Idle Ant Farm
Collect Dirt -> Use dirt to upgrade ants -> Ants expand the hive faster
UPGRADES
Buy Ant = Spawn in a new ant
Speed = Movement Speed of the ants
Production = Free ant spawn rate
Multiplier = how much each collected dirt provides
Created as part of a graduate research project. The results of the study can be found in the attached PDF file.
Thanks for trying this small game of mine!
Download
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Development log
- The Idle Ant Farm Experiment69 days ago
- Minor Updates93 days ago
Comments
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Needs to be able to work in the background, but is a nice demo.
This game is amazing! I'm currently working on a small experiment about ants for my year-end thesis, and the way you've simulated this ant colony is exactly what I need. Could you please share a bit about your food-finding algorithm? Please! Do you use ECS? How were you able to create thousands of grid cells and have 300 ants moving around without any lag?
I'll share more in depth info publically in a week or two on how the behavior works. I don't use ECS actually but would be a good optimization if I wanted to push it even further. The entire world is a grid of nodes in memory that is just its type (dirt or empty) and some other bits of info. This data is rendered to a texture rather than each being a separate entity. When a node changes type, it changes the corresponding pixel on the texture. Basically the ants are modifying pixels on a canvas. An ant is always located at the center of a node and makes decisions moving one node at a time or deciding whether to dig a dirt next to herself. There's more info I can share if you'd like to DM me on Discord (justicefied) or something. Excited to see the results of your thesis as well! The world needs more cool ant simulators.
Nice game :)