It is definitely something we need to solve and is on our radar. These has been worse ones with whole groups of ants. We are having some trouble with the crowd management system in UE4 which is what sometimes causes blockage. Thanks for giving it a go, we appreciate the feedback will add it to the big feedback document. I still love the theme and I'm looking forward to a new build! I dont know if I missed something, or if the enemies are too strong (or the soldiers too weak? they were dying almost instantly) but after 5 losses, it felt a bit unbalanced. Even with that, I could only kill one enemy when I came across a group of 3 and my colony got destroyed as well I only built a really small food storage and spent all my resources on creating soldiers (no workers at all). As soon as I met the enemies, my colony got eradicated instantlyįor the next 4 games, I tried to maximize the amount of soldiers. Maybe I'm just bad, but I kept losing to the Staphylinidae (if that's what the big black enemies insects are).įor my first game, I built a big room for food storage, then another one for the worker ants, and only a few soldiers. The only issue I had with the game, is the difficulty. Just once, two ants were blocked together, but when I alt-tabbed to paste my screenshot in paint and came back ingame, they were not blocked anymore.
I played 5 games and didnt really experience any major bugs. The graphics are really nice and except a few things that you probably know already, I dont have much to say about it, it just looks nice I downloaded and tried the game yesterday. These ones will burrow from the ground where you need them and so can have a more direct impact on the fight. We bring a little micro in with what we are calling specialist ants. You can assign certain ants to certain tasks, but they go about doing it themselves. We do have a plan with the mind control fungus also, couldn't make an ant game and not include it! so and ant gets into a cart and is transported to an attack point on the creatures back. The current system we have for doing it involves invisible carts. The complicated bit of that is getting the ants to crawl over the back of it. I suspect we will have reptiles and arachnids in before the end. We have a system half implemented for large insects we are calling titans of the undergrowth. Diversity of species was always one of our goals and seems to be something people are not aware of. It did not do too well bug many remember it fondly. There was another ant game people talk about, Empire of the Ants. If you notice anything in the demo build that you think would improve the game please do let us know, we are always looking to make it better. We appreciate feedback and questions about the project. Matt and Liam have just finished their PhDs and so are dedicating more time to the game and I (John) have taken my non-game work hours down to part time so we can progress faster. The game concept we came up with gave us the final push we needed to go ahead and do it. It was there that we first started talking about founding our own games studio. We are 3 friends who met back in school and stayed together through university. Over the next couple of months we are hoping to have all the basic features in so a complete level should be playable. You can get hold of the demo build of the underground on our IndieDB page We are working on getting all the surface features in currently.
You can upgrade them by playing one-off missions, sometimes with your home colony and sometimes with other ant species.We are building the game in Unreal Engine 4 and have the underground section pretty much sorted. The primary game mode in early access is Formicarium, where you take ownership of a home colony of unique DNA-harvesting ants as they work to assimilate the desirable traits of their foes. Missions are narrated from the perspective of a documentary film maker studying the ants, who offers intelligent insight into the goings-on of the colony and the undergrowth beyond. Nest design, army size, composition and attack timing are key to securing victory. On the surface, the ants claim territory, gather resources, overwhelm fearsome arachnids and clash with other colonies.
The player excavates their nest underground, constructing tunnels and chambers to store food and raise brood. Empires of the Undergrowth is an ant colony management game, in a fast-paced real-time strategy style.