this is incredible. Please consider adding aphids, they're comparable to cows and you could say that the ants "milk" them, which is really interesting.
In a way, they kind of do milk them. Ants tend to the aphids and allow them to feed, and in return, the aphids secrete a fluid that the ants absolutely love, like cows and milk.
@@jdstearmanThe ants get sap from the aphids! Maybe there is multiple ways of getting sap, and the sap could be building material for higher level huts, along with ploop! This introduces a difficulty curve and more strategy! Like should you try to get ploop, or focus on sap and you must do both because the enemies will destroy your huts, which requires both. And other ways would make sap feel like a more challenging resource, because the choice of picking something can be difficult! The aphids could have a chance of getting angry and try to attack, but they give lots more sap, but farming it by plants is safe, but gives less! I really want to see sap as a resource, as it would bring a lot more content!
A neat ant species you could add to the evolutions section is weaver ants. In real life, they use their larva to spin silk and create leaf basket nests in the tree tops. Though, as there aren’t currently any tall trees in the game, another option would be spiny ants which are known as “lesser weaver ants” and basically do the same thing as weavers but on the ground, and with debris instead of leaves. In the game, this could lead to silk being some special material that might be difficult to produce (needing the larva to make it) but would have high rewards for using it as a building material. Anyways, great content, can’t wait until the next dev-log!
To me, it sounds like beekeeping is halfway between aphid farming and big-game hunting. So, I think you should handle aphid farming next, so you can apply what you've learned from that and the fungus farming to beekeeping later.
I could see bees being a sort of rival faction, like a different kingdom with options to trade with them for resources, or the possibility for them to grow hostile and give you an army to worry about. Definitely something to tackle after aphids and more basic enemies.
It feels like the game is moving closer and closer to a sandbox style rather than a sequence of levels...which I personally think would be really awesome! Might involve exploring procedurally generated biomes with different resources, expanding your anthill across a big map, tracking monsters back to monster lairs, and maybe even discovering rival ant colonies! A sandbox mode would really scratch that resource-farming itch and it's the perfect concept for it imo. Keep up the great work!
I'm interested in how bee (peace)keeping would go. Perhaps you have to supply food and water to prevent bees from attacking, to which excess food and water grant you honey and wax, which could be cultural resources. Maybe even a side option where you intentionally don't give bees resources and instead raze the buildings that *they* would make, allowing two different and opposing options to gain the same resources. Perhaps the latter is faster but requires more micromanagement, whereas the former is robust but resource intensive.
But then longer tasks like carrying radium would Peter out, and keeping track of which trails have run out later in the game when you’ve scaled the colony larger will become an annoyance. Usually a good UI doesn’t yank control from the user, so it should keep doing what you told it to do, *until you tell it to stop*. Although, it would be interesting to have the ‘annoyance’ of keeping track as motivation to level up so you can get a reward that makes pheromone trails either last longer, or stay permanently until you change them
Ground nesting bumble bees as a bee species might be particularly useful. In addition to producing honey their hives are usually in the ground sometimes popping up a little above ground level, and in the case of some species they make these near exclusively in rodent dens(tests show they will choose a former rodent den over other similar structures) The partially emerging out of the ground would let them be a similar size as you ant castles and the rodent den dynamic could result in some interesting gsmeplay. As a hypothetical example is if you clear out a rodent den or some other animal den, that would make one or more hives on the map happy and then they would create a new hive on the den location.
26:00 - Brutal scrubbing out of character. He hit them with the modern logo ray and removed their articulated body. Maybe it is because I am older than most of the people on the discord but I like the old design of ants. That feels like what they're supposed to look like while the tiny ants are like abstract representations. The same way a lot of pixel art games lovingly rendered scenes in art for the cabinet or manual or box art, you know to work around the limitations of memory. You're working around size but it's the same concept. If you're going to make them ants, and put effort into the style being ant like through a cartoony style you might as well commit to the vision. If you really think they're creepy It'd probably compromise by making the eyes bigger and ramping up the cuteness to offset their more detailed bodies instead of scrubbing all the detail out and making them brown pumpkins with horns.
Yeah I kinda got bummed when he said he had simplified them. I think it would be totally fine if cutscenes portrayed a more detailed world and characters, reminds me of how in many animations, the perspective would zoom in to little dots and scribbles on the floor to reveal a fully realized world, seemingly as vast and complex as our own. From what I can tell, the scenes are separate enough from gameplay so as to not cause a clash in artstyle. With the worker ants simplified, it now looks _really odd_ to have them in the same picture as the queen.
@@preferablygeneric agreed 100% Like, the simplified sprites work great for rendering a bunch during gameplay, but when you're watching a cutscene that only has 5 of them looking up at a much more detailed queen they just feel lackluster. I also feel like the mayor should just be the cursor the whole time, so it makes it more obvious that this character is you and so the pheromone trails aren't just coming out of nowhere.
