ant ocracy
A downloadable game
Play Online:
Or purchase the extra maps and full campaign
Grow Your Colony
You are a queen ant starting a new colony from scratch. Lay eggs, feed the larva that hatch from them, and eventually raise broods of worker ants that act independently and self-organize to locate food and recruit other ants to help them retrieve it. Your workers will also help raise additional larva, fight enemy critters and enemy ants, and move dirt out of areas you've marked for pickup and place them in areas you've marked for putting down.
Upgrade Your Queen
As your colony grows in number, you'll be offered opportunities to unlock additional abilities for your queen like the ability to emit different kinds of pheromones to influence worker behavior (see screenshot of upgrades). Focus on making your queen a powerful warrior with a Dash attack and more hitpoints, or focus on upgrades that make your colony grow as fast as you can, or unlock additional castes of workers with different sizes and abilities.
Dominate the Environment
Collect food from all corners of the map. Kill critters to feed your larva, or direct water towards vines that will grow and sprout food. Zoom out to view your colony from afar (second screenshot) or stay zoomed in for finer detail. Compete with the Red Ants for territory and steal their larva for yourself. But watch out for the Giant Foot!
If you die you must start over! So keep the queen protected at all costs.
There are global leaderboards for getting to 250 ants fastest, most ants, and most Young Queens. Record your high score!
This game is a website, but please donate if you like it!
How do the ants decide what to do?
Each worker ant acts totally independently, but with the use of pheromones of different kinds they can influence each other to coordinate their behavior. As you unlock additional pheromones then you can use the queen to lead your ants. Ants react to each pheromone type differently based on their task. For example, ants that are carrying food will move towards higher concentrations of the Colony pheromone, while ants that are retrieving food outside the colony will move away from Colony pheromone and towards Food pheromone.
Background
I've been obsessed with ants since childhood and this game is the result of much research on ant behavior. I was particularly influenced by the work of E.O. Wilson, Deborah Gordon, and Mark Moffett.
Development log
- New Challenge Level!Apr 09, 2021
Comments
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Hello, Antocracy creator here, I have a small but mighty (just like ants!) discord where you can post cool screenshots or give bug reports. I'll give updates there more regularly than here.
https://discord.gg/MW96uVkprg
Bug: i dont have screenshots but some of my ants went insane in an area and were alarmed forever. please fix it.
+i reccomend adding a nanitic caste which are the first 10 workers.
oof sorry about that bug! I'll try to beef up the pheromone decay system before I release the full version.
Also good call on having nanitic workers. I have something like this planned as an upgradeable ability for the campaign mode I'm working on. Stay tuned!
Bug report: I don't know if this is already known but some times my ai ants don't drop the food their holding even thou they are in the range of the token. If it would help I could try and redo and try and make it happen again to get more info.
Thanks for this. These "traffic jams" used to be a lot more common, but I made it so ants could put something down even when another ant is there, and it just pushes the ant out of the way (including the queen). I thought this change would have fixed it so I'll need to play around more to reproduce your issue.
As an in-game workaround, you can use Alert pheromone to make them drop everything to kind of reset their task.
I tried the alert pheromone, but at least for me it didn't work well because they would (for the most part) just pick the food back up :/
I've got what I think is the same bug, but the ants aren't in the range of the token and have a clear path to it. (ants on left have food and token is under the pile of food)
When I placed some eggs down they fixed and just went to go feed them. Which makes me think the problem has something to do with the part of the code that handles that, but I could be wrong.
Thanks for looking more into it. Yeah ants carrying food will switch to feeding larva if there are new larva that need to be fed. The example you sent in these screenshots seems like it might be a different issue... or I didn't properly understand the original issue.
I wonder if the next time you run into this, you can pause, then open the console and enter:
JSON.stringify(store.getState().game)
which will dump the game state into a giant string that you could share with me via like pastebin.com or something I can try to mess around with it? I've never actually transferred the game state that way but it just miiight work haha
I'm playing it online do I have to download it to do that?
Also I have a discord which may be a good way to share stuff like that.
Discord: REMOVED TO AVOID SPAM.
I might have killed the spider with the red ants...
Now you're thinking! And only 2 survived so all the food is yours
Yeah what I did is open a diagonal path to the spider so it would be easy to close and so if they picked up food they wouldn't be able to find home and could be easily killed.
Edit: This is about how I did it.
I got foooooooooood.
An ant hill made entirely of food!
:)
Great game and hope you do a lot with it (including harder levels), but some people I think have found a way to cheat because on the undergrowth someone has a "record" of almost 2000 ants in under one and a half minutes.
Nick, you're the first person to beat the game who I didn't introduce it to myself. Thank you for playing and commenting!
Yeah I've been trying to figure out how they're getting such high scores... It might be a bug I introduced (and not the in-game kind, haha).
I'm working on a paid version now which will have ~20 additional upgrades ~15 additional levels and a campaign. So stay tuned for that.
If you have any other feedback or suggestions I'd love to hear more!
I enjoy the game a lot which is why I play it a lot and I will almost definitely buy the paid version when it comes out. P.S. Also if you would like a beta tester I would be interested in being one.
Edit: Also the AI ants and termites should be able to dig I think.
EPIC GAME