Formica Industria

Still in development, not for sale yet.

FormicaIndustria

You start as one ant queen with nothing, dig a nest out of the dirt yourself, and try to raise enough workers to get a colony through its first winter. I'm building it on my own, and the whole yard is simulated down to the grain of sand.

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30 seconds of the game as it is right now, no sound. Founding, a colony in summer, a fire, a bird and midwinter.

You start alone

The game opens with the queen standing on bare ground and you control her directly. Walking into soil digs it, then you have to carry it back up and drop it away from the hole (if you drop it at the top it just falls back in), and she needs a side tunnel with a roof close over her before she'll lay.

She raises the first few workers off her own reserves, which run out in about 11 minutes if you do nothing, so there isn't a lot of time to wander around. There are also birds.

A cross-section of garden soil under a picket fence. A short shaft runs down from the surface to a side tunnel, where the queen stands beside three pale eggs.the queenfirst eggs
The queen dug in and laid her first 3 eggs.
A dark bird hovering in front of the fence, just above the mound at the nest entrance. Ants are spread along the surface below it.
A bird over the entrance, anything out in the open can get taken.

The ants do the work

A close view of dark ants walking in file over a mound of soil and down a shaft into the nest. Many carry seeds in their jaws.
Foragers coming back over the mound, most of them have a seed.

Once the first workers hatch you stop driving the queen and start marking things up instead. You paint where to dig and they dig it and carry the dirt out to a pile by the entrance, you mark a chamber as a granary and the foragers start filling it with seed, and after a while there's a trail of them going back and forth that you didn't have to draw.

They also feed the queen, move the brood into the nursery, drag their dead out to a dump, bail water out when a tunnel floods and build walls where you ask for them. There are no conveyor belts or pipes anywhere in the game and I don't plan to add any, if something moves it's because an ant picked it up.

A grown nest in cross-section: a shaft between two rubble mounds, long galleries, yellow granary strips, a pink nursery and the red queen at the centre.granarythe queen
A nest in late summer, the dotted lines are ants on their trails.

A year is long

A full year takes around 96 minutes. Foragers stay in at night, most of the seed falls in autumn and none in winter, and rain will run straight down an open shaft if you haven't built anything around it.

In winter the ground freezes from the top down and the colony mostly sleeps and lives off what it stored. There's a heat view that shows how far down the frost goes, which is probably the most useful screen in the game since anything above that line is in trouble.

Spring. A sun in a pale sky, a tree in pink blossom behind a picket fence, and a small nest with one granary under the grass.
Spring, a young nest under the fence.
Midwinter with the heat view on. The sky and the upper soil are tinted cold blue, a pale line marks how deep the frost reaches, and the nest galleries lie in warmer ground below it.frost linealive down here
Midwinter with the heat view on, anything below the pale line is fine.
Rain falling on the yard. Two rubble mounds stand at the nest entrance and the galleries run on below.
Rain.
The same colony at night under a dark blue sky with stars. The soil is dim and no ants are out on the surface.
Night, nobody goes out.
Rust-red fire ants and dark workers mixed together along the surface and at the mouth of the nest, above a shaft and a seed store.fire ants
Fire ants at the entrance in late summer.

It pushes back

Birds pick ants off open ground, spiders sit next to the trails, antlions dig pits in loose sand and every so often a mole comes through the side of the nest. There's also another colony (fire ants) going after the same seed, and from about midsummer they start raiding. You can raise soldiers for that, I'm still working out how much they should matter.

Fire works too. Seed burns, a gas pocket burns a lot faster, and water puts it out. The ants won't walk through it.

A nest at night with a fire burning in the seed store. Sparks rise into the gallery above and ants crowd the shaft and the far tunnels.
The seed store on fire at night.

Every grain

The yard is 2048 cells wide and 1024 deep, so a bit over two million cells, and every one of them is a material that behaves like what it is. Sand slides into a pile, water levels out, gas goes up, and if you dig a chamber too wide the roof starts dropping bits on you and then comes down.

Further down there's ore, pockets of water and gas that stay sealed until you dig into them, bedrock at the bottom, and a few things somebody buried in the yard a long time ago.

The whole world in cross-section: a meadow with trees, a fence and the corner of a house on the surface, then bands of red soil with pale sand and grey gravel beds, dark stone outcrops and pockets of blue water above black bedrock.the housewater
The whole yard, trees and the house on top and bedrock at the bottom.
The notebook panel from the game. Under the heading The colony it lists dated entries: the first chamber, the first egg, the first worker, the nursery, the first corpse and the midden, each with a line or two of description.
The first pages of the notebook, spring of year one.

Keep a notebook

The colony keeps a notebook. The first time it runs into something (the first egg, the first dead ant in a tunnel, copper ore a lot later) it gets an entry with the day it happened, and some of the tools only show up once the colony has learned the thing they depend on.

I tried to keep the rest of the screen out of the way, so the date and the food count are in one corner and the tools are along the bottom.

The game during play. A paper card in the top corner reads Spring, day 6 with counts for ants and seed, pause and speed tiles sit at the top, and a row of tool tiles runs along the bottom with the dig tool selected.the day and the storestools
What it looks like while you play.

Where it is going

I'm making this by myself and it isn't finished. What you can play today is the colony part: founding, digging, foraging, getting through a year, and the things that try to eat you. The name is about where I want it to end up, which is the ants learning to fire clay, smelt copper and eventually run electricity, still carrying everything by hand. None of that is in the game yet so I'm not going to show it here until it is.

The edge of the yard, where the picket fence ends at the corner of a clapboard house with a window and a drainpipe.
The house at the edge of the yard.

Lately

Saves load right away now

A save used to be a recording of everything you did, and loading it meant playing the whole game again.

All the notes

Not for sale yet

If you leave an email I'll send one when there's something you can actually play, and that's all I'll use it for.

I’ll only use this for news about the game. Privacy