@@ithalathegayguy Gonna have to disagree with you on the Mayor opinion, I think having him follow you is much more interesting and unique than just "another game with a custom cursor." But yea I also much prefer the old sprites over the simplified ones, mostly because if I'd been given that sprite and told to say what it is, I'd say it's an alien lol
@TheCrimsonKnight. I don't mean have him locked to the cursor, the following animations are perfect. What I mean is, in the gameplay footage, the only times you see him are at the beginning of the level when he builds the anthill and at the end of the level when he flies across the screen. I'm sure he probably also shows up in cutscenes, but since those weren't shown in this video I can't confirm that. Otherwise, he's just non-existent. But if he was actually on screen while playing, it'd make a lot more sense that he's you and that he's the one making the pheremone trails and managing the colony. As it currently is, he just looks like some rando builder and leaves all the real work to the player.
These are so cathartic mto watch! One note: I'd name the upgrades more closely to what they achieve, rather than their real-life explanation. Even after watching the whole video, I saw ants carrying leaves and thought "why would I want the leaf cutter upgrade? They're already cutting leaves." This game looks so fun and I've had a blast playing through your builds.
If you add aphids a cool mechanic could be protecting them from other creatures, which could add some risk to farming them and would result in protecting multiple areas. Ants irl do this and of course people do too so I think it would be perfect for ant-people
Oh, there's also ants that domesticate aphids to "milk" them for sugary substance that they secrete. Not the same as leaf cutters, but might be interesting if ever the idea of extending it beyond just farming as this sounds sorta adjacent to that. (I clearly wrote this before the end of the video, I see it's in your next steps... and that's cool!)
34:00 I was expecting you to place the houses next to your big colony, at least that's what my first instinct was. I definitely wouldn't place it far unless it was a gathering building like the gathering post from frostpunk that is meant to be further than usual
I think that having buildings that only do one thing would actually make things easier. Yes, selecting the right one would take longer, and the number of buildings needed would increase. But from the user's perspective, it's much easier to make the one-to-one mental connection between each building and its function than it is to remember all the things each one of the complex multi-function buildings can do, at least in my opinion. In any case, pretty cool video, lots of great ideas and progress!
The way they carry this radium crystal is absolutly adorable !!!! 12:17 I am not fan of this twist effect personnally. I like your game in flat 2D graphics and we cannot feel any thickness of objects. This effect creates a "made out of paper" and completely change the emotions in my opinion. But as always, I respect your choices. But everything is awesome, all those details, all the sound and visual and gameplay, really, I hope I am not unrespectful, because Im deeply impressed
Randomly found this on my home page. First caught my eye cause one of my college field projects was on leaf-cutter ants (before anyone asks, it wasn't anything big/serious/conclusive). But this game looks super cute!!! I've never watched a sort of dev blog before, but I love seeing and hearing about how it's being made and the thought and creativity behind it all. Definitely a lot of small things I've never considered, but in hindsight, definitely do add to the game! I would also love to see bee keeping because I think it's super cute, but maybe aphid ranching is the way to go, at least at first? I don't know if leafcutter ants do, but some any species do farm aphids. So, I think there is a more immediate thought/connection to aphids than bees (at least I think so...). Bee keeping seems like a good idea for maybe like... "sidekick" helpers for fighting enemies? Whereas aphid ranching sounds more like some kind of supportive/healing thing...?
Wow.The other day i was wondering when your next video was going to be. The wait was worth it, the game look amazing! I think bringing back combat would be a good next step :)
Wow. Impressive work, and it's really nice getting to see the whole process being summarized. I can definitely see how this game would be fun, or might I say, satisfying to play. Seems like it might bring some of the essence of automation games and city builders with much reduced mental load and focus on numbers. And I like the idea that the map will grow greener as you expand, the opposite of what happens in most factory themed games. Ants collecting a big crystal and evolving? That gives me big "Children of Time" vibes, haha. Excellent sci-fi book which, among other things, explores the evolution of a civilization of spiders and their relationship to other species. There's an ant colony that finds a crystal that happens to slightly vibrate in reaction to ambiant radio waves, and the curious phenomenon sparks the scientific curiosity of the spiders.
I just went looking for a new video from you the other day. I'm so glad you have something to show us! You've been a huge game dev inspiration for me since your early Patch Quest logs. Amazing updates. All the juice has a huge impact.
only queen and king ants have wings, and short after they reproduce, the king perishes, and the queen goes on to make her anthill. I would reccomend to have the player represented by and army ant with a military helmet for example, as youre comanding the army
I love the evolution mechanic. It is a nice way of implementing the mechanic, the actual gameplay looks fun and I like the idea of the ants actually evolving because of radiation. It also feels seem-less with the atmosphere and kind of fantasy realism, where the fantasy ants are changed through radiation but the actual concept is grounded in reality and feels realistic
SO fun to warch the project develop. I'm unsure if the core gameplay loop is quite for me but i am enamoured with these little guys and will gladly feed the algorithm!
This is becoming more and more interesting. Ive been watching the Devlogs for quite a while now and Im always happy to see the progress. I really want to play it already, keep up the great work!
