Hell of Ants

Giant ants have stolen your picnic basket and taken it underground. Delve down into the ant tunnels armed with your six shooter and your grappling hook. Grab some Molotovs and get ready, the ants will swarm to prevent your escape! This is a retro ant fightin' cave spelunkin' action game . The game features ten random procedural levels with unlockable + and ++ difficulty modes.  It uses a worms style terrain model with simple physics, and also has some different ant types and special pick ups.

Firstly huge shout out to JustWall games for providing all the great art , sounds and music for this project and assistance with testing. Cannot express my gratitude enough, peace out! Check out all of Marcus' work at https://justwall.itch.io/

Also big thanks for testing and feedback go to
Ryan Kwok https://fullsparedice.itch.io
and Mika Pyon http://www.niyotan.org/mikapyon/

I made this game to give myself a grounding in Gamemaker Studio. I wanted to try and achieve certain things in Gamemaker to know that I could use it for a large future project. Most specifically I was testing to see if I could make a fast and reasonably simple terrain collision model , exactly like Worms, Liero, Cortex Command etc I think I achieved something practical , while not entirely perfect, it is solid enough to facilitate fun gameplay without many noticeable collision issues. I deliberately set a small scope for the project and completion took approximately two months.

To create the terrain model I used this great library from the GM Marketplace.

https://marketplace.yoyogames.com/assets/6334/destructible-terrain-converter

I then added my own collisions by adapting parts of this excellent tutorial below into gamemaker.

https://gamedevelopment.tutsplus.com/tutorials/coding-destructible-pixel-terrain...

The idea for this  game was something I came up with around twenty years ago . At the time I attempted to create it in visual basic with grid based graphics, but did not complete the project. It is inspired by and a homage to two of my favorite commodore 64 games , Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Mike Davis and Ant Attack by Sandy White.  Both remarkable games for their time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Journey_to_the_Centre_of_the_Earth_(1984_video_game)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_Attack

The games title 'Hell of Ants' is inspired by my favourite Falling Sand game, Hell of Sand.

Known Issues:

-A giant replication of the pause screen text can be seen on parts of the map when the game is paused. I feel that fixing this GUI DRAW issue would take too much of a rewrite for the scope of this project.

-Very occasionally ants will get stuck on odd slopes, sorry I did my best :)

Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy the game!