Ant Town by Johnsensei

made by Johnsensei for Ludum Dare 48 (JAM)

Audio rating for music only please. Music is original. Sound effects are from RPG Maker MV.

Welcome to Ant Town, stranger! Help the ants in town dig deeper and deeper to expand their city.

Creative Team John Gale - Lead Designer johnsensei.com

Ross David Cooper - Music rossdavidcooper.com

Known bugs and issues: Buildings can be built on top of each other. Continuing from a save file immediately asks if you want to quit the game. Animation on destroying the spider isn't always on the spider. The sand overflows at the top and doesn't fill out the bottom of the game. Pressing the cancel button to advance dialogue also changes modes.

TODO items left untodone: Have actual ants walking around Ant Town as the population increases. Have the bank earn interest on the player's money balance as each day goes by. Don't let buildings be built in thin air without support under them. Don't let rocks float in mid-air either. Have a system so that buildings have to be built a certain distance apart in the left-right directions. Add a parallax background. Animate Anster's sprite. Do more with the Population, like have it increase over time and decrease if a spider is encountered.

As always, great jamming with you Ludum Dare!

Play in browser!	https://johnsensei.itch.io/ant-town
Download for Windows!	https://johnsensei.itch.io/ant-town
Download for Mac!	https://johnsensei.itch.io/ant-town
Original URL	https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/ant-town

Ratings

Overall	1572^th	3.077⭐	28🧑‍⚖️
Fun	1738^th	2.596⭐	28🧑‍⚖️
Innovation	1165^th	3.038⭐	28🧑‍⚖️
Theme	607^th	3.865⭐	28🧑‍⚖️
Audio	483^th	3.654⭐	28🧑‍⚖️
Humor	1008^th	2.54⭐	27🧑‍⚖️
Mood	1689^th	2.66⭐	27🧑‍⚖️
Given		24🗳️	18🗨️

Feedback

Scowling Pastry

27. Apr 2021 · 16:50 UTC

I got stuck after building the second house. The ant said I needed to dig deeper (even though the depth was already at 500), but to dig deeper I needed to build an office, and to build an office I needed to build a house for which I needed to dig deeper.

Seems like an interesting concept if I could have progressed further

Steffy

27. Apr 2021 · 16:56 UTC

I feel the game is a touch rigid on what the player is allowed to do. However, nice graphics/music and it played well.

PotatoNugget

27. Apr 2021 · 16:59 UTC

The game seems fun and I like the graphics and the music is very good. The build mode keeps breaking however to I can not make it very far into the game. Hopefully the build function can get fixed and I can try to get further!

nexust

27. Apr 2021 · 17:03 UTC

I enjoyed this and wish I could progress, but it seems the game soft locks you at the third house. Trying to build the third house, even at 500m, the game tells you to build at 300m

Vivien Fargette

27. Apr 2021 · 17:04 UTC

this is quite a nice game but the unfinished aspect is felt: after reading the tutorial, I just dig in a straight line, moving by one on the side when there was a rock and built everything by this line. Obviously, your TODO list would solve that by not letting building be build on thin air but it kind of break the game currently.

Moreover, there seems to be no backside at "working for Antster" other than having 1 day going by and that kinda remove the money limitation. Maybe putting some kind of interest or an objective to fulfill within a few days but that would need to have more ways of getting money so I don't really have a good idea to improve that.

The game clearly has a good concept and the music is really cool. I clearly would like to see a finished version of it :D

fledgeling93

27. Apr 2021 · 17:19 UTC

The music is great and the idea of making this kind of game in an RPGMaker looks interesting to me, but, as already mentioned, game wants player to do a very specific (although not at first glance specified) thing and it's really easy to get stuck. Also it gets repetitive real fast, maybe some obvious goals on each stretch of the game could've helped with that.

xpoho

27. Apr 2021 · 17:29 UTC

Весьма оригинальная идея использовать RPG Maker для создания AntSimCity. Ну и код на бесконечные деньги, конечно, помогает!
Спасибо большое за игру ^_^

Eugenik

28. Apr 2021 · 13:30 UTC

trop mignon!.

extar

28. Apr 2021 · 20:33 UTC

It's cool to see a city builder in Ludum Dare and I respect the fact you made it run in the browser, so convenient! It's interesting building up a city but I wish the game wasn't so linear, it always feels like there's exactly one thing you need to do next to advance. Also, I love the music in the game, so peaceful! :)

mhorth

28. Apr 2021 · 20:59 UTC

+1 to everything said above. Art, music, sound, and concept are nicely done. Just rough around the edges especially with what I'm supposed to do at any given moment.

AronIngi

28. Apr 2021 · 21:10 UTC

I love the music, and the art is very well done. The game-play is, like others have mentioned, pretty linear but that didn't really bother me a whole lot, I still had a lot of fun trying to dig down to the bottom.

I had a lot of fun while playing, great job.