I think it'd be cool to have some kind of rival faction to play against, at least in some scenarios. Ants are well-known to wage war against other colonies, and I think it would be interesting to watch so many ants going at it against each other
The early plant could be introduced by itself, then a future level you get the sprinkler (and the terrain is like "bad for plants") so it lets you use the sprinkler on wild plants like you show. That way it can be a nice progression of a few new things ("plant harvesting" > "Sprinklers" > "potatoes" > "Farms" or something)
Amazing devlog! Very curius about how possible new mechanics like hunting could work, i'm always impressed by your creativity! Can't wait for the next devlog! 👍
WOW! This is such an incredible devlog, definitely worth the wait. It was so satisfying to see you workshop each individual new mechanic and then have a comprehensive showcase of everything at the end. Well done, eagerly anticipating more :D
You should definitely add a building animation for structures, I think it would help to slow down tha game as well as add a way to show off some of the ants' character, also you cold have advanced structures need some building materials that have to be harvested in various ways, immagine big trunks of trees in the map with termites hollowing them to make homes
maybe a fog of war for larger levels or just in general could be a cool feature. you can send out your ants to explore and find new resources so that you dont just know where all the radium is at all times.
13:45 I love the compost and farm design, i hope you will use this graphics in the futures, i'm not english but i understand that you rework you idea for the farm at 17:48, i love it too but the graphics is so cool to be throw to trash 25:33 nooo ants was very cute, it's not creepy :,(
I know it's way too early to be thinking about stuff like this, but I can't help but imagine that an optional challenge run where you only control one ant would be really fun
I love your videos one of the few channels that im exited everytime he uploads. I do prefer the brown ground and not the black but the game looks amaizing!
What a relaxing video that was. Perfect before going tolbed. Watching those ants doing stuff is quite satisfying. The only thing that bothered me was that you wanted to use coins.... it didn't feelt right. But later you changed it, so everything is perfect👍 I hopefully will play the prototype during the weekend and will leave my comment about that on the discord. I had the idea that the big animals could be the creatures of patchquest. But than I thought that I don't want to see my precious creatures turned into antfood😢. 🤣
I feel like I would love an infinite or near infinite mode in this game... I want to make a giant colony with hundreds of complex systems, farms and automations. I get that optimizing for large scale games like that is a different beast to the level focused game you are making, but if you add lose conditions to levels as well, you can just keep ramping up the difficulty until something fails when a player keeps playing beyond level completion (think mini motorways). Probably not what you want to go for, but something i'd personally love.
I think a good addition would be the ability to draw a second pheromone trail out of the larger buildings, splitting the work force between the two trails. From playing the demo it felt really weird to send 50 ants to do a single task when 15 would suffice. This change would let players strategize more about the placement of larger buildings, instead of just putting a building right next to whatever resource you want it to collect, you now have to consider placing it in between multiple smaller resources, and if the extra travel time is worth the decreased cost. Alternatively this lets a single large building cover a whole farm, instead of having to place multiple for watering, collecting, etc.
@@LycheeGameLabs That's true. Thinking on it and it would require a lot more controls then I originally thought. You would need a way to distinguish which trail you want to interact with, and a way to individually delete trails without spawning a new one. If this was in a menu it would really bog down the gameplay, and if it wasn't as intuitive as the current controls it would be frustrating to remember. Really goes to show how much design is needed for even the most simple changes.
I'd potentially reconsider the peacekeeping mechanic with the bees, as they are not typically violent about sharing honey. Perhaps it could be about not overstepping your boundaries or not demanding too much honey. Just don't wanna spread beekeeping misinformation if they attack unprompted.
first off i have to say i really love the nugget walking animation, there's smth cartoony and mildly funny to me about it. I think all the other changes are nice aswell, but they dont stick out as much for me. the only other thing i'd have to say would be that, besides the evolution mechanic obviously being a nice addition to the game, i don't see why you'd evolve leafcutting via that system as opposed to just starting with the trait. If you don't get the option to choose a different type of ant species that has some benefit, there's never really a reason not to go for leafcutting ants asap to get the farming boost, which i think would not serve the system too well. As an example you could make smth like bullet ants that have an additional attack boost over the warrior ants, or become especially strong warriors or smth like that to give the colony more security when you do add the mobs back in. Tldr: I dont really see why you'd include the leafcutting ability in the evolution-table, if it's so useful that the player would always go for it over any other ability first. Also I'd love to see more unique ant species like the leafcutter.
idea of upgrade. to builind is keep upgrade, than need to upgrade resource(level2 need clay of your art example .). but you don't need to manually send upgrade rsource to target building. just send main castle (or maintenace builing.) than ant are keep storage limit like they did larva. so i make keep flow of main castle and other building.
perhaps with the bee keeping it could be a trade alliance of finding some material to offer them in exchange for honey, or defending them from hornets or wasps since wasps and hornets are known for attacking both ants and bees, it could be a case of The Enemy of my Enemy is my friend kind of relationship
May I suggest when you add a potentially distracting element to give it a parameterized scaler. So for screenshake, or UI wiggliness, add a parameter that you can then control in whatever options menu you build.
in the future u could make it so time to time hornets attack your bees and u have to help the bees fend them off and in return the beehive would send a group of 4-5 bees carrying a giant honey jar to your base giving you a lot of honey as a reward and theyd attack you less
Everything is incredibly pleasing, from sounds to visuals, to animations and feedback. Black ground in the end of the video though.... I don't know about that one
I kinda wish there were no icons or outlined elements at all. I think the flat style and the visual indications from the animations are nice enough on their own.
