Pzants

I made it home! The presentation is well done. I like the concept of the signal mechanic more than how I ended up using it. The followers would scatter at any hole instead of going it, and I couldn't call them back until they came back after the gauge drained. The fireballs were enough to get me to the end, I do like the sound cue of a spider showing up. The fancy ant design is cute as well.

I had fun with the game, though I didn't end up really understanding the pzazz mechanic. The spiders ran at me instead of the other ants, so I could just kite backwards and kill them with the fireballs, without ever needing to command the other ants at all. Maybe I missed something, but I did get the three starter ants back home and killed a lot of spiders.

Playing as a fire ant feels super fresh, and I really loved the ambient sound design. Every time I spotted a spider I got a little tense, but thankfully the combat's pretty forgiving. A really solid, creative effort!

I enjoyed the overall presentation, and the game has a nice feel to it. The signal idea is interesting, though in my run it was a little hard to use the way I expected. It seems like the fireballs are powerful enough. GJ and keep it up.

Great work after only a few weeks in Godot! Very impressive effort. I have to admit, I never found my way home. I lost many good ants, however, and ended up going full one-ant-army on those spiders. Nice game!

Considering you only discovered Godot and Aseprite two weeks ago, that’s impressive work. The graphics, the sound, the gameplay, the game already has a strong artistic vision. Congrats :)

Really interesting! I'll admit I had trouble with the signaling and all but I found this quite enjoyable! Amazing presentation overall!

Nice little game, I liked the concept of ants shooting fireballs, that's cool af. Like another commenter I didn't find the reason to hide my ants since the spiders just went for me however I liked the idea.

Really appreciate the constructive feedback we've been getting. Admittedly the concept of using the signal to hide the other ants turned out to be a little bit ambitious and difficult to properly implement given the lack of experience and still learning mid jam. Pretty excited though to keep learning and see what we can come up with and complete the next time around.

I immediately panicked when I saw ants haha but I played it and it's well done! The art is cute, I love the big shovel. I would have liked more cute foods to eat as well. Nice work!

Very nice game and art. Cool game!

Cute sprites, i didn't feel like needing to use the pizzaz at all, maybe more ant hills and more agressive enemies could have helped that. At least all ants made it home ^^

Regarding the pzazz mechanic I can only agree to what has been said already. But! It's still very impressive for your first game! The vision is there and if you two continue down this path, great things will come of it 😊

The whole atmosphere is really cute and the nature sounds were a great addition that does so much for the game! I really did feel like a tiny creature (the shovel, omg!)!

I'll share one little piece of Godot wisdom for games with "2D top-down 3/4 perspective" with you:

- make all visible objects in the game world (ants, mushrooms, grass etc.) children of a CanvasItem (or a derived node, e. g. Node2D)
- enable Y Sorting (under CanvasItem > Ordering)
- change the offset of all Sprite nodes (or their parent) to the bottom of the sprite (instead of center)
- the rendering order will now be determined by the y position of the objects instead of position in the tree, thus objects "nearer" to our vision will appear in front of objects "further" away
- you can now reduce the size of hitboxes to the part you would actually collide with (e. g. the base of the mushrooms) so you can walk behind the parts that are "higher up" (like you have already excluded the top of the mushrooms from the hitbox, now you could also exclude the stems)

Keep going, you've laid a strong foundation! :heart:

@purrseus this is amazing feedback, thank you! We're both software engineers so we were able to code ourselves out of some corners but have zero game dev experience. It was little things like that, that I knew felt off but couldn't even really put into words to find answers to. We're both looking forward to learning more and having another go in October!

Yay, finally made it to the mound! Really cool little game, simply and easy to get. Loved the little "pss" sound so you know predators were coming. The graphics gave me an old school vibe and overall atmosphere was quite calm and meditative. Really good play!

Interesting idea and realization, cute ants art style

I failed multiple times but I really enjoyed the concept, the sounds and art style was fun! cute ants

Congrats on you first ludum dare entry !

I'm not sure what was the point of the pzazz but I had a good time walking in the garden with my fellow ants and providing for the colony.

I would have loved a little more feedback about how much food I collected and ennemies I defeated. Some kind of high score at the end. And a little bit of screenshake can never hurt this kind of game.

Good job :)

Lovely game. Loved protecting my ants and collecting apples in this world. Very relaxing game despite the spiders attacking.

That’s a cool idea. Well done!

Impressive for a first! Congrats!

Animations and sound are well done. Also the gameplay ist a nice idea. A little bug (pun intended) here and there is acceptible. I think, if the spiders would mainly attack your companions, it would be more unique of a mechanic. Here it is relatively easy to get very far, because the spiders are easy to defeat before they even get to your companions.

I had a good time while playing and that is the main point ;)

I think this is a cute idea but maybe you couldn't fully realize it. The spiders were so easy to kill and there were so few holes (I must have seen like 2 or 3 in my entire playthrough, and the map is massive!) that I didn't feel like using pizazz would be worth it, the best strategy is to just ignore that mechanic and stay as far away from your ants as possible and gun down the spiders until you get to the end.

I think for this idea to work:

1. The spiders need to attack your ants, not the main character.
2. You'd need to have way more ants, so that you don't feel like losing a single ant is such a massive deal.
3. The camera would need to be way more zoomed out so you can see further ahead of you.
4. You can make your own holes instead of having to find them.

Good work on your first game! Now that you know the ropes around the software, I hope you'll keep creating more projects to perfect your game design skills as well!