So, I’ve submitted now, and its playable. You can survive wave after wave of monsters. I had to post a couple of bug fixes halfway into the submission hour, but hopefully I wont get into too much trouble for that.

The general idea is that you build your ants nest (you get free wood as I had to drop the wood harvesting feature). You can build a larder to collect food, but your ants are not very smart. They will wander off into the ether if you don’t provide them with a pathway of pheromones to follow.

Meanwhile, you are fighting off waves of other bugs coming from the top. Sadly I was only able to add termites and spiders, I had planned wasps as well but ran out of time. To defend against this you must build sentry holes, and spawn soldier ants from them. These guys will patrol near the sentry hole, and when they see an enemy, they will attack it, and then return to the sentry hole. This way, provided you can produce enough food to keep up, you can hold back the endless stream of monsters from the north.

OK, so I did promise to do my game using HTML5 and I’m not going to reneg on that one. For Tiny World I’m going to do a variation on tower defence, where you are a colony of ants. For my first prototype, which should hopefully take about 12 hours to finish, I need the following features:

You can place an ant hole within range of your main nest mound
You can draw a line from the hole to a nearby resource
You can station soldiers on a line, and they will patrol up and down it
Worker ants move up the line to the resource, harvest it, and then move back down.
Waves of creatures come along periodically, and you must watch in horror as your little ants fight for their lives.
Between waves, you can upgrade each hole, adding new workers, new soldiers, or changing the path.

The graphics are going to start off simple, of course, I’ll draw a very basic ant hole and 2 types of ant, the enemies will just be blocks until I can make them more convincing.

I imagine many other people will be doing something ant related, since ants do live in their own “tiny world” so hopefully mine will be more engaging than all the others.

This time around, I’m going to break the mold and do something in Javascript. I’m looking at two options depending on the theme. “Build it then use it” seems to be a likelyhood so in that case I’ll do something like Fantastic Contraption. If its something that lends itself to an RPG, which I’m hoping is the case, I’ll do a roguelike. Thats right, a roguelike, in javascript not sure there are many of those around right now. There is also a possibility that I’ll do an FPS but only a few possible themes lend themselves well to that.

Whatever I do I’ll need some backing store either for saved games or to host the main page stuff, so I’ll have to write that in PHP, the rest will be pure JS. Again depending on the theme, I have several choices of API’s, I’ll probably use something in the CreateJS framework. If I end up doing physics though, I’ll be looking at JiglibJS2.

This is going to be highly experimental so I’ll get the most basic game to work first and then add to it iteratively, not my usual strategy.