Kickstart This: Guide an Ant Colony in Formicarium

Having an ant colony without getting hands dirty is a lot easier when it’s just a touchscreen.

Formicarium takes some inspiration from sim management games, a la Dwarf Fortress, and the popular web comic xkcd to create a virtual ecosystem with your personal ant empire to guide into prosperity.

Formicarium has you taking on the role of an “invisible mind” directing the ant hive and avoiding potential dangers above and below ground. Starvation is the primary concern, though predators are another. In the casual game mode, there’s no need to worry about spiders, earthworms, or wasps doing unfortunate, but necessary actions. Thi mode is for learning and discovering how the game’s mechanics function and the resolutions of choices. Another option is the competitive mode, which does introduce the baddies, coupled with infestation and fungi for a more challenging experience.

When not worrying about spiders eating up your ants, you can focus on tending to your species pool. There will be many different kinds of ants, like acid sprayers, honey pots, nest maintenance workers, leaf-cutting specialists, and many more. They’ll work together to dig and strengthen underground tunnels, construct nurseries, and cultivate fungi gardens. Digital genetics procedurally generate the world and guide its development, but you’ll have some detailed control over the gene pool of the animals. Depending on how you mate them, the eggs will spawn new ants with attributes you want.

And all this can happen either on a big PC or Mac screen, or a mobile device. The team from mathHeartCode is a two-person programmer and designer pair, and they’re putting up Formicarium on Kickstarter. The first tier of rewards, estimated for delivery in July 2015, is for the mobile version, while a few dollars more backs up the game for a PC or Mac — both give a certain amount of a discount on the future release.

Check out Formicarium ‘s campaign pageas well as their Steam Greenlightpage, and look to IGM for future updates on how the ant colony is faring.