30 000 Wishlists - How Ant Colony Came to Life [PT1]

When we first put our game on Steam, we honestly didn’t expect much interest. Games about ants don’t seem to be very popular on the platform, so we were prepared for a long and quiet road.

We’re very happy to be wrong.

Recently, Ant Colony reached 30 000 wishlists, and this number means a lot to us. To make this journey more personal, I decided to share stories about our team and the development process every 10 000 wishlists.

Ant Colony is our very first project. Most of the team had never made games before. We’ve been developing it for exactly six years.

When we started, there were only 3 of us, working in our free time while studying or having full-time jobs:

• Developer

• Artist

• Game Designer

Today, our team consists of 7 people working full-time:

• Art Director / UI Designer

• Pixel Artist / Animator / Illustrator / Environment Designer

• Concept Artist

• Game Designer / Developer

• Enemy Developer / Git Master

• Ant Developer

• Community Manager / Support

For final testing of each update, we sit together as a team and play the game for 1–3 days straight. Earlier testing is usually done by our game designer and a few amazing volunteers from our mobile community.

We’re huge gamers ourselves. Some of the games that we've played the most in the past couple years are Barotrauma, Factorio, Minecraft (Create mod), 100 Doors, Project Zomboid, Peak and REPO.

Thank you for being part of this journey. More stories coming with the next milestones.

Also sharing one concept art for the game that wasn't posted before: