Ant Simulator
The game encompasses an ant simulation, giving the player the ability to control an ant colony with a focus on realistic ant behavior algorithms.
The player controls an ant with which they can lead their colonies to victory versus competing colonies thought gathering food, defending your colony and leading attacks against opposition. Game play also features colony design, with decisions dictating efficiency and safety of the colony. |
Early Alpha Mechanics
To get all the ants moving and working as a swarm, we have decided to implement an agent based system. Currently we're working on getting the foraging mechanic down and improving the rates of food discovery and and survival (eg, not having them die out in the field). Once that's at a point we're happy with we're going to add more agents, making it a multi-agent system. Other ants with different behaviors we'd like to have include nursing ants, and warrior ants. We may go into further detail and add pure exploration ants or ants responsible for maintaining the ant hole.
Essentially, an agent based system has a set of entities (called agents) that each follow a predefined set of instructions given some factors like their environment or their internal variables. Then, each update, all of these entities are updated based on these simple rules, which gives rise to emergent behavior such as swarm behavior. Eg, no path finding or movement patterns in my ants are predefined.
One interesting outcome of this, is that you can naturally get fairly intelligent behavior. For example, if an ant finds food, it then returns to the colony placing a pheromone trail to indicate food was found, retracing its steps based on the pheromone trial it left on the way there. Each ant has a small likelihood of deviating from the food path. It gets interesting in that, over time, these small deviations result in a more direct path, and since the path is faster, more ants travel along it, and therefore place more pheromone. Overtime, the path is essentially optimized to be the shortest path, based only on agent behavior!
Essentially, an agent based system has a set of entities (called agents) that each follow a predefined set of instructions given some factors like their environment or their internal variables. Then, each update, all of these entities are updated based on these simple rules, which gives rise to emergent behavior such as swarm behavior. Eg, no path finding or movement patterns in my ants are predefined.
One interesting outcome of this, is that you can naturally get fairly intelligent behavior. For example, if an ant finds food, it then returns to the colony placing a pheromone trail to indicate food was found, retracing its steps based on the pheromone trial it left on the way there. Each ant has a small likelihood of deviating from the food path. It gets interesting in that, over time, these small deviations result in a more direct path, and since the path is faster, more ants travel along it, and therefore place more pheromone. Overtime, the path is essentially optimized to be the shortest path, based only on agent behavior!
Early Alpha Ideas
We're not sure if we should have a single ant digging the colony and the ants naturally deciding what areas to use for which purposes (food storage, hatching new ants, etc) – or – if we should allow the user to place either components, or simply designate tiles to certain functions. While the earlier is likely to produce more natural ant behaviour, the later we suspect might be more engaging. we're curious what other people think.
Above ground, we'd like to use a pheromone based system so that the player doesn't have direct control over their forager ants, but rather has to find food and lead them to it to naturally control their ants through the placement of pheromone. In particular, we think it would be neat (although not necessarily realistic ant behavior that we know of ) if you could interfere with the enemy ant colony by dropping misleading pheromone, eg. food pheromone leading them to dangers.
Above ground, we'd like to use a pheromone based system so that the player doesn't have direct control over their forager ants, but rather has to find food and lead them to it to naturally control their ants through the placement of pheromone. In particular, we think it would be neat (although not necessarily realistic ant behavior that we know of ) if you could interfere with the enemy ant colony by dropping misleading pheromone, eg. food pheromone leading them to dangers.