Ant related anecdote (dare I say ant-cdote): The other day I was reading in my courtyard and kept seeing ants walking back and forth carrying these huge black balls which turned out to be other live ants. I followed an empty handed ant for a while but lost him in a patch of ivy. I think they were engaged in a behavior called social carrying https://www.antwiki.org/wiki/Social_Carrying .

TIL! I've read through some of the articles on AntWiki but not this one :) Thanks for sharing. Maybe I need my ants to be able to walk on and carry other ants!

SimAnt! Now that brings back some memories!

> and then deny the ability to provide ant care unless users engage in a breathwork/meditation exercise

Little surprise twist there!

:) SimAnt was the first game I played at home on a SNES, super fond memories of it. I watched a talk by Will Wright a while ago, from 96, on the development of SimAnt! It was super inspiring. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsxoZXaYJSk&t=1740s

And yeah, it's a bit of a hodgepodge of ideas. I started with a goal of helping people, not making a video game, but ultimately decided that taking the help to where it's needed made the most sense. So, now I'm trying to find ways to package up mental health help and deliver it to techie/gamer folks :)

If you want to be scientifically accurate; most of the time queen doesn't do work. It's workers/foragers that collect food and do most of the work. I have done research with for few years, if you want any suggestions on these aspects.

The queen stops moving once she starts giving birth and lets the workers do the nest expansion/feed her :) She also digs a smaller initial chamber than the workers. It would be nice to give her some slow movement though. Just roughly approximating for now. I also don't have her creating nanitics as her first workers but maybe we'll get there with varying sizes of ants in the future

Feel free to make suggestions! I'm all ears!

I dig it and love ants. Don't think I have time to help but thanks for making the ants :)

:) Thanks for the words of encouragement! Cheers

Love the choice of URL :)

Relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jtU9BbReQk

Thank you :) I was inspired by brr.fyi and decided to sit down for a few days and try my best to come up with a name I felt equally good about!

And hah, that video was funny. It confused me for a second as I thought it was real - sort of like the spiders on drugs video from back in the day.

This idea is so cute, I hope it goes well for you! Good luck with development <3

I like it! How does the queen get food? I let it run and the queen eventually just died despite having plenty of food around.

If you put one right in front of her face she'll pick it up and eat it, but that's about it right now. I want to add the ability for workers to feed her, but got distracted working on improving tunnels/chambers. I'll add something for that tonight or tomorrow. :)

(EDIT: I've pushed a quick implementation of regurgitating food. https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants/blob/master/src/ant/hung... It'll take ~30 minutes to go live)

Yea I think that would be a good feature to have. If you are open to more feedback... add some bit of texture to the dirt and sand and maybe a sprite for the food, I guess this would be not too difficult but I don't know. That would help orient me. I also noticed workers kind of rotating around single pixels like they were stuck for quite a few cycles. Few more ideas: seeds that slowly grow into plants and maybe worms (I love both IRL along with ants and was a huge simants fan growing up).

Of course I'm open to feedback, thank you for giving it.

Yeah, the visuals are super bad, right? lol. It's easy for me to forget when I've looked at them for a while. I'll see what I can do to make them look a little nicer. I'm just hesitant about making them look good and then going a different direction with the game / changing the perspective and needing to throw stuff out.

Yeah, so ants do have a chance to slip/fall when vertical/upside down and that allows gravity to pull them off of islands they get stuck on. I still need to introduce a mechanism for making those islands able to be accessed in larger nests, but I don't have any easy/simple ideas right now.

I do like the idea of seeds and watching them grow into the dirt. The worms are cool, too, my mom grows worms for fun :) I'll keep those ideas on the list, but I can think of a lot of stuff I want to take higher priority for now.

I didn't catch initially that the ants were confined to the edges underground, perhaps when underground they can walk the full 2d?

Yeah. I have been thinking about it. It'd require a different sprite visualization and there's some weird edge cases, but it's how SimAnt and others like PocketAnts handle their underground perspective (https://thekingofgrabs.files.wordpress.com/2018/07/sim-ant-s...)

There's this game, Oxygen Not Included, that tackles the issue with ladders. https://assets.rockpapershotgun.com/images/2019/08/Oxygen-No... I know ladders are immersion breaking, but was thinking maybe ants could form living chains or something, idk.