Hello HN! This is the first game I ever built. It's very simple, but I'm still kind of proud of it because all the pixel art is original. Thanks for taking a look!
So fun, thanks for sharing! I'm feeling some nostalgia. The first game I ever made was also an ant defense game. You use a magnifying glass to protect your tomato at a picnic. As you get to later levels, the ants get bigger and the sun starts to set, so you have to buy upgrades.
I wrote it in Java in high school back in 2006. The site I hosted it on in high school is no longer live. I put it on Replit a few years back, but I no longer have access to the account, so I had to fork the repl to play it again. Things change. Hold on to your code. It's fun to revisit old programs!
Java is a bit of a pain. It's a compiled language, so if you make any edits to the .java files you'll need to run a command in the shell to generate a new .jar file and then run that.
Congratulations on the launch! Please, consider putting up a screenshot at the top of the README. When I see visual products such as games or GUIs showcased in HN, having a good screenshot or two is often the deciding factor in whether I try it or not. And probably I am not the only one. A picture is worth a thousand words.
This a great start. A level progression system would make it a full fledged game. You could introduces walls to control the direction/flow of ants. The walls would change per level. Also, some kind of penalty for spamming might help. Right now I can use multiple fingers to press all over the map without much thought.
I think adding a note that there's an end would go a long way. I personally tried it once, killed something like 100 ants, thought "That's cute, but not interested in clicking on ants endlessly", and closed the game well before I lost.
Fun game! Resizing the browser window after it starts breaks the game though. If you you resize it so the princess is off the screen, you can't lose :)
That was much more fun than I expected and the game is really well-drawn and snappy. I was doing so well until the really fast black ants started showing up.
There is an end! I think the hardest step is the one where fast black ants attack every two seconds. and after that if you're able to play for 30 more seconds, the princess will be saved.
What a great game. Terrifying, but great! Thanks for sharing. I loved how the ants come in waves, felt very old-skool in line with the graphics, but still very effective!
However, if you resize the window (I fullscreened it after 50 or o ants), the princess is no longer centered and the ants cannot reach her anymore, except those that come from the "closest" wall. Makes the game pretty easy since you only have to watch 1/4th of the screen
congratulations! To me, it is a kind of perfect little game, with an extra psychological twist. I don’t have a phobia for insects. The theme of having me protect a child instead of a generic target put me in a completely a different mindset. I really started to hate the fast-moving black ants.
Well, there's this browser limitation, you first have to interact with a webpage in a way for it to be able to produce sound. This stops random tabs and pages blasting sound as soon as they're opened. That's why you need to first kill an ant first!
Just check what cloud costs you may endure. Serving static CDN files is cheap. Dynamic image resizing costs. I use the simple img tag as I am not interested in that optimization.
I wrote it in Java in high school back in 2006. The site I hosted it on in high school is no longer live. I put it on Replit a few years back, but I no longer have access to the account, so I had to fork the repl to play it again. Things change. Hold on to your code. It's fun to revisit old programs!
If you want to give it a try: https://replit.com/@PatrickAtReplit/Ant-Killer-Game.
reply