40 000 Wishlists - How Ant Colony Came to Life [PT2]

We have reached a new milestone of 40,000 wishlists! That means it's time for the second part! This is a continuation of the previous post about our team. In this post, I will tell you how Ant Colony started its way to became exactly what it is.

If you open the game page today and look at the tags, you can see: City Builder, Colony Sim, RTS, Tower Defense. A lot of mid-core tags, lots of control, management, strategy.

But originally, Ant Colony wasn't intended as a strategy game at all. The first prototype aimed to create a simple simulator where the player could just watch their ant colony develop.

The idea that led to 1,000,000 downloads

Back in 2018, ant terrariums became popular on YouTube. I was just learning how to make games and tried prototyping concepts in random genres and settings. The terrarium theme seemed interesting to me; writing artificial intelligence for units is always fun, and ants even more so! We teamed up with a developer from the forums and sketched out a prototype in 2 weeks.

The essence of the game was very simple - you play as the ant queen, you can only spawn the necessary types of units, and they do everything themselves. It was a cool experience, we built a version for Google Play to send to friends and family, and went on to do other projects.

3-4 months pass. I receive a notification from Google Play that some libraries in the game need updating. I go to the developer console and decide to check the reviews while I'm at it.

I read one

two

ten

a hundred... wait.

I check the downloads. The game is featured.

Downloads are flying at a rate of 300,000 per month. A ton of organic traffic.

The prototype proved its viability. People turned out to be interested in a small pixel art game about an ant colony. A game without ads or in-app purchases, for 30 minutes of gameplay, with no optimization for mobile devices. It was almost magic. In total, the game surpassed 1,000,000 users and even caused a wave of clones in the Play Market.

A couple of years later, it was decided to make a full product. A second part that would take into account the players' wishes. The team found me themselves. Everyone came from the first part. They wanted a sequel, they wanted to make a big game about ants, this time now not just about spawning units, but something more.

So, from a simple observation simulator, a strategy began to be born.

And in the next part, I will tell you exactly how Ant Colony turned into a game with management, control, and defense.

Also, as promised, I am sharing a couple of concept arts of the game that have not been published before: