saladsquid

[saladsquid]

Ant Empire Rising: Food System, Environments, and Ants!

The first AER Tumblr post! These will be large progress updates that show off what I've been working on for the game as of late.

If you missed it, check out my previous post, or the TIGForum devlog for more information about what Ant Empire Rising is. In short, it's my indie ant-themed RTS video game. Passion project!

Today, I wanted to reveal the current food system, PLUS the newly revamped art of the field map Hills & Pits and some previous work on the ants themselves. Lets get into it!

Food System

Let's start with a treat; the food system! In the game, food is the main currency and you need it to make more ants and sustain the colony as a whole.

There are two main components to the system; the Queen Hunger bar, representative of the ant queen's own survival, and the Food Storage bar, representative of how much food you have. There is a maximum amount of food one can have, which is dependent on your colony's population. The more ants you have, the higher the maximum is.

Over time, the Queen Hunger bar drains. If the Queen Hunger bar is at 0, the colony dies and you lose. How to keep this from happening? Collect food! The hunger bar increases when you have food, slowly taking from the stores to fill itself. When your food stores are at 0, the bar starts draining.

It's a simple system, but with the right balancing, it can be a challenging one. I'm still working on getting the right balance for how quickly the bar drains, among the other variables, like max hunger and how much you get at the start (right now, it's half).

Queen bar in red, food bar in green

So, in essence, you NEED food for survival. How do you get it?

Collect it from the map! Currently, there is only one food type to collect; seeds. They spawn infrequently across set points around the map, plus there is plenty of seeds to collect at the start of the game. There's also a fun new feature called randomized food; the food that spawns at the start is randomized instead of set.

There are different types of seeds to collect. Right now, there are three types: wheat seeds, sunflower seeds, and milkweed seeds. There will probably be more in the future.

Wheat seeds currently give the least food. BTW, to collect food, you just need your ants to collide with it!

Better Biomes

The first, and currently only, map in the game has gotten a bit of a revamp! Hills & Pits, set in a Mongolian field in the middle of nowhere, though it looks more like a desert, USED to look like this:

There's nothing really wrong with this look tbh; you get used to it. It's a simple design that can still offer a lot of variety in playstyle. However, it's not necessarily cut out for what it's supposed to be, which is why I gave it a remaster with some new art that I personally think looks a bit better:

Hills & Pits 2.0!! It's still a bit janky, of course, but that's to be expected.

The land is no longer shaped like a square but has a more dynamic outlining; there are gravel patches around the map with unique assets; pebbles and tiny bushes are scattered as small props.

Plus, the new map uses a better system than the old one: tilemaps. They were implemented into GDevelop (AER's game engine) a while ago, but up until a few days ago I had just been using classic sprites. Tilemaps makes things a LOT easier though, and because of that I can finish up on maps much faster now.

All told, it's a better implementation for the long run.

Ants & UI

The Ant HUD in-game has changed a bit from it's last appearance:

Old vs New

The new version is a lot better, for a couple reasons; firstly, I managed to shrink it, which was a pain to deal with but made it less obstructive during gameplay. Second, there is now space for two more additional castes, one that can go above ground and another that stays below ground (like the queen).

And of course, it's just better looking, at least in my opinion.

In case you're wondering, each 'aa' is a text box that can robustly change depending on what I need it to say. From left to right, they are: "Z", "X", "Queen" "Worker" "Soldier" "1" "2" "3".

Z and X are hotkeys for zooming in/out and 1, 2, 3 are hotkeys for waypoints. They'll probably be replaced by something else in the future but it was the easiest way to communicate these things in this early of development.

Next Up: The General Stuff

So with those new features and whatnot, my next plans are fairly simple; I want to finish development on black garden ants (the first ant species) and add customizable hotkeys.

For BGA, they need a lot of work on their animations in-game and adding their stats. For hotkeys, it's mainly so I can remove them from the Ant HUD and put more practical features there.

I also technically need to finish Hills & Pits but that won't happen for another week or two. After that, I'll move on to enemy creatures, technical stuff, and then the first demo of the game!

See you all around in the future,

-saladsquid

[saladsquid]

Making an ant RTS game; Ant Empire Rising

I've been working on a video game called Ant Empire Rising. As the name implies, it's a video game about ants, particularly an RTS game. It'll be a mix of the themes of Empires of the Undergrowth (another ant RTS game), the game mechanics of traditional RTS games (like drag-and-click movement), and the complex ecosystem type backdrop of Rain World.

I have a detailed devlog over on TIGForums, where I post semi-daily progress updates of what I've been up to. However, I decided to start posting about the game here on Tumblr as well, in the hope of reaching a wider audience. I'll probably make big, weekly progress updates as opposed to small, daily progress updates, but it depends.

If you wanna learn more about the game itself, I highly recommend reading my devlog on TIGForums, I'd say it sums up how the game is/will be pretty well.

I've also linked all of the photos and videos of the game thus far here, so that you can see the current state of things.