Hi everyone! I wanted to write up a little short thing about Antstronauts, a new game by Keith & Snake Games. I got the idea for Antstronauts after playing BrainGoodGames‘ Solar Settlers, and it started as kind of a variant of that game, but now it’s pretty darn different.
Basically you have a Queen ant who has 20 health, who produces worker ants who have to explore planets, build buildings, work at those buildings, and dodge red ants and meteors. The objective is to settle 3 colonies before your Queen runs out of health.
Snake and I decided to make some free, quick games together sometime last year, and it’s been going pretty well. For Antstronauts, we decided that I would do the game design and Snake would code it and do the art. For the next game we’ll reverse that (more on that at some point).
The development was kind of on and off and there was actually a lot of iteration. We strayed pretty far from Solar Settlers quite early and from there it was kind of that “oh shit, we’ve entered never-ending-game-design-iteration-hell” feeling, at least on my end. Until the last few versions I sort of was doubting whether there was anything here. But it started to come together and I’m feeling pretty good about it, especially as like a 1-month game.
We may work more on it in the future, I’m not totally sure. I know both of us have a lot else going on, and we’re definitely going to do another game, this time that Snake will design and that I will do everything else for. I’m kinda looking forward to that. It’s a lot of pressure and stress being the game designer. Obviously it’s my favorite thing to do but when other people are actually paying attention, it can feel like I’m wasting a lot of their time and effort. So much of strategy game development energy feels wasted, because so much of it has to be deleted and re-done, over and over and over.
Anyway, Antstronauts is free, it’s available, and it’s kinda cool. Check it out and let me know what you think!
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