i been thinking about what ant game is gonna end up playing like I’m gonna start prototyping these ideas and see what works the first idea is kind of like a programming sim, you can edit the ants’ genome and have conditionals to make the species adaptive without mutation
the dressing is that you are a human researcher trying to make a hyper adaptive genome to save humanity from extinction from environmental pressure. You are mutating ant-human chimeras as the test subject
you have a limited amount of terrarium slots to create maps with, you can set what the map’s environment is like, and then drop a colony in. You use the terrariums to figure out what the ants struggle with, and then edit their genome to make them more adaptable
once you’ve decided you’ve learned all you can from a terrarium, you cull the colony and empty the terrarium for reuse, because everybody loves depressing story elements
I’d say the gameplay is somewhere between a programming sim and a factory builder; you are trying to build a robust genome that lets the ants thrive without you needing to intervene with spot treatment mutations. You learn what resources the ants can gather, and then how to code a genome that teaches them how survive through shortages (maybe some kind of inefficent resource conversion that they can activate at a threshold you set)
so the part I’m gonna prototype is the genome editor and resource management. Will it be fun to design a code/factory/genome that knows how to cope with different ratios/quantity of resources on the map? maybe maybe
with this concept, the target audience changes from people who like sandboxes to people who like optimizing, though I think they overlap a bit already that market exists, so I should also research existing optimization games to see what engages, frustrates, or bores
Potential optimization choices:
• cost for spawning/maintaining workers
• worker behavior, physical ability
• resource conversion
• thresholds/conditions at which all of the above change to allow for autonomous adaptation
