Violants 2: For Queen and Colony

(Made from scratch in 72 hours for Ludum Dare #46)

The traitorous lava ants are attacking your colony! Will you stand idly by and let them get away with these transgressions???

ViolAnts 2: For Queen and Colony is an RTS/Ant Simulator game!

No tedious and difficult micro here—macro only!

How to play

Build up your base and ant army to overcome the enemy lava ants!

Hold the middle mouse button or left shift and move your mouse to move the camera. Scroll the mouse wheel to zoom in and out.

• Press Q and click to spawn a Smasher Ant!
• Press W and click to spawn a Shooter Ant!
• Press E and click to spawn an Exploder Ant!

Ants can only be spawned within your goo radius, which can be increased by building structures.

• Press R and click to spawn a Goo Hub!
  • Click on your Goo Hub to open an upgrade menu in the bottom right of the screen!
  • Upgrade your Goo Hub into either a Nursery to increase your production, or a Spire for defense.
• Larvae are required to build units and are generated by your queen and by nurseries. Keeps tabs on your larvae count either on the left side of the screen, or safely nestled underneath your queen.

You can win by killing the enemy queen, but beware—her dark forces will continue to grow! You can also assert your dominance and claim victory by maintaining 10 Nurseries for 1 minute.

Good luck!

Made in 72 hours from scratch for Ludum Dare 46 for the theme “Keep it Alive”.

Retrospective:

Violants was one of our first ever Ludum Dare games and we wanted to do a followup now that we know what we're doing. I think we did it justice, though this version is definitely still too difficult. We got caught up balancing the game for ourselves instead of a reasonable audience, so the game ends up relying a lot on an unintuitive gimmick (using Goo Hubs to tank damage) to win.

Gameplay: