Teaching my virtual Ant People to Fight!

This is maybe a bit anti-video-gamey but a thing that is super cute with ants is the way they never go on a straight line but always seem to wiggle a bit in a very peculiar way, looking for a better path or something. It's endearing and really make them feel alive, not just like little robots.

There is this AntsCanada YouTube channel that built a 1000 gallon terrarium with 4 or 5 ant colonies along with a ton of other insects and animals, it’s fascinating how ants live and not attack some animals but do attack others. It might give you a lot of inspiration for your ant miners

I had an idea for fighting the slugs, where if there aren't enough ants attacking it, or its only workers fighting, some could release pheromones to call in further away ants/warriors

What would make sense is that if the enemy enters an ant's bubble the ant not only switches to attack mode but also "alerts" ants in in a slightly bigger bubble to also switch to a attack mode and pathfind to the place where the alert was created, so they becahe more "anty"

You could have different species of "Ants" each with different pros, cons, art styles, and mechanics. Maybe one of the species could be a "Moss Ant" so you can still have the original artwork in its own colony!

Hello! love your work! If you want to add different types of ants, certain colonies have whats called 'majors' which are way bigger than normal ants and they are specialized in protecting the colony and hauling big chunks of food. Basically, as a colony grows bigger they have more needs so they feed some larvae with special food that can either make them grow into majors or even grow into queens that would leave the colony to find a mate and start a new colony and so on. If you wanna see more on different types of ants with special attributes, I recommend AntsCanada on youtube. He recently started a serie on an ecosystem he built and it might inspire you for the game. His content is more romanticized than SerpaDesign but it's also very entertaining. Good luck with your game :)

For the issue of "how much should the game focus on fighting", you might consider an opt-in approach. You already have a framework for structures that produce resources, so implementing a "bait" category of cards that attract hostile monsters, which the ants can then fight for resources, would allow the player to organically decide how much combat they want in their playthrough. The player could turn it into a full on RTS game by going all in on bait cards, crafting, and housing, or could stick with simple resource management/peaceful farming as in the previous prototypes.

Having the enemies have 2 eye stalks really reminds me of Bulborbs from Pikmin. This game is really starting to feel like a top-down pikmin colony sim. Whish honestly just sounds like a dream game to me! Combining my favorite video game franchise with my favorite genre of games. I never got patch quest because the game didn't really seem up my alley, but this game feels like it was just made for me to enjoy. Let's just say, I am hyped.

I think you should aim for a game where you have to explore and expand your colony in search of new food sources - you still upgrade your Castle/settlement however, probably without outposts (if you want it to simulate how ants build, anyway) but in order to get hold of new resources you might need to send your warriors on either raids, meaning you get some short term resources but leave the node or the enemies to recover (so that you can raid them again!), or you might send your warriors to attack the "nest" where a threat is spawning "enemies" from. Basically, you should think of what the end goal of a session or playthrough is, and if it's not to be done within the hour you'll need some "checkpoints" to aim for in between the beginning and the end.

Love the new logo! Looks very proffesional but it still looks fun and like the old fruit logo

Your ants look a lot like the main character of Hollow Knight. This is a good thing!

I tested the update from last video and it was a lot of fun though I saw that you can get a lot of honey very easy. like .... a LOT of honey. So naturally I did what everyone would have done and started a new colony placed the building that honey gets delivered to at the very bottom of my screen and played until the pile of honey was so high, it went beyond the screen. I really like this :D

The "bite" things on the new bugs image looks like ears to me

One thing that worked well in my game is to have competing goals. So in my game you wanted to trade to make money, buy art and then buy soldiers to protect your trade goods and art. Art is how you win and so you want to focus on that but if you don't buy enough soldiers that leads to trouble. I also had it that you can't control the soldiers they do as they want. So yeah maybe something similar will work here? You could have warriors be a drag on resource collecting so you want to make as few as possible, but losing buildings is also a drag so you have to balance it while working towards your economic goals.

I really like the "plant-creature" earlier design of the ants - I highly recommend retaining both of these designs. A "gardener" and "warrior" subtypes would fit really well with the ant theming, giving you different eusocial castes to play with. "Gardeners" could be green and bushy, better at resource gathering, and could do low damage but also slow enemies down, while "warriors" would be less efficient at certain tasks but have much higher offense and speed. A few types like that could create a really cool progression path and options for specializations - don't scrap the design quite yet!

cool seeing your process of drawing stuff for these games

For the farmers you can use the green ants since they're already a passive group, the green ants supply the brown ants with weapons so they can protect the colony. This system is already similar to that of a real ant colony, the only ants you're missing are the nursery ants that protect and care for the young, the queen ant, and the flying ant warriors. You'll also need a secondary queen ant or princess should the colony fall, and you need to rebuild. But hey, that's just my opinion.:face-pink-drinking-tea:

Patch Quest is my go-to game on the Steam Deck. If this is anywhere near as entertaining as that, you’ve got a day one customer.

Love the use of Animate as a drawing tool! Cool to see I'm not alone. I always get some brows raised when I mention it as my preferred drawing software, but it is so so fast and I get those sweet sweet vectors. The "2d" layers (using the frames) is also super handy.

On the subject of warrior ants, I think something that would be cool moving forward would be the ability to create a whole different variety of ants. Ants in real life have extremely specialized jobs within their colonies. Some of the crazier examples are phragmosis, where certain members of the colony develop large, disc-shaped heads that they use as doors to plug up the entrances to the anthill (which I could see being implemented as an ant that just hangs out near buildings and draws enemy attention so that they'll attack it instead of the building), honeypot ants, which can eat an excessive amount of food which other ants then extract from them, exploding ants, which (as the name suggests) explode to defend their colonies, and more!