Messages

31

Computer Game Development - The Indie Alley / Re: Empires of the Undergrowth: A game about ants

« on: October 06, 2017, 02:55:03 PM »

Ha, thanks.  That was a lot of fun to put together, really hits hard what you let happen to your poor queen

I had no idea there was a sorting hat spider!!! We should have just changed all the spiders to this!  That really is an awesome little beast.  You are of course right about the hat having little effect on arachnophobes. That fact alone, I find quite hilarious (that we added the feature and it doesn't help at all)- though I think some people are quite serious about not wanting to be scared by spiders.  The idea came up (though may not be implemented for some time yet) to have an "arachnophobia slider":  The higher you set your arachnophobia, the bigger the top hat is, and on maximum it is just a big mobile top hat.

Obviously we don't want to get too side tracked pouring time into that, not when ants are still getting themselves stuck on nest entrances.. Damn 3d pathfinding. 

32

Computer Game Development - The Indie Alley / Re: Empires of the Undergrowth: A game about ants

« on: October 04, 2017, 01:46:02 PM »

We are fast closing on our closed beta and early access release.  It's making me very itchy.  There is still no demo update but we are considering producing another just after release with the latest, much needed optimizations.

I have a nice selection of images and videos for the last month of progress here, things are really coming on:
http://slugdisco.com/september-newsletter/

 

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Computer Game Development - The Indie Alley / Re: Empires of the Undergrowth: A game about ants

« on: July 14, 2017, 12:38:41 PM »

Awesome description, thanks!  I will let our friends know, I'm sure I know some people who would be particularly interested in Township.

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Computer Game Development - The Indie Alley / Re: Empires of the Undergrowth: A game about ants

« on: July 07, 2017, 05:32:37 PM »

Sounds great .

No need to visit the forum, you have enough to deal with here. The main thing is that its working out quite nicely with the fans, I look forward to dealing with hordes of spam on the boards when the game releases.

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Computer Game Development - The Indie Alley / Re: Empires of the Undergrowth: A game about ants

« on: June 28, 2017, 01:23:01 PM »

What an awesome floating beast! This reminds me, we promised fire ant rafts to our backers.  There is a long road of development still to go  .

Although the game doesn't really focus on arachnids, they will no doubt become a major feature and I love making contacts with people interested in the game from a more scientific outreach / biology perspective.  We exhibited the demo at ENTOSCI 2016 (entomology conference for schools) and that went down really well (mostly because we were the only ones with a computer game in a hall of school children.. haha).

We are really busy at the moment as you can imagine, but more opportunities to showcase the game to a niche crowd are always welcome.  If she knows of any events / competitions etc, especially where younger people might be involved, and where promoting a video game wouldn't be frowned upon (that can be a tricky one in this setting), I would be very interested to know.

By the way Jubal - the forum you advised us on is trundling along quite happily.  It isn't growing much anymore but we have some regular visitors now.  It should look nicely established by the time we release the game so thanks for the help with that! -> http://forum.eotugame.com/

36

Computer Game Development - The Indie Alley / Re: Empires of the Undergrowth: A game about ants

« on: June 27, 2017, 09:31:23 AM »

This is Arctosa littoralis, also known as a Beach Wolf Spider. Her and her spiderlings cause problems for a wood ant colony trying to establish a nest on the beach.  I want to add quite a few more spiders eventually, everyone who played Sim Ant seems to remember the big spider.  For early access we are working on one more spider, Segestria florentina, who is quite different.  She makes funnel webs in cracks and holes, the player will find her underground.

37

Computer Game Development - The Indie Alley / Re: Empires of the Undergrowth: A game about ants

« on: June 26, 2017, 02:16:41 PM »

Ahh its a shame you couldn't get it working.  That is quite an old card, its worse than integrated intel graphics available these days (which are also not really recommended for gaming). 

We are not entirely sure what the spec requirement will be yet.  So far we have listed "nVidia GeForce GTX 660 2GB / AMD Radeon HD 7850 2GB" as the minimum.  It might run with lower spec hardware than that, to a point, but this should give you some idea.

Whilst you are pricing up your new rig, here is a video of our new wolf spider 

38

Forum Games - The Beer Cellar! / Re: Guess Who Will Post Next... II!

« on: June 11, 2017, 12:40:43 AM »

Nope,
Glaurung is after me

39

Computer Game Development - The Indie Alley / Re: Empires of the Undergrowth: A game about ants

« on: April 27, 2017, 02:48:57 PM »

Definitely, It needs a little queen or a house or something like that yeah.