I gotta tell you, I think that you so deserve to get promoted and published by a well known indie game publisher like devolver or big mode by videogamedunkey. I hope this game goes well, I sure know I am getting it!
The ant head icon is a little harder to parse than I'd like :/ The antenna are so chunky & similar to the Mandibles that it's not immediately clear which is which so I keep stopping to check if the head is the right way up In this example (9:20) - It took me a second to work out if the head was upside down, with the antenna at the bottom & the mandibles pointing up at an awkward angle to snip at the leaf or if it was facing forward, towards the camera, & just had unusually pointy antenna, with the leaf perched on its shoulders. If I didn't already know it was an ant, I might've assumed it was just a little Kirby or Pikmin-esque little guy with horns. It's not a huge deal but it's a little distracting & takes me out of the experience for a sec every time I see it
The Play, Pause & Fastforward buttons should react slightly to you hovering over them, not just tapping on them. Perhaps increase the brightness a smidge or add a subtle outline while hovering? Just helps reenforce that they are clickable before you try & click on them~
19:49 i'd suggest making the actual "sprinkling" animation a bit more prominent. at first i didn't see the animation at all because i thought it was just juice from having water added, and i thought the blue droplets appearing above it were somehow showing the radius. so maybe having larger, blue droplets flying out to show a radius would be good
Do you have plans for honeypot ants? Weaver ants that can make proxy nests out of leaves? Harvester ants with seed granaries? There are so many cool ant types :D
I would imagine you have already thought of it, but these systems would be perfect for a more difficult rougelite/wave survival gamemode as well as your intended level based puzzling system.
looks great! one small criticism towards the ui, the population counter dosent look very "clickable" (though im sure you could explain this is tutorial text), and it seems a little counterintuitive to click a button in the top right corner of the screen to open a menu on the bottom, especially if you want the player to be moving quickly.
“They seem much less likely to murder me in my sleep.”
The chance has been lowered, but not to zero
Watch your windows
@@LycheeGameLabs oh no
r u n
this is incredible. Please consider adding aphids, they're comparable to cows and you could say that the ants "milk" them, which is really interesting.
In a way, they kind of do milk them. Ants tend to the aphids and allow them to feed, and in return, the aphids secrete a fluid that the ants absolutely love, like cows and milk.
@@jdstearmanThe ants get sap from the aphids! Maybe there is multiple ways of getting sap, and the sap could be building material for higher level huts, along with ploop! This introduces a difficulty curve and more strategy! Like should you try to get ploop, or focus on sap and you must do both because the enemies will destroy your huts, which requires both. And other ways would make sap feel like a more challenging resource, because the choice of picking something can be difficult! The aphids could have a chance of getting angry and try to attack, but they give lots more sap, but farming it by plants is safe, but gives less! I really want to see sap as a resource, as it would bring a lot more content!
36:20 ...
@@casperadriaensen5390 yup
@@casperadriaensen5390i know but i am giving a suggestion on what aphid ranching could do, and expanding the idea
This game looks like it’s going to be so fun! Ngl the notion of ants carrying a chunk of radium straight into their colony is so funny to me.
I always wanted an ant farm. 😂 This is the way to go, to avoid the hard parts of it. HAHAHAHA.
A neat ant species you could add to the evolutions section is weaver ants. In real life, they use their larva to spin silk and create leaf basket nests in the tree tops. Though, as there aren’t currently any tall trees in the game, another option would be spiny ants which are known as “lesser weaver ants” and basically do the same thing as weavers but on the ground, and with debris instead of leaves.
In the game, this could lead to silk being some special material that might be difficult to produce (needing the larva to make it) but would have high rewards for using it as a building material.
Anyways, great content, can’t wait until the next dev-log!
Weaver ants are also characteristically tall and skinny compared to most ants, which could give the lil' guys a unique look-
Silk would be perfect for trade with the bees in exchange of honey!
To me, it sounds like beekeeping is halfway between aphid farming and big-game hunting. So, I think you should handle aphid farming next, so you can apply what you've learned from that and the fungus farming to beekeeping later.
That's very logical
I could see bees being a sort of rival faction, like a different kingdom with options to trade with them for resources, or the possibility for them to grow hostile and give you an army to worry about.
Definitely something to tackle after aphids and more basic enemies.
It feels like the game is moving closer and closer to a sandbox style rather than a sequence of levels...which I personally think would be really awesome! Might involve exploring procedurally generated biomes with different resources, expanding your anthill across a big map, tracking monsters back to monster lairs, and maybe even discovering rival ant colonies! A sandbox mode would really scratch that resource-farming itch and it's the perfect concept for it imo. Keep up the great work!