Corentin SABIAUX

28. Apr 2021 · 21:43 UTC

Cute little simulation game ! After the first step, i didn't know how to continue :( It's amazed me when i heard that you used RPG Maker for making your entry, original :D It reminds me an old arcade game called Dig Dug but without boulder who's smash our head when you dig under them ahah Funny and logical reaction for the ant when you try to do that :p

🎤 Johnsensei

29. Apr 2021 · 13:25 UTC

@scowling-pastry Thanks for playing and the feedback. I've added your feedback to a list of items to investigate. Essentially each house has to be built at a different depth. So the third house has to be built at a depth of 300 meters. Antster should be giving hints each time you try to build a house at the "wrong" layer. I'll check tomorrow to make sure that's still working. I'll admit my code for depth checking the Y position started getting convoluted towards the end. And house depth was one of the first things I implemented so I haven't looked at it or tested it in a while.

🎤 Johnsensei

29. Apr 2021 · 13:40 UTC

@steffy Thanks for playing and the feedback. Initially I thought I was coding so that the houses could be built within a 200 meter range, but realized halfway through I was only allowing a specific depth. So I just kept going with it. Now I see it would have been better to allow that range.

🎤 Johnsensei

29. Apr 2021 · 13:54 UTC

@potatonugget Thanks for playing. Was there a specific problem with the build mode that you found. I'll admit I ran into some problems if you tried to use build mode on a space that had a hidden rock or spider, especially if they were at the top of the next stratum. But I thought I had fixed those issues. If not, I'll add it to the list of issues to look into.

cavedens

29. Apr 2021 · 14:18 UTC

You got some great systems in place. Youve been very innovative with RPG Maker and have done some things I have not seen a lot of people do with it. The music was great and overall the gameplay loop was pretty decent

PotatoNugget

30. Apr 2021 · 04:53 UTC

@johnsensei I don't know what the specific issue was but at some point the game stopped allowing me to open the build menu. I could not find any reason and I tried to get work to get more money and even saving and reopening. I have some homework to work on but I will launch my save again if I can and see if I can investigate more and give you some feedback. By the way thanks for checking out my teams game I saw your comment!

LeviDSmith

02. May 2021 · 00:13 UTC

Nice game. I never would have thought about doing a digging game RPG style. Sort of reminded me of Actraiser. One problem I had was that whenever I pressed space to open the menu, it would make the browser window scroll down so I couldn't see most of the screen anymore. Maybe a maximize option would help (at least that's how I get around that problem in Unity). Sometimes it seemed awkward that I would have to be facing the right way to do things like building houses.

🎤 Johnsensei

03. May 2021 · 13:49 UTC

@nexust Thanks for playing and the feedback. The third house has seemed to trip a lot of people up. I've added a todo item to clarify the hints. The third house is meant to be built at 300 meters below the surface and essentially there's one house per layer. I've decided to recode this game from the beginning and just add a check to make sure that houses are being built within like 2 spaces of each other vertically in Y and like 5-7 spaces horizontally in X. That should give the player more freedom to explore and build houses where they want.

🎤 Johnsensei

04. May 2021 · 13:12 UTC

@vivien-fargette Thanks for playing and your detailed feedback. I realized the "player can just dig in a straight line" problem about halfway through. I tried adding lines of rocks to counter this. But even on my final play test I was still able to basically dig straight down.

On working for Antster, I had a whole story idea where each time you worked for him the dialogue would change. But there wasn't time to implement it. This game presented a lot of interesting technical challenges that I'd like to solve, so I'll keep working on it at our Nashville Game Developers meetups. Thanks again.

🎤 Johnsensei

04. May 2021 · 13:37 UTC

@extar Thanks for playing and your review. There's still some work I'd like to do on this game during my game dev group's meetups. But I had never thought about how there's basically just one fixed thing you're supposed to do next. That'll give me some ideas going forward. Thanks.

🎤 Johnsensei

05. May 2021 · 12:44 UTC

@levidsmith Thanks for playing and letting me know about the browser issue. I'll add that to the investigation list. I usually set the game screen to 1280 x 720 in RPG Maker and set the same size viewport on itch.io with a full screen button. And that's always worked fine for my other games on itch.io. But when I tested this game in full screen, the dialogue text was getting cut off at the bottom of the screen. In a rush before the submission deadline, I just took away the full screen button. But now I see that's cause other problems. I think I'll make the screen size a little smaller in RPG Maker first.

LeReveur

09. May 2021 · 17:59 UTC

This was fun to play, but it turns out that the better results you want to have, the less fun you have to have : basically, it's just a matter of chance, and if you want to get to the end with the lesser time, money, and job for Antster, well, the better way to succesfully do that is you dig down, dig right or left once and dig down again if you found a rock, build a house each step down, and do a job for Antster when money missing… :sweat_smile:
Good job anyways, gfx and music are good!