40

Computer Game Development - The Indie Alley / Re: Empires of the Undergrowth: A game about ants

« on: April 26, 2017, 04:36:21 PM »

The home group is a strange thing that is left over from before you could actually control the ants with pheromone markers. In the first demo of the game, all you could do was build and the ants were entirely autonomous.  There were no groups and all workers would do jobs including building, digging, carrying eggs, and collecting food automatically; soldiers could only fight and would go toward the nearest enemy, wherever it was.

We then introduced 1 group marker just for soldiers as an experiment (and decreased their aggro range from encompassing the whole map, to just a few tiles), people really appreciated this control.  After that, multiple groups appeared and we muddied the waters with regard to who can do what: we let workers fight, and we let soldiers collect food.

As soldiers could collect food, it started to feel like food shouldn't be universally visible to the ants, and so in the same way as we did for combat, we reduced food detection range to just a few tiles - you must now tell ants to go near food with the marker or they wont collect it.

The three other jobs that only worker ants can do: digging, building and egg carrying are still universally visible (wherever the job is, they will do it).  This is controlled by a 'job manager' that calculates the most efficient distribution of jobs within the nest and then assigns them to workers accordingly; updating periodically and swapping jobs if necessary (see the travelling salesman problem). The job manager also checks if the worker is in a group, and has its pheromone marker placed down: if the marker is not near the job, the job manager won't assign it.  This means if all of your workers are in a group, and that group marker is set in location A, and you dig in location B (far away), no one will come to dig.

If you put your workers in the nest group (or any group with its pheromone marker currently disabled) - the job manager will automatically tell them to take eggs to tiles in an efficient manner.

If you want your workers to prioritise taking eggs to a specific room, you can actually use the pheromone marker to send them to that room; the job manager will then only give them nearby jobs, and they will fill up that room first.  Though, this would probably be a very specific scenario emerging possibly in a future build (say you had a small room of highly upgraded tiles, or specialist ants, and you wanted those replenished before any others).

The nice thing about this whole system is that as long as you tell the player to "keep some workers in the home group", even if they don't really understand the mechanisms behind everything, they can play the game fairly well and it feels quite intuitive.  However, when someone wants to really figure out how to do something efficiently, they need all of this explained properly - and the above is going to be difficult to get across in a short tutorial.  We will try though.

41

Computer Game Development - The Indie Alley / Re: Empires of the Undergrowth: A game about ants

« on: April 25, 2017, 02:19:41 PM »

Food tiles have actually begun to annoy us as they don't really seem to serve much purpose game-wise. If I was to start again, I would just have the ants bring food to the queen, but they have sort of become woven in and will probably be more trouble than it's worth to remove them.  - You are of course using them as any good strategy player should (putting them near by food as you move further from the queen).  I don't really like this and we are coming up with some quick ways to combat it in future.  Our first plan is to have food tiles be very expensive, but with reduced cost for each neighbouring food tile (so investing in a large food chamber is more sensible than small satellite ones).  This should at least reduce the number of random food tiles that players put wherever they please.  Future plans include having creatures that steal food, and the ability to create food networks (jobs for ants to move food from one storage area to another).

For hatching areas - the workers (primarily those in the far left "home" group) will take eggs from the queen to the tiles, which then hatch at the cost of some food and are then replaced, again by the workers.  Short distance from the queen helps with this, and you start to feel it when you have big nests and are replenishing 30-40 ants after a big battle.  Another thing to consider will be tile upgrades.  Although not available at the moment, if you hold down AltGr, you can see the level of the tiles (graphical representation of level is a WIP).  A tile's level is increased by surrounding tiles and walls; once it reaches a certain level, then you will be allowed to upgrade it (which then in turn increases the level of all those it touches).  This will promote large rooms, enclosed by walls in the final game.  Another thing to be introduced that will effect nest architecture will be that ants will move more slowly over hatchery / food tiles.  This will encourage the player to create corridors with satellite rooms, so that when the ant paths to a location, they avoid built tiles and hence move more quickly.  So even though digging out a massive area will allow ants to travel in straight lines, they wont be as efficient as they would if you had created a network of tunnels.  Hopefully this will organically lead to people building nests that feel more realistic.

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Computer Game Development - The Indie Alley / Re: Empires of the Undergrowth: A game about ants

« on: April 24, 2017, 10:03:48 AM »

Awesome feedback, thanks!