I really enjoy watching the growth of this game. I’m really excited for the release
I'm interested in how bee (peace)keeping would go. Perhaps you have to supply food and water to prevent bees from attacking, to which excess food and water grant you honey and wax, which could be cultural resources.
Maybe even a side option where you intentionally don't give bees resources and instead raze the buildings that *they* would make, allowing two different and opposing options to gain the same resources.
Perhaps the latter is faster but requires more micromanagement, whereas the former is robust but resource intensive.
5:00 those pheromone trails need to start dissapating when the ants return empty handed, maybe 5-10 percent per ant?
That's an interesting concept. I'll have to think about how it interacts with the other features
But then longer tasks like carrying radium would Peter out, and keeping track of which trails have run out later in the game when you’ve scaled the colony larger will become an annoyance. Usually a good UI doesn’t yank control from the user, so it should keep doing what you told it to do, *until you tell it to stop*. Although, it would be interesting to have the ‘annoyance’ of keeping track as motivation to level up so you can get a reward that makes pheromone trails either last longer, or stay permanently until you change them
Ground nesting bumble bees as a bee species might be particularly useful. In addition to producing honey their hives are usually in the ground sometimes popping up a little above ground level, and in the case of some species they make these near exclusively in rodent dens(tests show they will choose a former rodent den over other similar structures) The partially emerging out of the ground would let them be a similar size as you ant castles and the rodent den dynamic could result in some interesting gsmeplay.
As a hypothetical example is if you clear out a rodent den or some other animal den, that would make one or more hives on the map happy and then they would create a new hive on the den location.
26:00 - Brutal scrubbing out of character. He hit them with the modern logo ray and removed their articulated body.
Maybe it is because I am older than most of the people on the discord but I like the old design of ants. That feels like what they're supposed to look like while the tiny ants are like abstract representations.
The same way a lot of pixel art games lovingly rendered scenes in art for the cabinet or manual or box art, you know to work around the limitations of memory.
You're working around size but it's the same concept.
If you're going to make them ants, and put effort into the style being ant like through a cartoony style you might as well commit to the vision.
If you really think they're creepy It'd probably compromise by making the eyes bigger and ramping up the cuteness to offset their more detailed bodies instead of scrubbing all the detail out and making them brown pumpkins with horns.
Maybe I'll make some kind of an in-between version. Thanks
Yeah I kinda got bummed when he said he had simplified them. I think it would be totally fine if cutscenes portrayed a more detailed world and characters, reminds me of how in many animations, the perspective would zoom in to little dots and scribbles on the floor to reveal a fully realized world, seemingly as vast and complex as our own.
From what I can tell, the scenes are separate enough from gameplay so as to not cause a clash in artstyle. With the worker ants simplified, it now looks _really odd_ to have them in the same picture as the queen.
@@preferablygeneric agreed 100%
Like, the simplified sprites work great for rendering a bunch during gameplay, but when you're watching a cutscene that only has 5 of them looking up at a much more detailed queen they just feel lackluster.
I also feel like the mayor should just be the cursor the whole time, so it makes it more obvious that this character is you and so the pheromone trails aren't just coming out of nowhere.
@@ithalathegayguy Gonna have to disagree with you on the Mayor opinion, I think having him follow you is much more interesting and unique than just "another game with a custom cursor."
But yea I also much prefer the old sprites over the simplified ones, mostly because if I'd been given that sprite and told to say what it is, I'd say it's an alien lol
@TheCrimsonKnight. I don't mean have him locked to the cursor, the following animations are perfect.
What I mean is, in the gameplay footage, the only times you see him are at the beginning of the level when he builds the anthill and at the end of the level when he flies across the screen. I'm sure he probably also shows up in cutscenes, but since those weren't shown in this video I can't confirm that. Otherwise, he's just non-existent.
But if he was actually on screen while playing, it'd make a lot more sense that he's you and that he's the one making the pheremone trails and managing the colony. As it currently is, he just looks like some rando builder and leaves all the real work to the player.
These are so cathartic mto watch! One note: I'd name the upgrades more closely to what they achieve, rather than their real-life explanation. Even after watching the whole video, I saw ants carrying leaves and thought "why would I want the leaf cutter upgrade? They're already cutting leaves."
This game looks so fun and I've had a blast playing through your builds.
That's worth considering. Thanks
"Population" should probably be called "larvae", that makes it clear that you aren't consuming ants to create new buildings but gaining new ones
Honestly the baby snail as the queen's hair is GENIUS
If you add aphids a cool mechanic could be protecting them from other creatures, which could add some risk to farming them and would result in protecting multiple areas. Ants irl do this and of course people do too so I think it would be perfect for ant-people
Yeah this is a great idea
Oh, there's also ants that domesticate aphids to "milk" them for sugary substance that they secrete. Not the same as leaf cutters, but might be interesting if ever the idea of extending it beyond just farming as this sounds sorta adjacent to that. (I clearly wrote this before the end of the video, I see it's in your next steps... and that's cool!)
