Anthill Down

About the game

Anthill Down is a chill strategy/building game where you watch over your ants as they expand their territory, steal food from houses, and ultimately raid the house of the ant exterminator.

Try to complete the game in the shortest amount of time, with the highest score, with the smallest death toll, or just sit back and watch your ants go about their lives.

This game was created in one week by 3 crazy Swiss people. Our goal was to test out our workflow from start to finish, get back into Game Dev, and produce a quirky and unique little game.

The core logic of the game was inspired by Sebastian Lague's amazing Coding Adventure: Ant and Slime Simulations

How to Play

This information is available at all times in the game.

Camera

- Use the Middle Click to drag the camera around.

- Use the Scroll Wheel to zoom in and out

- Alternatively, you can move around with W A S D

Ants

- Ants go about their lives and leave pheromones behind. Their body and pheromone color should help you find out what they are/were up to

- Ants have stamina. Once it reaches zero, they die

Following ants

- Start following an ant with Ctrl + Left Click

- Stop following ants with Ctrl + Right Click

Controlling ants

- Once you follow an ant, you can take control and move it with W A S D

- If you stop moving for a while, the ant will take back control

- Alternatively, you can click on the Ant Head Icon at the bottom left of the screen to toggle the control state

- When controlling ants, their stamina drains twice as fast

Anthills

- Anthills produce ants every so often. The healthier the anthill, the faster it produces ants. Anthills slowly heal overtime is not abandoned

- You start every game with one anthill

- You can dispatch troops from anthills. Troops will look for houses to raid for a bit. If they don't find any, they will go back to work

- When controlling an ant, you can build an anthill anywhere by pressing B, or the Build button at the bottom left, as long as it’s not too close to houses and other anthills

- Once you asked the ant to build, you should bring it to well populated areas to try to recruit other ants to help you build. If you give it back control, it will attempt to get back home on it's own, recruiting people on the way

- If you run on low-end hardware, we recommend abandoning unused anthills as you progress towards the exterminator's house

Raids

- You can raid the houses on the map to gain food

- When the food is brought back to anthills, your score increases

- Anthills that recovered food heal faster, thus produce more ants

- Each house has a recommended number of ants to raid. You can try raiding it with less ants, but you troops are more likely to fail and perish

- Once you've depleted the house's food, the residents will go shopping, and food will be available again later

- The game comes to an end once you finish raiding the Exterminator's house

Reporters and Risks

- Once an anthill has recovered some food from houses, there is a chance it will breed a reporter ant

- Once the reporter ant is present at an anthill, it will report on natural disasters and murders happening around that anthill