My Virtual Ants now grow from Larvae

I'm creating a game where you

grow

a colony of

ants

and this time I've taught you all about the industry. They can now harvest raw materials, convert them into items and weapons of various types, and transport them between buildings as needed. Now I also have to find a food source so they can hatch, which will then become new

ants

. That's how it all works first. I made these little reservation icons for your buildings. Each building can now collect resources of a particular type and convert them into something else, so here your Castle is collecting food and crafting that food in Lai now, of course, they are not crafted, hatched or hatched, but to keep things consistent each time you convert one type of resource into a different one.

I will say that creating other buildings like this archery range can then request resources here, you are requesting some of those Lavi that are transported from the nearest reserve. This mechanic is called transportation and it happens automatically, the lvi will then become archery. ants and can turn into different types of ants depending on the building they've been transported to, so these two new crafting and transportation mechanics together create a foundation that I'll use to build a more complex game now that the industry already exists. In some of my previous prototypes I came up with a ton of ideas about different things you could create, buildings that would create them and also how all the byproducts from each would be put together and recycled, but for now I've scrapped most of them so I can focus on The basics, the most important thing is to give the ants a way to collect food and a way to fight predators, so I designed two new types of buildings: The log cabin will gather all kinds of different plant bits. and turn them into high quality wood, this wood will then be used as arrows in the archery ranges and the nursery will collect food and hatch more ivy just like your castle does, but the difference is that you can only have one castle building , is where your queen ant lives, so you'll need these nursery buildings to increase the ant generation rate as your colony

grow

s.

Here you can see these new buildings in action. Ants can be directed towards the right types of resources using the pheromone trail mechanics that Last time I added that notice how nurseries get a bunch of forager ants as soon as you place them, but all other buildings, like the log cabin , they will need to be supplied with lari to increase their population first. Both buildings will then be powered. At the archery range to stock and restock each archer is given a limited number of shots and once those shots have been spent they will have to return to the range and reload which costs another wood so the range will need a regular. wood supply and therefore it makes sense to build particular weapon types near the resources that replenish them and speaking of weapon types, I thought this all went pretty well so let's add a second industry type as well, this one new Pottery building will collect clay and then turn that clay into vessels and then the Armory building will equip the ants with these vessels.

My idea was that we can make the ants wear the pots as helmets and this will make their melee attacks much stronger and maybe protect them as well. Also due to some damage, I felt it was very important to make it obvious what each building does at a glance so you can't follow everything and that's why the pottery looks like a pot and the Armory looks like a helmet. I also put these little teardrop shaped lines under the eyes of the helmet just to give it a little more detail, but the charcoal eater on the Discord server had a better idea by replacing them with vines in a similar pattern and I think it looks much better this way.

We are also going to need a new ant design and this can be tricky because the ants are actually very small so the design has to be very simple and clean. After some testing I found that adding this horizontal stripe to the pot really helps separate the outlines if there are a lot of pot ants next to each other, you may have also noticed that I changed the color of the arch on the archer ants. A bunch of people left comments on the last video saying that the black arches were too hard to see against the grass, so after choosing this nice warm brown, let me know if this is an improvement for you anyway.

Here is the clay industry in action. All that's left now is to create some new sound effects and create your combat animations. Made the boats also run out after several hits, just like arrows work, but as an extra touch on the final attack, when the hot smash will count as a critical hit and that means it deals triple damage, which helps to distinguish the arrows from the pots a little, but to be honest, they still needed to be much more unique. Ideally, there should be many different types of enemies in the game and each type of enemy should be particularly vulnerable to certain weapons which will create a lot of strategy, so I quickly created two new types of enemies, Beatles and flies.

These graphics are just temporary while I test out the new features, um, so I'm going to avoid making complicated animations for them just yet, uh, but the idea is that the Beatles are going to resist the arrows because of their thick armor and the flies are going to resist melee attacks due to his fast movement, so let's discuss this first. I separated damage into two different types, bludgeoning and sharp, and each enemy type can have different resistances or weaknesses. to these different guys, the Beatles are going to resist sharp damage and the arrows will just bounce off them this way and when they bounce they do 80% less damage and the archers will defeat the beetle eventually, but it's not efficient and you're going to spend a lot ammo and time doing so, on the other hand, the pots deal bludgeoning damage that can bypass the Beatles' armor, so the pot ants are much better at fighting them, however, the pot ants will have a hard time hitting them. the flies.

See here that sometimes they hit this little particle effect I added that shows when a hit happens and so they will eventually take out the flies but it will take a long time and on the other hand archery is very fast and accurate, so they are going to hit most of the shots they shoot at the flies and to take this a step further I also did heavy damage and critical hits to the flies and this means you can actually take them out. with a single arrow each, so depending on what types of enemies are attacking your colony, you will now be much better off responding with particular types of ants, that's all I did this time and now it's time to start thinking about the next steps.

I've added a lot of mechanics to the game at this point, but still the game as a whole lacks structure. I'm going to have to add money and a building menu, also a daily cycle where new waves of monsters appear every day. and also some kind of victory condition, so it's a lot of bits and Bobs, but if I do them all, the game will start to become much more playable and then we can gradually move towards the next free prototype. I'll be back with my Progress in a few weeks, so be sure to press the right button and vibrate the Dingle and if you want to get more involved in the development, join the Discord server where I post my daily development log and you can also chat with me directly while I work. that's all for now thanks for watching