You know me better than I know myself!
34:00 I was expecting you to place the houses next to your big colony, at least that's what my first instinct was. I definitely wouldn't place it far unless it was a gathering building like the gathering post from frostpunk that is meant to be further than usual
Maybe in the future, enemy creatures could discourage being spread out
Frostpunk Shoutout!
this is one of my favorite devlogs of all time
I love this game and these videos I’m glad you uploaded!!
Thanks! :D
I think that having buildings that only do one thing would actually make things easier.
Yes, selecting the right one would take longer, and the number of buildings needed would increase. But from the user's perspective, it's much easier to make the one-to-one mental connection between each building and its function than it is to remember all the things each one of the complex multi-function buildings can do, at least in my opinion.
In any case, pretty cool video, lots of great ideas and progress!
I love these videos. I’m not sure this is really my kind of game but I’m going to buy it regardless as thanks for making these.
The way they carry this radium crystal is absolutly adorable !!!! 12:17 I am not fan of this twist effect personnally. I like your game in flat 2D graphics and we cannot feel any thickness of objects. This effect creates a "made out of paper" and completely change the emotions in my opinion. But as always, I respect your choices. But everything is awesome, all those details, all the sound and visual and gameplay, really, I hope I am not unrespectful, because Im deeply impressed
Randomly found this on my home page. First caught my eye cause one of my college field projects was on leaf-cutter ants (before anyone asks, it wasn't anything big/serious/conclusive). But this game looks super cute!!! I've never watched a sort of dev blog before, but I love seeing and hearing about how it's being made and the thought and creativity behind it all. Definitely a lot of small things I've never considered, but in hindsight, definitely do add to the game!
I would also love to see bee keeping because I think it's super cute, but maybe aphid ranching is the way to go, at least at first? I don't know if leafcutter ants do, but some any species do farm aphids. So, I think there is a more immediate thought/connection to aphids than bees (at least I think so...). Bee keeping seems like a good idea for maybe like... "sidekick" helpers for fighting enemies? Whereas aphid ranching sounds more like some kind of supportive/healing thing...?
Wow.The other day i was wondering when your next video was going to be. The wait was worth it, the game look amazing! I think bringing back combat would be a good next step :)
The level of quality, thought, and detail behind all of this is amazing!
Wow. Impressive work, and it's really nice getting to see the whole process being summarized.
I can definitely see how this game would be fun, or might I say, satisfying to play. Seems like it might bring some of the essence of automation games and city builders with much reduced mental load and focus on numbers. And I like the idea that the map will grow greener as you expand, the opposite of what happens in most factory themed games.
Ants collecting a big crystal and evolving? That gives me big "Children of Time" vibes, haha. Excellent sci-fi book which, among other things, explores the evolution of a civilization of spiders and their relationship to other species. There's an ant colony that finds a crystal that happens to slightly vibrate in reaction to ambiant radio waves, and the curious phenomenon sparks the scientific curiosity of the spiders.
That's a wacky book lmao
I like how the carrying ants send messages to the chunk. It's very object-oriented in the Alan Kay sense of the word.
I just went looking for a new video from you the other day. I'm so glad you have something to show us! You've been a huge game dev inspiration for me since your early Patch Quest logs.
Amazing updates. All the juice has a huge impact.
only queen and king ants have wings, and short after they reproduce, the king perishes, and the queen goes on to make her anthill. I would reccomend to have the player represented by and army ant with a military helmet for example, as youre comanding the army
I love the evolution mechanic. It is a nice way of implementing the mechanic, the actual gameplay looks fun and I like the idea of the ants actually evolving because of radiation. It also feels seem-less with the atmosphere and kind of fantasy realism, where the fantasy ants are changed through radiation but the actual concept is grounded in reality and feels realistic
SO fun to warch the project develop. I'm unsure if the core gameplay loop is quite for me but i am enamoured with these little guys and will gladly feed the algorithm!
Your solution for the carrying of the nuggets was so creative! 🥹
Thanks!
Loved the art similarities between this and Patch Quest
The graphics look so great for something that's still so early in development. Really cute and crisp and charming.
This is becoming more and more interesting. Ive been watching the Devlogs for quite a while now and Im always happy to see the progress. I really want to play it already, keep up the great work!
Glad you like them!
Love how this game has evolved over time, much as the ants will when I play through it :)
I think it'd be cool to have some kind of rival faction to play against, at least in some scenarios. Ants are well-known to wage war against other colonies, and I think it would be interesting to watch so many ants going at it against each other
The early plant could be introduced by itself, then a future level you get the sprinkler (and the terrain is like "bad for plants") so it lets you use the sprinkler on wild plants like you show. That way it can be a nice progression of a few new things ("plant harvesting" > "Sprinklers" > "potatoes" > "Farms" or something)
You had me at fungus farm. The lil mushrooms are so cute! & the little clicks of picking up the leaves sound so satisfying
Amazing devlog! Very curius about how possible new mechanics like hunting could work, i'm always impressed by your creativity! Can't wait for the next devlog! 👍
WOW! This is such an incredible devlog, definitely worth the wait. It was so satisfying to see you workshop each individual new mechanic and then have a comprehensive showcase of everything at the end. Well done, eagerly anticipating more :D
Glad you enjoyed it!
