age of ants
age of ants
send your worker ants to gather resources…
amass an army of bugs to defend your queen...
build your ant empire and conquer the lawn!
a pico-8 demake of age of empires II, featuring:
* cutting edge graphics – 128x128px 16-color display
* 1 map with 4 possible starting locations
* up to 2 allied AI opponents with 3 difficulty modes
* 9 unit types, 8 buildings, 12 tech upgrades
* up to 99 active units per player
* aoe2 controls & behaviors
* savefiles¹
* original 8-bit soundtrack
* wololoooo!
defeat the enemy queen to win!
this game is playable on:
- desktop with mouse (best experience) - download below
- mobile/tablet - click "run game" above
- handheld consoles (requires pico-8)
for non-desktop, when the game first launches, open the pause menu 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
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 unit stats
- thisismypassport's shrinko8 for code compression
- wolfe3d for the idea of a screenshot-based savefile
- the pico-8 community!
see this project on the lexaloffle (pico-8) bbs
🍿 watch me beat 2 hards:
Download
Click download now to get access to the following files:
Development log
Comments
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The music for this game slaps
thanks! just added the soundtrack as an mp3 download in case anyone's interested :)
This is a pretty nice AoE clone. I just wish being able to read what certain units were doing was easier, enemy units were more obviously labeled (perhaps a red outline?), and that I could retreat units from combat rather than then remaining in it despite my orders.
hey thanks for playing and for the feedback. screen space is super limited so i opted for a more zoomed out view, unfortunately at that resolution it means large clumps of units do render as a mass of pixels. it's a tradeoff i had to accept with the platform constraints.
on enemy unit labeling, if blue/purple look too similar, you can also try changing player colors (in the menu screen, press "z" (or the "o" button) to cycle through choices that might have more contrast. i'll take this into consideration though
as for retreating, on desktop/handheld doing a move order should work, but i'm guessing you're playing on mobile? to retreat you will have to tap the action button twice to get to a move-only action instead of an attack-move action (mentioned under the touchscreen tutorial), which you can see in this gif:
it defaults to attack-move as i thought it'd be more useful to have quickly available on desktop (since right-click is already move), but actually maybe i could flip the default when the controls are set to touch...
Yeah, I think flipping would be neccessary. I guess the only way to resolve my problems with the zoomed out issue would be to make a PicoTron port that can allow for a larger screen size. Also, yes, my first experience with this game was on Mobile rather than PC
just released a new version where "move" is the default action on mobile (and got rid of mobile attack-move, no reason to support it there i think). thanks for the good suggestion!