Hello to all ant colonies!
Ant Colony is coming to Steam soon, and that meant answering a question we'd never had to answer before: what does our game look like when it isn't sitting in your hand?
A phone screen forgives a lot. You tap, you swipe, you only ever see one thing at a time. A monitor doesn't work like that – there's space everywhere, there's a cursor, and suddenly every single panel has to justify why it's on screen at all.
So we rebuilt the interface from scratch. Here's how that went 👇
🔍 Homework First
We didn't start in a drawing tool. We started by playing other games.
We went through project after project hunting for solutions we could borrow – where to put things, which panels a colony sim actually needs, and, more importantly, which ones we could throw out. The goal was never to fit everything on screen. It was the opposite: strip it back until your attention lands on what matters and nothing else is competing for it.
We looked at Empires of the Undergrowth, Dungeons III and then we saw Against the Storm, which happened to be the ideal reference. A seriously well-built strategy with gameplay we love and an interface that just makes sense – nothing shouts at you, nothing hides from you. We took the ideas that worked best there and adapted them for our ants 🐜
✏️ Redrawing the Anthill
Then came the part that looked easy on paper: sketch out the new layout.
Every tab. Every panel. Every screen. All of it drawn again from zero.
It was harder than we expected, and that turned out to be the useful part. You don't really understand how a mobile interface differs from a desktop one until you try to move one into the other and watch it fall apart. Element sizes, spacing, how much information a player can actually hold on screen at once, all the things a cursor does that a thumb can't – none of it was a resize job. It all had to be rethought.
🛠️ Learning It the Hard Way
Full honesty: we had never made a PC interface before. What we had was our mobile screens and a rough idea of how we wanted the whole thing to feel.
Turns out that was enough. We dived in headfirst, built plenty of things twice, and came out the other side with something we're properly proud of.
The result is an interface that stays out of your way and lets you get on with running the colony – which was the entire point.
Add Ant Colony to your wishlist so you don't miss the release, and drop a comment telling us what you want us to break down in the next diary 🐜
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