Hey guys, I just wrote a long Q&A in the dwarf-fortress forums and thought I'd share it here too:
Thanks for all the support gals&guys, it's really amazing, we also got featured on
tigsource now.
I'm about to fix some some stuff that I thought of in my sleep (it's morning in Berlin atm) but I thought I'd answer your questions first:
Q&A:First: "I like the concept. What about reproduction? Spreading new colonies? Inter-colonial warfare? Anthill coalitions?"
Let's talk a little about scale&scope.As you all know, Dwarf Fortress' FPS drop once you have 200 dwarves (+ assorted NPC's in the map amounting to maybe 600 individuals).
Our current prototype can handle about 500 ants + 1000 npc + 1000 plants and 10k liveless objects without dropping the framerate on an iPad. A Desktop PC doubles this. Since I only spent a year worth of saturdays and 3 months devoted time to it yet, there's still a little room for optimization, so let's add another factor of x2 and we arrive at 2000 ants and like 40k total objects.
Now you can all do the math about how many colonies we can have in one game given those numbers.
Also on average each animal/plant has a double set genes + a ton of variables governing it's metabolism so that saving all the individiums of more then 2 colonies would put stress the memory of modern computers.
1. Will there be different species? Like Slaver Ants?, Army Ants? and polygyn (a hive with many queens) and monogyn (hives with only one queen?)
There will be different species, but in gameplay terms I am highly sceptic whether it will be fun to only give the player only one species to play with at a time.
I'm tending towards letting the player start with your run-of-the-mail garden ant with a Queen that just landed from her nuptial flight. And then you can unlock more genes/castes/abilities as you discover more males that can mate with your queen. Some army ant species do this, where the queen(s) mate with multiple males during their lifetime that get carried to them by the workers.
Think about Plague INC, it would be pretty boring when you start out as a Norovirus and can only unlock abilities that Noroviruses have in Real life. Instead you get to progressively unlock more Symptoms/Infection pathways that are never possible in one real life pathogen (thank god for that!)
@Queens: I believe I might include some tolerance gene/ability that allows you to have more then one queen. So "polygyny" will definitely be a part of the middle/late game.
2. Will it be more scientifically accurate with different species only having different ants and specific mechanics (aka leafcutters can grow fungus but slaver ants can not, but in return get to keep slaves)? Or will it more likely be a freeform system?I will have both species abilities but I'm tending towards freeform, see reasoning above
3. Do you intend to include different seasons?
Yes, as you have seen in the video we already have a day/nightcycle (hooray for OpenGL Lighting), and we can make leaves fall already. Since our plants get pollinated and different phases (flower bud, flower, pollinated flower, seed head ..) seasons will be the next step.
In cold climates we might skip the winter though and just make the workers die and the queen sleep at the moment of the first snowfall?
4. Will humans make an appearance? ( the big foot out of the sky...run for yer lives!)
For starters I was thinking of shrews attacking insects/ants. At the scale that you look at the game they'd already be quiet scary.
5. Will you be able to invade other Ant-Hives and take their hives?
Maybe, but then I have to write AI for the central management of a hive. See multiplayer
6. Will there be a multiplayer option?
Unfortunately, synchronising games, sending package updates back and forth between players etc is a ton of work. The first game I ever wrote was a hexagonal chess-like 3D Game and I worked 3 months on the multiplayer alone. Therefore in our current quiet restricted timeplan that we have after the kickstarter-campaign it will not be included but it is in the strech-goal's.
7. Will the game in scale be like Dwarf Fortress, or will you be able to actually expand into a farch stretching "Ant-Empire"?
Very much like Dwarf Fortress. For the mentioned reasons above, I'd like to simulate each individual living being with attention to detail. If you have an ant-empire with many hives that would not be feasible with modern computers. If the project is succesful and maybe we have computers with 10cores in ten years, who knows, maybe we can have one hive per CPU?
8. Is there going to be a campaign?
Yes, but I haven't worked at it so much yet.
You know this feeling when you observe an ant hive, and everything first seems so chaotic yet every ant seems to have some reason for whatever she is doing at any point? I want to capture this feeling and let players enjoy and control this flow. Currently working on the logistics of an ant-hive, making individual ants transport goods from outside to stockpiles and from there to the queen/nurseries.
9. What about "animal husbandry?" Will ants be able to domesticate lice and milk them for their sweet, sweet sugar?That was planned since the first time I had the idea for this game in my head. I was reading
Jared Diamond's Third Chimpanzee a year ago where he talks a long time about the fact that humans totally didn't invent animal husbandry
10. I hope ant empire functionality works - it could be like that when you create new colony, you are given choice between which one you want to control and hand other over to the AI... otherwise I assume player burden will be massive.
I think the player burden would not be different then in dwarf fortress. Most processes are automated, and you only have to plan them. Also we will have a Dwarf Therapist - like menu right in the game
11. As a geneticist (I guess that the way to make it into a title) by trade and training, this looks so. cool. Definitely keeping my eye on this. At first I was a little lukewarm, but the more I thought about a modern Sim Ant-ish sort of thing where I can actually fiddle with genetics, the more excited I got. You could even indirectly select for better plants by making sure the bad ones get taken out by your ants. Thank you for the compliments and interest. The genetics are basically the same simplified system that Randall Munroe (creator of xkcd) describes in
his latest book 'What If' page 158. In case you haven't heard about it, as a scientist you should check it out. (And tell me what you think about this system!)
The idea with ants weeding out the inbred plants (you know, we have asexual and sexual reproduction) sounds amazing, thank you for that!
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