You should definitely add a building animation for structures, I think it would help to slow down tha game as well as add a way to show off some of the ants' character, also you cold have advanced structures need some building materials that have to be harvested in various ways, immagine big trunks of trees in the map with termites hollowing them to make homes
maybe a fog of war for larger levels or just in general could be a cool feature. you can send out your ants to explore and find new resources so that you dont just know where all the radium is at all times.
if the queen takes damage the snail should fall off. And then when it's safe she puts a new one on. The new snail could be a random colour each time.
I like the idea of having to choose between multiple different ant types
I feel that would be fun.
That would be awesome if there's enough time to add it
This looks like an interesting series.
Thanks!
this is great, I YEARN for the ants to make little pikmin sounds when they spawn in
Yay finally a new video on this game! It's been so long!
This is the channel that inspired me to make games ❤️ thank you
That's awesome!
0:50 Oh yeah! Liam changing and tweaking a ton of basic and essencial mechanics of the game that he is developing. Where have I seen that before??? 🤔🤔
My Achilles heel...
@@LycheeGameLabs so true
still time for an emergency pivot to twinstick roguelite?
Sound and animations make this look and feel very rewarding and satisfying!
Thanks!
13:45 I love the compost and farm design, i hope you will use this graphics in the futures, i'm not english but i understand that you rework you idea for the farm at 17:48, i love it too but the graphics is so cool to be throw to trash
25:33 nooo ants was very cute, it's not creepy :,(
Very excited to play this game once it is ready! I absolutely loved Patch Quest!
Hope you enjoy it!
I know it's way too early to be thinking about stuff like this, but I can't help but imagine that an optional challenge run where you only control one ant would be really fun
I love your videos one of the few channels that im exited everytime he uploads. I do prefer the brown ground and not the black but the game looks amaizing!
I'll keep tinkering with the colors
Ahids! they are so cool! I would also Imagine an underground maze level with mist to bee really cool!
I'm loving watching these videos, I look forward to all your future devlogs and other videos!
What a relaxing video that was. Perfect before going tolbed.
Watching those ants doing stuff is quite satisfying.
The only thing that bothered me was that you wanted to use coins.... it didn't feelt right.
But later you changed it, so everything is perfect👍
I hopefully will play the prototype during the weekend and will leave my comment about that on the discord.
I had the idea that the big animals could be the creatures of patchquest.
But than I thought that I don't want to see my precious creatures turned into antfood😢. 🤣
these huge changes are amazing! looks great, sounds great, prototype is really fun!
The Candy and mentioned honey from bees makes me thinks of honeypot ants which like leaf cutters are fascinating little buggies
I feel like I would love an infinite or near infinite mode in this game... I want to make a giant colony with hundreds of complex systems, farms and automations. I get that optimizing for large scale games like that is a different beast to the level focused game you are making, but if you add lose conditions to levels as well, you can just keep ramping up the difficulty until something fails when a player keeps playing beyond level completion (think mini motorways). Probably not what you want to go for, but something i'd personally love.
I think a good addition would be the ability to draw a second pheromone trail out of the larger buildings, splitting the work force between the two trails. From playing the demo it felt really weird to send 50 ants to do a single task when 15 would suffice. This change would let players strategize more about the placement of larger buildings, instead of just putting a building right next to whatever resource you want it to collect, you now have to consider placing it in between multiple smaller resources, and if the extra travel time is worth the decreased cost. Alternatively this lets a single large building cover a whole farm, instead of having to place multiple for watering, collecting, etc.
This is a really smart idea. Although it makes the controls much more fiddly too
@@LycheeGameLabs That's true.
Thinking on it and it would require a lot more controls then I originally thought. You would need a way to distinguish which trail you want to interact with, and a way to individually delete trails without spawning a new one. If this was in a menu it would really bog down the gameplay, and if it wasn't as intuitive as the current controls it would be frustrating to remember.
Really goes to show how much design is needed for even the most simple changes.
I'd potentially reconsider the peacekeeping mechanic with the bees, as they are not typically violent about sharing honey. Perhaps it could be about not overstepping your boundaries or not demanding too much honey. Just don't wanna spread beekeeping misinformation if they attack unprompted.
ik i might sound nuts but this would be a pretty fun incremental game
this video was so fun!!! and id love to see aphid farming next :]!!
First ten!! I absolutely love this game and I hope you continue to release dev logs 😁
More devlogs are coming, and also more game design videos are coming too
This game is geting better and better
AMAZING!! Love it all.
Maybe the Population could be renamed to Buildings? Just to avoid an abstraction...
HE’S BAAAAACK
So glad you started uploading again, been missing these videos!!
More to come!
@ can’t wait!
