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[KingKaol]

Hey guys, been a dwarf fortress player since 2009ish, and DF was a major influence on my wanting to learn programming back then.
Fast forward to today and we are finally releasing a little project that might appeal to DF players.

This is a desktop game meant to be played with keyboard, and is completely text mode but also has audio. I call it a "sandbox" game because it's more like a virtual terrarium than a "game" with set goals, although you can directly control individual ants within the colony to have some degree of influence. It's nowhere near the scope of DF, it basically started out as a 5 minute game to test some GUI code. It does have "simulation" elements but it's not meant to be realistic. If you were a fan of SimAnt you might also like it =)

Currently builds are only available for Windows and Linux 64-bit, but theoretically it should run on macOS so Mac builds may appear in the future.

Here's a gameplay video of the first few minutes: https://vimeo.com/394647599

Alpha release builds are available on itch: http://nativesystems.itch.io/colony and latest debug builds are posted on the discord: https://discord.gg/tggBBhW

Cheers!

[McMagma]

Actually looks super interesting.

[LoSboccacc]

full red/green makes it unplayable for me.

[KingKaol]

full red/green makes it unplayable for me.

Sorry about that, someone else also pointed that out. There will be an option in the next version to change the color palette in some way to help with red/green color blindness.

[Salmeuk]

In that video, a series of purple dots that left blue trails seemed to be attacking the colony. What were those?!

[KingKaol]

In that video, a series of purple dots that left blue trails seemed to be attacking the colony. What were those?!

Purple dots are food and the blue trails are food trails that other foragers can follow back to the food source.

[KingKaol]

full red/green makes it unplayable for me.

Testing out an alternate color palette for red-green color blindness if anyone has any feedback:

https://i.ibb.co/M5yDR0D/colors1.png

https://i.ibb.co/4fQq81Z/colors2.png

The luminance on red is reduced and boosted on green, so they should be distinguished in grayscale. There is a small blue component to both, not sure if that helps tell them apart from yellow.

Edit: this is a darker red without the blue component, not sure if it's any better or worse:

https://i.ibb.co/CKNpkds/colors1-2.png

[Lidku]

Yes! New ASCII style games, sweet! Really hope this gets developed further. I'm downloading it now.

Question before I start playing: Will you broader the scope of insects you can be?

[Lidku]

Bro this game is hard

EDIT: Yo this game is mad scary at night! Something just came out of nowhere and killed me I think. Is there a mode where I can just watch the ants do such on their own?

[KingKaol]

Bro this game is hard

EDIT: Yo this game is mad scary at night! Something just came out of nowhere and killed me I think. Is there a mode where I can just watch the ants do such on their own?

=) If you deselect the queen ant (the '1' key, or select another ant), the queen will revert to AI control, but when you first start out as a 'Drone' (not scientifically accurate, I know), the drone doesn't know how to dig a new nest so you kind of have to do that first. Actually the digging AI isn't very good yet so it's probably best that you do most of that yourself before turning control over to AI completely.

Yes! New ASCII style games, sweet! Really hope this gets developed further. I'm downloading it now.

Question before I start playing: Will you broader the scope of insects you can be?

I guess the current roadmap is to flesh out the features that are currently there and wasn't planned on adding more playable insects. The whole thing is kind of experimental so it will probably end up in a kind of perpetual beta, but I do have further game projects I want to move on to so major changes are less likely, at least in the near future.

That does give me some ideas though, since I thought the flying mode at the beginning has some potential maybe a play mode as some kind of other flying insects would be interesting.

[Lidku]

Yeah this is really good for an alpha, really good. Maybe you can make this like Spore, but with insects and more in-depth. 

EDIT: Also I had to save early from playing, but during my playthrough something at night "killed" the ant I was controlling? All I know is that something flew to my location, hit(?) me and the ant turned green. I couldn't move anymore. Did something kill me? Also he was really scary, lol

[KingKaol]

Yeah this is really good for an alpha, really good. Maybe you can make this like Spore, but with insects and more in-depth. 

EDIT: Also I had to save early from playing, but during my playthrough something at night "killed" the ant I was controlling? All I know is that something flew to my location, hit(?) me and the ant turned green. I couldn't move anymore. Did something kill me? Also he was really scary, lol

  The flies you see during the day are harmless, and they shouldn't be active at night. Right now the only thing that can kill an ant are other ants from the black colony, so maybe that's what happened, they can be kind of hard to see at night.

[Lidku]

LOL

[KingKaol]

Released an update with better color options for red-green color blindness and improved contrast in the default setting =)
https://nativesystems.itch.io/colony/devlog/129507/colony-genesis-v101-alpha

[KingKaol]

Bumping to announce macOS builds (x86-64) are now available (and there have been several small updates over the past year): https://native-systems.itch.io/colony/devlog/214146/colony-genesis-v1015-alpha

The default macOS terminal is really slow, there are instructions in MANUAL.txt for setting up and using the "kitty" terminal which is a GPU accelerated terminal.

Cheers