Why two ant biologists quit their part-time field gigs to make a game no one asked for
Right now, Mia’s crammed onto the end of my couch, picking cold pad thai noodles out of a takeout container and arguing that I messed up the maximum foraging range for common black garden ants. She’s got a crumpled copy of her 2019 field notebook open on her lap, the spine cracked so bad the pages fall out if you breathe on it wrong, and she just stabbed the page with a chopstick to prove her point. I told her it’s just a game, people won’t notice if we round it from 14 meters to 10 for the sake of map size. She hasn’t stopped glaring at me for 10 minutes. That’s pretty much how this whole project has gone, honestly.
We got the idea four years ago, at a middle school outreach event. We’d brought a big fancy formicarium we’d built for the university’s open house, with clear sides so you could watch the workers move eggs around and dig tunnels. Most kids thought it was cool, but after we did our little 10-minute talk about how ant colonies work, this 12-year-old boy raised his hand and asked, “Can they attack other colonies and take their food?” We said yeah, of course, that’s a whole common thing that happens all the time. And then half the kids in the room just started yelling about how that should be a video game. We laughed it off at the time, but on the drive home we couldn’t stop talking about it. All the educational ant stuff out there is either cutesy 15-second TikTok videos or boring worksheets that make collective behavior sound like just another fact you memorize for a multiple-choice test. We both stayed up all night playing strategy games in undergrad, between back-to-back field seasons. Why couldn’t we make one that just… works like real ant colonies work, with the education sneaking in instead of being shoved down your throat?
We got a tiny $5000 outreach grant from the university, enough to buy a year of game dev software and pay for a lot of late-night gas station coffee. Neither of us had ever coded anything more complicated than a data spreadsheet for a published paper, so that first year was just a lot of staring at YouTube tutorials at 10pm and accidentally deleting half our work once a week. I still remember the time we spent three weeks building the leafcutter ant fungus garden mechanic, and then realized I’d messed up a basic fact I should have remembered: I’d written that leafcutters can use any old leaf they cut, but actually they refuse leaves with certain toxins that kill their symbiotic fungus. Mia had studied leafcutters for her master’s, so she just sat on the floor of my apartment and stared at me for a full minute like I’d just said evolution is a hoax. We scrapped the whole thing and started over. Then when we got our first outside playtester (my cousin’s roommate, who plays a lot of mobile strategy games) he said the “sort out safe vs toxic leaves” mechanic was too annoying and quit halfway through the first leafcutter level. That’s the contradiction we’re still working through, right? We want it to be accurate, we want people to learn something, but we also don’t want it to be so much work no one wants to play it.
We went to a local indie game meetup a couple months ago, just to meet other people and get feedback. Everyone there was talking about user acquisition and battle passes and whatever that jargon is. When it was our turn to introduce the project, someone asked what our monetization plan was. Mia and I just stared at each other. We’d never thought that far. We just want to put it on Itch.io for like five bucks, if we even charge anything, just to recoup the cost of all that coffee we drank while making it. Mia ended up blurting out “we just want people to stop thinking all ants are just pests that need to be sprayed” and the whole room went quiet. No one knew what to say after that. We left 20 minutes later and got ice cream, didn’t bring it up again.
Last week I was sitting on the steps outside our apartment, eating a chocolate chip cookie, and I noticed a line of Lasius niger moving a crumb I’d dropped. I ended up counting how many workers it took to move it, and how often they switched paths when a breeze messed up the pheromone trail, just to check if the pathfinding code we wrote was even close. My neighbor from 2B walked by, stopped, asked if I’d lost my keys or something. I said I was just counting ants. She nodded really slowly, backed up, and went inside without saying another word. I can’t blame her. It does look weird from the outside.
The whole educational part isn’t shoved in your face with pop quizzes or anything, by the way. We just made the game work like real ants. You don’t click the queen to give all your orders, that’s the big twist everyone gets wrong. Everyone thinks the queen is the boss sitting in the middle giving orders, but she’s just there to lay eggs. The whole colony runs on pheromones and tiny individual worker decisions, so that’s how the strategy works. You lay down pheromone trails to mark good food sources, you decide how many workers to send foraging vs how many stay to nurse new larvae vs how many get sent out to fight. If you allocate wrong, your colony starves, just like in real life. You don’t have to memorize anything, you just… figure it out, and if you pay attention, you leave knowing how this whole collective thing works without ever feeling like you’re in class.
Mia just threw a napkin at my head because I typed that last paragraph and she says I got the nurse worker thing wrong too—older workers forage, younger ones nurse, I mixed the order. Whatever, we’ll fix it. It’s not going to be a perfect game. The ant models are a little blocky, because we can’t afford a 3D artist. One playtester said the pheromone gradient overlay looks like someone spilled yellow Gatorade on the screen. We kept it, actually, because that’s what it would look like if you could see pheromones—messy, uneven, no hard edges. I don’t know if anyone besides our moms and our old advisor will even play it. That’s okay, honestly. We didn’t get into this to get rich or hit some big education goal. If a few kids play it, and then next time they see a line of ants crossing the sidewalk they don’t step on them, that’s enough. And if most people just play it to send their soldier ants to wreck the other guys’ colony and have fun? That’s fine too. We did that 90% of the time when we were playtesting anyway.
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