Abysmal Ants: Mining But Cooler

A game about abysmal ants, mining and high-level management, created for Ludum Dare 48.

Game jam theme

Deeper and deeper

Game idea / Story

At an undefined place, deep inside an abstract world, abysmal entities exist! Spawn new entities, gather food and explore the world in order to expand your colony!

Behind the scenes

For this jam the team grouped around the idea of making a game where you have high-level control over AI entities. We came up with the idea of managing a hive of abysmal ants, deep underground. You start with a base and can spawn ants with different stats. Depending on the stats, they'll be good at and will try to perform different tasks. Our artists also came up with the idea of making the ants look distinct, based on their highest stats or whether everything's in balance.

We also added other AI-controller colonies somewhere on the map, that the player eventually encounters. Unfortunately we didn't have time to implement ant fighting, but it's still cool to look at the other colonies and how they expand. :)

The team

Georgy Angelov - design, programming

Pulni (me) - design, programming

BloodyStupidViktor - programming

Virimine - environment art, UI, shaders

NefiLouko - character art

My role

Programming: In this game jam I was mostly focused on programming. I started the AI part then Georgy took over and I switched to implementing some other smaller features, integrated the assets from our artists and helped them with whatever was needed.

Game design: I participated in that as well, but it was largely a team effort.