathandrepublic the food sources never run out. We didn't want to create a stressful pressure where you have to complete the game before all the food sources on the map run out and every ant starves. Instead, they have a limit to how fast you can pull food from each food source to encourage spreading out to as many as possible.
Enver Arco
Apr 21st · 16:56 UTC
You built a whole RTS for a game jam! Nice. Reminds me of the old empire of ants game
VenomousMouse
Apr 21st · 19:49 UTC
Cool game!
MajorManiac
Apr 21st · 21:42 UTC
Ants :)
steinhks
Apr 21st · 22:58 UTC
Ants :)
Henry Taylor
Apr 22nd · 00:05 UTC
Ants :)
squimmy
Apr 22nd · 02:28 UTC
Pretty cool idea. I think a desktop build would have been a really good idea because the performance suffered a bit in the browser. I was still able to finish the game, but I think it would have been more fun if the framerate had been smoother.
Bambutcher
Apr 22nd · 09:02 UTC
Instead of working my actual job, I spent my time working with ants - I wish everyone had that opportunity!)

Interesting idea and execution!
Yukiiii
Apr 22nd · 13:49 UTC
Very interesting gameplay ！ I've already lost myself in planning food-seeking routes for the ant colony.
bellicapelli
Apr 22nd · 17:51 UTC
I loved this! The artstyle reminds me of those early 3D claymation games, and the idea is very clever and fun!

I was a bit confused about the resource system, did I miss something or is the game not telling me how much food I have, how much food is consumed, etc?

I also didn't really understand what made the ants decide what to do, I had a trail leading to all of the ship parts for a while and it felt like I was just waiting for an ant to decide to finally do its job.

I feel that with a little bit of work on the UI, you have a really cool game idea in your hands, kinda like top-down Pikmin, very charming.
PanDuplan
Apr 26th · 10:20 UTC
Really cool idea and very charming presentation! Game name earned extra start for humour. I like the concept of guiding ants with pheromones, feels unique. Did feel a bit stupid at first because I was just pointing at final destinations and wondering why nothing happens, then realized you need to pave the whole path :D Maybe a small visual example would help players get it faster

Very satisfying to watch the ants work, movement feels nicely programmed, they really move like ants and create those narrow paths like in real life. Some parts felt a bit tedious with placing pheromones maybe drawing instead of placing separate spots would feel better, but overall I really enjoyed it. Totally worth post-jam version and moving on with it, with you luck guys
kr4ft3r
Apr 27th · 17:17 UTC
Both cute and technicallz well done, but I just can't figure out how to use the rocket ingredients (though I'm sure I identified them on the map), and I'm surprised that no one asked for or provided clarification in comments.