Watching your videos is always a nice peaceful moment for me for some reason.
first off i have to say i really love the nugget walking animation, there's smth cartoony and mildly funny to me about it. I think all the other changes are nice aswell, but they dont stick out as much for me.
the only other thing i'd have to say would be that, besides the evolution mechanic obviously being a nice addition to the game, i don't see why you'd evolve leafcutting via that system as opposed to just starting with the trait. If you don't get the option to choose a different type of ant species that has some benefit, there's never really a reason not to go for leafcutting ants asap to get the farming boost, which i think would not serve the system too well. As an example you could make smth like bullet ants that have an additional attack boost over the warrior ants, or become especially strong warriors or smth like that to give the colony more security when you do add the mobs back in.
Tldr: I dont really see why you'd include the leafcutting ability in the evolution-table, if it's so useful that the player would always go for it over any other ability first. Also I'd love to see more unique ant species like the leafcutter.
I tried out the prototype and it is so fun one thing I think would be a great idea is an "endless mode" ie one that just lets you keep on playing
idea of upgrade.
to builind is keep upgrade, than need to upgrade resource(level2 need clay of your art example .). but you don't need to manually send upgrade rsource to target building. just send main castle (or maintenace builing.) than ant are keep storage limit like they did larva. so i make keep flow of main castle and other building.
I cannot wait for this game to come out, it looks so cool
perhaps with the bee keeping it could be a trade alliance of finding some material to offer them in exchange for honey, or defending them from hornets or wasps since wasps and hornets are known for attacking both ants and bees, it could be a case of The Enemy of my Enemy is my friend kind of relationship
That's a cool idea
I was waiting for an early 2025 post and it was even better than I expected. Keep up the great work on this game
Thanks, will do!
May I suggest when you add a potentially distracting element to give it a parameterized scaler. So for screenshake, or UI wiggliness, add a parameter that you can then control in whatever options menu you build.
This is so cute! I can't wait to play it
This is so genuinely underrated, I think you should add aphids first, and maybe you could add some other anthills?
in the future u could make it so time to time hornets attack your bees and u have to help the bees fend them off and in return the beehive would send a group of 4-5 bees carrying a giant honey jar to your base giving you a lot of honey as a reward and theyd attack you less
Something like this would be cool
Everything is incredibly pleasing, from sounds to visuals, to animations and feedback. Black ground in the end of the video though.... I don't know about that one
Maybe I'll shift things around again in the next video
Some ants collect seeds and transform them to 'antbread' to use as food.
Lol sounds kinda funny I like it
He's back! Great to see it.
:D
I kinda wish there were no icons or outlined elements at all. I think the flat style and the visual indications from the animations are nice enough on their own.
The big hunt game is gonna be really good
I gotta tell you, I think that you so deserve to get promoted and published by a well known indie game publisher like devolver or big mode by videogamedunkey. I hope this game goes well, I sure know I am getting it!
Thanks! I'm doing my best
Bee i love bee bumblebee are so cute and fluffy also if you add cloth adding moth to get silk would be fun
The ant head icon is a little harder to parse than I'd like :/
The antenna are so chunky & similar to the Mandibles that it's not immediately clear which is which so I keep stopping to check if the head is the right way up
In this example (9:20) - It took me a second to work out if the head was upside down, with the antenna at the bottom & the mandibles pointing up at an awkward angle to snip at the leaf or if it was facing forward, towards the camera, & just had unusually pointy antenna, with the leaf perched on its shoulders.
If I didn't already know it was an ant, I might've assumed it was just a little Kirby or Pikmin-esque little guy with horns.
It's not a huge deal but it's a little distracting & takes me out of the experience for a sec every time I see it
I waited for your upload.
The Play, Pause & Fastforward buttons should react slightly to you hovering over them, not just tapping on them.
Perhaps increase the brightness a smidge or add a subtle outline while hovering?
Just helps reenforce that they are clickable before you try & click on them~
19:49 i'd suggest making the actual "sprinkling" animation a bit more prominent. at first i didn't see the animation at all because i thought it was just juice from having water added, and i thought the blue droplets appearing above it were somehow showing the radius. so maybe having larger, blue droplets flying out to show a radius would be good
Awesome video, awesome game!
The spring system is so good that my cat ran to attack it on my screen.
XD
Well this is getting somewhere !
35:29 two ant live in the well
Maybe the mayor should follow the cursor and be the one leaving the feromone trail
Bees usually a bit bigger than ants so I think the answer is obvious. BEE COWS!
They also breed aphids!!! They are the only animals that breed other animals also
Do you have plans for honeypot ants? Weaver ants that can make proxy nests out of leaves? Harvester ants with seed granaries? There are so many cool ant types :D
I would imagine you have already thought of it, but these systems would be perfect for a more difficult rougelite/wave survival gamemode as well as your intended level based puzzling system.
It's definitely possible
looks great! one small criticism towards the ui, the population counter dosent look very "clickable" (though im sure you could explain this is tutorial text), and it seems a little counterintuitive to click a button in the top right corner of the screen to open a menu on the bottom, especially if you want the player to be moving quickly.