Kingdom of Ants is a mobile idle/hybrid casual game where players build and manage a growing ant colony — producing resources, training warriors, and sending them on raids.
The project was initially prototyped by another developer who later left the company. I joined as the sole developer, working with a few artists and an art lead.
Main Challenges
- The codebase I inherited leaned hard on singletons — it was fragile and painful to extend, so one of the first things I did was refactor it to a service-based architecture using Zenject DI.
- Balance values were all hardcoded too, which made the game designer's life miserable every time something needed tuning. I built a small plugin in my spare time that syncs values from Google Sheets into local config files — nothing fancy, but it saved a lot of back-and-forth.
- The other headache was testing: so many unit and machine combinations that even a small logic change could quietly break something unrelated. I tried to fix that by making the units more self-contained, so changes had less surface area to cause damage."
During development the project went through several visual art. Below are examples from the earliest prototype and the latest release:
To improve retention, the tutorial was redesigned and integrated into a newly created quest system that guides players through onboarding so they always have a clear next step. We later added daily quests so players have a reason to return each day — complete a simple task and earn a currency reward.
All rooms are unlocked through progression. The final layout with all rooms and upgradeable production machines is shown below.
Hunt
Hunt is a meta layer that unlocks as the anthill grows. Early on, players train every warrior unit manually - later this can be automated. Each raid demands a stronger army, but the rewards scale up accordingly.
Each raid takes place in a unique environment with a different set of enemies.
After a raid, warriors begin disassembling the loot they carried back. The parts are then used piece by piece to produce soft currency.
Progression
Each milestone unlocks a new anthill room along with free upgrade options.
