age of ants

age of ants send your worker ants to gather resources…
make buildings and amass an army to defend your queen…
defeat the enemy queen to win!

age of ants is a pico-8 demake of age of empires 2, featuring:

* 1 map with 4 possible starting locations

* up to 2 allied AI opponents to play against on 3 difficulty settings

* 9 units, 7 buildings, 12 tech upgrades (most are repeatable)

* up to 99 active units per player

* aoe2 controls & behaviors (let me know if something seems off, it's been a while)

* savefiles¹

* original soundtrack

* wololoooo

defeat the enemy queen to win!

this game is playable on:

• desktop with mouse (best experience, of course) - download the appropriate binary below
• mobile/tablet - play on the web using the play button above
• handheld consoles (requires pico-8) - search "age of ants" on SPLORE or download the pico-8 rom below

when the game first launches, open the pause menu (enter or P) and select the appropriate controls mode.

¹savefiles won't track the state of your units, which means they'll all be idle when the game is loaded - you'll have to reassign workers back to farms, resource gathering, and construction. also, any tech upgrades beyond the first level of repeatable upgrades will be forgotten, along with units currently in production (and their resource costs and population allocation). side effects may include, use at your own risk, consult your doctor yadda yadda

desktop tutorial

touchscreen tutorial

note: using the "action button" to move defaults to an "attack-move" (meaning that if the unit sees any enemies while it's moving it will start attacking them).

this is usually what you want, but not to retreat! to move without attacking, tap the action button twice:

handheld tutorial credits

age of ants was made over the course of 4 months by dan hassin. thank you to: 

• morgan3d's p8pathfinder (modified for caching and approximating unreachable paths)
• musurca's fast dist()
• gruber's explosion 18 sound effect
• carlc27843's pxaviz for code compression hints
• siege engineers' aoe2techtree.net for baseline unit stats
• thisismypassport's shrinko8 for code compression
• wolfe3d for the idea of a screenshot-based savefile
• the pico-8 community on the bbs and discord!