Play Super Antbox!

Im happy that I've finally put something out, since I've been stuck in prototype limbo for a good year. This game has some interesting aspects, but clearly shows some hasty flaws.

Approach on design and visuals

My plan was to make a diorama-like game, that takes a lot of visual and design cues from Gamecube era Sega games, as an example Skies of Arcadia Legends and Super Monkey Ball. I'm such a fool for level based games and this approach worked flawlessly, letting the skybox do the heavy lifting and subtract all maps as a floating cutouts. I'm really happy how visually coherent this became and how fun it was to work on it.

The opening screen is definitely one of my favorites, showing that era-specific lightness and optimism. I found out that it needed some movement, so I reused the asset placement randomizer and made it loop top to bottom. chefs kiss

Design through theme

Tiny creatures clearly meant point-of-view for me, so it was somewhat natural to make something that resembles diorama. Anything can look tiny based on the perspective. I thought about it overnight and my mind was set on multiple creatures - which means traffic - which led to controlling the traffic. I had some thoughts about HUMANITY, game revolving around leading crowds, but i wanted to steer away from grid base , so I came up with suggesting path changes to ants.

It was all fairly straight forward, until it became apparent that hivemind isnt a simple task to imitate. I went with Navmesh solution, gave the ants some incentives to find new waypoints and tested for a solid day. There was always something bugging me, ants heading back to visit newly found locations, getting stuck in traffic and many other issues. At the end I settled with one path that ants update together, but keep their own until respawn.

Last design changes like ants lifting the crumbles, came just few hours before deadline. Same time I started implementing the logic behind feromone tracks, but simplified it to single locations. Sadly the predictability of ants and paths didn't become clear or easy to understand, so I kept this sandboxy in many senses. No tutorial, no explanations, just experimenting.

Cleaning ants logic and making the interaction more readable would make it quite an interesting game with unique gameplay.

This game really hits me personally with the aesthetics, overall feeling and gameplay. I'm having serious urges to develop it more, create more ant varieties, enemies and different obstacles. How do you think? Would love to hear some thoughts and how you've felt about it!

Thank you for reading!