What you say about it being "scenario driven" hits a chord with me.  We have been aware of this for a while and although I was working on a full blown bot colony AI, it has taken a back seat for the moment as we ramp up to early access (which will be primarily scenario driven).  The fact is that it is much easier for us to make engaging content in this way than create a balanced bot AI that changes tactics.  The plan is to release 4 new scenario style missions for early access (with a bit more of a story, including narration), and a "pet formicarium" mode, which is a bit more free and the danger is controlled by the player.  After that, I want to pour effort back into the bot AI and developing a nice skirmish mode.

I have noticed all sorts of things happening with graphics on first boot of the game.  We need to look into that prior to release. As for your fan - it is a pretty heavy game. We have been working on getting the CPU load down: the main culprits here are movement, collision and individual ant behaviour AI.  The GPU load is also high; this is a symptom of having free reign of UE4 graphics.  There are still optimizations to be made there, but the main thing I think we want to do is make sure that lower graphics settings still look nice (we haven't paid much attention to anything below maximum so far).

Having more info on the species is really important - as they are real species. Hovering over for their name seems sensible - also there is health bar info if you hold down "alt", perhaps that could include some stats too. We want a creature wiki in the game anyway to give all of this information but that's not so helpful in the heat of battle.

Clarity on how to use your ants is understandably difficult.  When I watch people play on Youtube, I find it incredibly frustrating "NO NOT LIKE THAT, YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG".  Totally our fault as we have no tutorial yet. Distribution of ants in your groups has a massive effect on colony efficiency, and arguably the most important group (the "home" group) is unlabeled.

More tactical options should emerge as we include more ant species.  The next one planned is a type of wood ant, which sprays acid as a defense mechanism (so.. ranged ants  ). The introduction of tile-based upgrades should diversify your army more and effect who you want to send in first.

Again - with the scenario based missions, learning the level is a significant part of it.  Actually I don't like chamber shapes being unknown - I don't think we will be having long elaborate cave-ins in the next missions (unless they don't contain enemies).  You should always know if you are about to dig into danger (at least to a large extent).

Really appreciate you taking the time to give such a thorough breakdown of your experience!

43

Computer Game Development - The Indie Alley / Re: Empires of the Undergrowth: A game about ants

« on: April 23, 2017, 12:07:31 PM »

That's great. You seem to give everything a go

One day it would be nice to have mod support too. A few people have already expressed an interest in making their own scenarios.

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Computer Game Development - The Indie Alley / Empires of the Undergrowth: A game about ants

« on: April 22, 2017, 10:39:44 AM »

I have been working on an ant colony management game for a while now and posted around here a few times in relation to that.  We just put out a new demo (with some much overdue performance enhancements) and so it seems like a good time to do an announcement about it in the indie alley.  You can grab the demo (0.064) for Windows here: http://www.indiedb.com/games/empires-of-the-undergrowth/downloads

It's a bit like the original dungeon keeper, crossed with sim ant. I stress "a bit like", I don't know if we can truly do either of those immortal titles justice. 

You start each level with a queen and a couple of worker ants, and you have to build up from there.  You need to gather food, build more workers and soldiers, and most importantly, defend your queen.  Currently in the demo, you can only explore underground maps - but you can see overground in action on our steam "coming soon" page. http://store.steampowered.com/app/463530

This is how the underground looks (after a lot of digging)


And here is a shot of the overground (the beach)


Our team is really small, there are just three of us, and only one gets to work on the project full-time (slowly eating away at our modest kickstarter pile). We have to try and do as much as we can on a tiny budget. That includes making our own sound effects:

If you have any trouble with the demo or have any feedback or anything else, let me know 

45

Creative and Project Hub - The River Docks / Re: Building a community forum around an indie game

« on: February 17, 2017, 12:49:22 PM »

I can only hope our forum does well enough to become bogged down with bans and appeals! 

You are right about posting in the Indie Alley, I have been meaning to get around to that.  I was putting it off until our next demo was ready, the currently available one is not well optimized so you need a fairly decent machine to get the most out of it.  Also one of the sound effects added in was accidentally set 10x louder than it should be.  Scares everyone to death.

The problem is, between demos, everything comes apart and turns into a building site - so it's not so easy to produce a fresh build even for the sake of changing the volume of a sound effect.  We could roll back, but it seems like the time is better spent elsewhere.  Always roll forward, never back!