Destroy all enemy anthills without getting destroyed!
How to play
When you start the game, there is a little tutorial, but it may first be a little bit unintuitive.
With the left and right arrow keys you can move this cursor:
It points to an anthill.
This is your anthill:
This is the enemy anthill:
If you select your anthill ant press SPACE, you'll see this panel:
If you press SPACE again, you can assign your ants different tasks:
* Search food. Search food so that your ants can live properly. If your anthill runs out of food, it will loose HP. * Attack: Walk around the map to kill the enemy ants in your way. * Go home: Ask your ants which are attacking or in war to come back into the anthill.
Press SPACE to validate your action.
However, if you selected an enemy anthill, you'll see this panel:
It lets you send ants to the selected anthill, to damage it. It is very powerful!
Validate your selection with SPACE.
Downloads
I'm not so happy with the audio I made, so if you want to play without, I provided a version without.
The v.1.0.1 builds are antwars_fix1_with_audio.zip and antwars_fix1_without_audio.zip.
Have fun!
CHANGELOG:
v1.0.1:
- Fixed seed input (zeroes not always displayed) - Web port.
Sure, I'll start making it right now, I just didn't had the time to make the port yesterday (I coded it in pure ANSI C with the SDL and OpenGL so it takes a little bit of time).
Very interesting idea, but I agree with DropMania that the controls were unintuitive and the long wall of text at the beginning was pretty boring. Condensing it down to just "Use arrow keys to select anthills, press Space to assign troops" might make onboarding a bit more interesting
Interesting idea! I also love that it’s made from scratch using C and OpenGL. The web version didn’t work for me at first, but after a few refreshes, I got it going (could be my mistake too). Gj!
Interesting game! The concept of playing with ants is pretty neat. I'm not a big fan of the wall of text with a text font that was quite hard to read (maybe that's just me though for the font, I'm not fond of reading anyway). I also thought it was a little hard to understand the mechanics and the controls, and just figure out what to do... maybe the fact that I didn't read the wall of text has something to do with it haha. I did like what I saw with a lot of ants on screen though. Nice work done here gg!
Oh ok, I made it very bold because someone told me once that my thin font (in a NES homebrew game) was hard to read on CRTs, so I'm making bold pixel art fonts since, but maybe it's an issue specific to CRTs :rofl:.
At first I had no idea what was going on but I got around and beat it twice. It's somewhat self explanatory. Had no problems with the web version. Also, always happy to find a game not using a big engine!
The font is a little rough to read. The game seems to launch you right into it and is quite a sensory overload. It wasn't immediately clear to me which ants were mine. I think the menus for controlling the ants could use some reworking, even if all you do is make it so you order 10 at a time. Somehow I won, though.
+1 for the Linux build! Unfortunately I couldn't get it to run, because it seems to want SDL bundled with the build, but it isn't, and I haven't got it installed and set up a path for it locally.
The web build didn't work for me either, so for the time being I can't really rate this.
I feel like the tutorial at the beginning was a bit hard to follow as it asks you to remember a lot before even seeing the game.
The gameplay felt innovative, although i wasn't able to get much of a feeling of how to strategize (aside from sending tons of ants to the enemy hills)
Quite cool for 48 hours tho! Strategy games are hard to do!
Good idea! Tho i always have problems with strategy games so i got killed almost instaintly Also adding andt one by one to a task at first was really exausting, maybe adding +10 to the choosing meny would be benefitial Overall, nice! Also - a strategy game for a compo? You are a madman.. Respect!
Fun game, I really liked playing it. I have similar feedback to other people here: the font in tutorial was hard to read and it would be nice to be able to add more ants at once to a given task.
This was a bit confusing. Every time I added ants to gather food and opened my nest none were assigned to the food gathering and I think they all just died? Nice to see a strategy game here. It's not an easy genre to do for sure. The best way to improve for the next jam would be to use mouse controls. Clicking on the nests and moving around the map with a mouse would make this a lot easier to grasp. Also then you could make the nest menu a bit easier to use with +1, +10, +100 buttons etc. I liked the retro graphics and the big ant sprites! Good job
Super impressive given how it was made. I feel like being locked to only viewing the anthills deprived me of getting a better sense of the context of the game, wonder if tile-based movement/selection would've been better (probably not feasible given the time constraint, like mouse controls). Maybe I missed it, but what purpose does food do? I had a bunch of food but I never gained any more ants or anything like that. Overally, wish it was a bit easier to digest, but very impressed by the scope and content of the game regardless, great job!
Comments25
I'll check your game out.
I think the idea is interesting tho.
Oh ok, I made it very bold because someone told me once that my thin font (in a NES homebrew game) was hard to read on CRTs, so I'm making bold pixel art fonts since, but maybe it's an issue specific to CRTs :rofl:.
The web build didn't work for me either, so for the time being I can't really rate this.
I feel like the tutorial at the beginning was a bit hard to follow as it asks you to remember a lot before even seeing the game.
The gameplay felt innovative, although i wasn't able to get much of a feeling of how to strategize (aside from sending tons of ants to the enemy hills)
Quite cool for 48 hours tho! Strategy games are hard to do!
Keep up the good work
I'm happy you enjoyed it! Thanks!
@mars
Have you installed SDL1.2, SDL_image and SDL_mixer? Maybe try building it from source by running the build.sh shell script.
What didn't worked in the web build?
Also adding andt one by one to a task at first was really exausting, maybe adding +10 to the choosing meny would be benefitial
Overall, nice! Also - a strategy game for a compo? You are a madman.. Respect!
> adding andt one by one to a task at first was really exausting
I should be letting the user keep the key pressed, but it was a bit more complicated and I didn't found the time to.
When I think about it I should have used the same input code as for the seed.
Overall thanks for your very constructive feedback
Nice to see a strategy game here. It's not an easy genre to do for sure. The best way to improve for the next jam would be to use mouse controls. Clicking on the nests and moving around the map with a mouse would make this a lot easier to grasp. Also then you could make the nest menu a bit easier to use with +1, +10, +100 buttons etc.
I liked the retro graphics and the big ant sprites! Good job
I know, it would have made it way better, but I wrote it in C from the ground up with SDL and OpenGL. I never handled mouse inputs with it.
I should really make myself a game engine...
Thanks a lot for your very complete comment!
> Maybe I missed it, but what purpose does food do?
If you run out of food your anthill gets damaged.
The increase of your ant population depends on the number of ants staying in the anthill. If you have no more ants in your hill, no ants will be born.