ant ocracy

Grow Your Colony

You are a queen ant starting a new colony from scratch. Lay eggs, feed the larva that hatch from them, and eventually raise broods of worker ants that act independently and self-organize to locate food and recruit other ants to help them retrieve it. Your workers will also help raise additional larva, fight enemy critters and enemy ants, and move dirt out of areas you've marked for pickup and place them in areas you've marked for putting down. 

Upgrade Your Queen

As your colony grows in number, you'll be offered opportunities to unlock additional abilities for your queen like the ability to emit different kinds of pheromones to influence worker behavior (see screenshot of upgrades). Focus on making your queen a powerful warrior with a Dash attack and more hitpoints, or focus on upgrades that make your colony grow as fast as you can, and unlock additional castes of workers with different sizes and abilities.

Dominate the Environment

Collect food from all corners of the map. Kill critters to feed your larva, or direct water towards vines that will grow and sprout food. Zoom out to view your colony from afar (first screenshot) or stay zoomed in for finer detail. Compete with the Red Ants for territory and steal their larva for yourself. But watch out for the Giant Foot!

If you die you must start over! So keep the queen protected at all costs.

Play Online Here:

antocracy.io

There are global leaderboards for getting to 250 ants fastest, most ants, and most Young Queens. Record your high score!

This game is a website, but please donate if you like it!

 How do the ants decide what to do?

Each worker ant acts totally independently, but with the use of pheromones of different kinds they can influence each other to coordinate their behavior. And as you unlock additional pheromones then you can use the queen to lead your ants. Ants react to each pheromone type differently based on their task. For example, ants that are carrying food will move towards higher concentrations of the Colony pheromone, while ants that are retrieving food outside the colony will move away from Colony pheromone and towards Food pheromone.

Background

I've been obsessed with ants since childhood and this game is the result of much research on ant behavior. I was particularly influenced by the work of E.O. Wilson, Deborah Gordon, and Mark Moffett.