The Ant Game
A real-time colony strategy game
One ant. One colony. The whole anthill.
Inhabit a single worker while a full colony simulation runs beneath you — foraging, digging and fighting on its own. Grow your nest, evolve the colony, and outlast rival anthills warring for the same map.
Coming soon to Early AccessWhat is The Ant Game
A whole colony, run from a single ant.
The Ant Game hands you one body. Above ground is an overhead map of soil, food and predators; below it, your nest in cross-section. Both run at once, with a real colony simulation underneath — jobs, pheromones, digging and war — and you feel it grow around you from the soil up.
The surface is only half of it
Two worlds run side by side: an overhead map above ground, and your anthill seen in cross-section beneath it. Walk in through the entrance and the game keeps going — no cutaway, no loading screen.
Ants that bid for the job
A deep colony simulation. Workers, soldiers and the queen take on roles through a live job-bidding system, so the nest reorganises itself as needs shift. You set how many of the brood hatch as soldiers; they work out the rest.
Trails that think
An advanced pheromone simulation drives foraging. Ants lay and follow scent trails, so good routes emerge, reinforce and fade on their own — but nothing exists until a scout has actually seen it. No colony here is omniscient.
The nest plans itself
Point at where the colony should grow and the ants carve the tunnels — but they also decide what to build. They site a nursery, a food store and a seed store as the need appears, then move the brood deeper as the colony outgrows the room it's in.
Three things worth carrying
Plant matter keeps the workers fed. Seeds are premium queen fuel — one delivery is a whole egg. And meat is stripped from whatever attacked you, buying brood outright, so winning a fight turns your attackers into your next generation.
Pick a target, pick a fight
Click to select anything, cycle targets with a key, right-click to commit. Crits, floating damage and health bars over anything bleeding — plus a real threat table, so you can pull a beetle off your workers and wear the hit yourself.
The richer you get, the harder they hit
Success draws predators. Raids scale with how much your colony is worth, not just how many ants it has, and elite beetles start turning up as the world grows. One boss has been sitting in its lair since the world was made, waiting for you to think you're ready.
You are not the only colony
Rivals work the same soil and conscript their own ants into war parties that march on a nest — leaving them weaker at home while it happens. Rally a band of your own and lead it through an enemy door. You can size a rival up, but only ever as an estimate.
A colony that gets stronger
Everything the colony does earns experience. Spend the perks in the Genome Lab on Agility, Vitality, Mandible Force, Metabolism and Fecundity — and while traits raise the colony's raw numbers, levelling makes you take less damage and burn less energy. Rivals evolve too.
Rain changes the plan
A living sky — sun, cloud, rain and fog, turning through spring, summer, autumn and winter with a day/night clock over the top. Rain washes out scent trails and slows everyone down but grows food faster, so sun is for foraging and rain is for digging.
A new map every run
Worlds are procedurally generated. Feed it a seed to replay the exact same map and share it — or roll a fresh one and find out what the soil gives you. Keep as many worlds on the go as you like.
Tune it to taste
Take Easy, Normal or Hard — or open the knobs: terrain and food density, raid size and cooldowns, rival count, storm frequency, season length, and how hostile rivals are to a trespasser. Every world stays editable after you've made it, and every control rebinds.
Coming soon to Early Access
Wishlist it on Steam.
The Ant Game is a solo project, built one tunnel at a time, and it's heading to Early Access on Steam for Windows and macOS. Wishlist it to hear the moment it's playable — and follow the Dev Log for progress, experiments, and the occasional collapse.