Micromanager

A single ant isn't much. A colony of them is a marvel of social dynamics. Too bad they gave you robots instead.

Your job as the new fleet manager is to try and "teach" these robots to act smart and harvest resources. Surely their programming isn't that bad?

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Instructions:

Your goal is to meet the ever-growing targets before time's up. Send your robots out to gather food and bring it back to the factory. Your factory keeps consuming the food to build more bots. Make sure you've got enough food stockpiled or it's game over!

Food randomly spawns inside the light grey area. If a robot strays too far out, this spawn area expands, so keep them contained!

White robots move around randomly, becoming red when they pick up food.

Red robots will backtrack, moving towards the oldest trail it can find. Red robots become Green when they unload their cargo at the factory.

Green robots follow the newest trail they can find, becoming red when they pick up food.

All robots will follow the Gold trails you can lay out.

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Controls:

Left-click and drag: Draw control paths

Right-click and drag: Camera movement

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Credits:

Fish Sprite by danieldiggle

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Micromanager was made solo in about 4 days with Godot for the 2024 GMTK Game Jam, with the theme "Built to Scale." This is my second game ever and it shows. Minimal audio, little to no visual work and a lot of ideas scrapped due to time and technical problems. Originally it was going to be about emergent behaviour, but the sheer complexity involved (and my lack of game dev know-how) lead to that idea being scrapped halfway through and a drastic scaling down of my initial ideas.