Ideas

Anything with ants has my vote!

"Keigoed". I am a believer. Wilson and Holdoebler, as well as Weber would be proud of you!

I like it! It is a great Idea.

Sounds like a hell of a lot of fun (maybe more to watch than participate!), but where is the money in this?

Do people buy in on games? Is there some sort of online wagering that could be integrated for non-participants? Is there just a bunch of ad revenue?

"Sounds like a hell of a lot of fun (maybe more to watch than participate!), but where is the money in this?"

Well, who cares, money is not important!.. ok, just kidding, money is needed, maybe the makers of this thing would like to pay some money:
http://www.sillyasst...seproducts/AntWorks-(Ant-Habitat).HTML
We would just mention their name on the site, they pay to keep the site going. Just a thought, maybe some of you have better ideas to make money out of this.

related to my other post, the link was not really good, so I provide another one, a better one eve:
http://www.thinkgeek...ektoys/science/6fd6/

so cool!

i love watching ants when I was young!!

about the money problem... hmm..
how about putting some "obstacles" in the screen? Say for example, the screen is a table -- and there is a big pencil lying in there (which, we can assume that the ants cant walk through it). This big pencil may be an actual ad of a writing product!!!

It is effective for the advertiser, since you can limit the number of "objects" in the table. AND, because of your good idea, people would STARE (and play) for hours - their attention os on the ANTS and the ADS. :)

Btw, since ants are ants, it could be also great for advertising certain food products. The ants could pick up some crumbs of "Lay's" chips.

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(And btw, you can add a specific property top the ants) --That is, they also mecome weaker at a certain point of time. So, after like, 30 minutes, they have to pick up and eat (or deposit somewhere) a food crumb. It'd be nice to see ants scrambling for food!

(Or, to enhance teamwork, the "hunger" may need not be individual. That is, food is exhausted at a certain time. So, the ants have to pick and repick food once in a while to sustain the colony.

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You can also allow users to "register" (should be VERY fast), so they could only be part of one colony. Registering will allow them to log in again to their colony, and so feel a sense of pride that they have contributed to colony evolution (maybe, supplies of food, and number of killed rival ants, and territory). This also gives a sense of solidarity. Under crisis, people are bonded together in a special way.
So, there could be a forum/thread accesible ONLY to a colony. This is an excellent place to meet friends. :)

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the possibilities are endless. I like your idea.

I hope I can contribute more in the dev't of the concepts.

Congrats. ^^

I love it. Just find where the money comes from. I would pay by the hour to play, or subscribe for say 3.99 per month or similar. I love the Idea of a crowd of players working together. I suspect we are far less capable than actual live ants!

A less simple game could differentiate the ants into soldiers, workers, etcetera with different strengths and weaknesses.

It's like SimAnt meets the Internet. I love it.

What if the ants could travel faster if they followed the path of a previous ant? Can we integrate building an ant hill into it? Is there a queen ant that you have to protect?

I think you should have 2 types of games.
1. Head to Head: with 2 groups of people that don't know each other and just match up. There would be one objective that could be reached within an hours time(or some other shorter amount of time).
2. Colony Building: You join a colony and the game goes on for a week(or some long period of time). The game never stops during this time even if ants decide to stop working(or should I say player decide to stop playing).

This allows those people who just want a quick game and those who want to be part of a large group and takes a long time to develop and compete.

Can the web handle this type of multiplayer game? With a client it seems fine, but can it funtion in a web browser properly? It seems to me like this has to be an installed application like second life or something like that.

I love this idea!

I think there should be a Ant Hill or a general area where players could mingle and upgrade weapons. In the hill players could get a full view of their Ant so they can customize it a bit.

I wonder what the purpose of the battles will be? Land? Resources?

I would pay to play this one.

"Can the web handle this type of multiplayer game? With a client it seems fine, but can it funtion in a web browser properly? It seems to me like this has to be an installed application like second life or something like that."

I think this does the trick for the multiplayer part (I'm guessing it will be a flash game).
http://www.adobe.com...ts/flashmediaserver/

I think it will be costing some big money. Probably are some open source alternatives. I'm figuring other people have way more knowledge about this, than I do. But I do know multiplayer flash games can be done :).

All the game elements feedback is great btw. I'm busy with other stuff at the moment, but I'll probalby be able to make some sort of game design document in the near future and put it on a .html somewhere.

Good idea. I think having it all on a web-page will be tough, but the idea behind the game is sound. Modelling the ants will be the interesting bit - some behaviours will be easier than others (e.g. following another ant or ant-trail is probably easier than going off in a random direction).

Perhaps each ant can communicate with the queen(s), and the queen can communicate with any ant. This way there is direction and participation.

Sorry everyone - but I just do not get it. I think it must be me, I didnt really get very excited about Gwabs either. Gonna have to do some real selling to get me to take control of an ant for any more than 2 minutes! Also, without a revenue model it seems a little counter the CH philosophy.

That being said, kids might love it, and I am clearly the odd one out here. Good luck with the idea Julius.

put this up! :)

This is sweet. let's support this. hehe..

How about having players work together toward a goal, perhaps building the nest or moving some obstacle? This idea has tremendous potential in terms of advertising, gameplay and social dynamics.

This is an idea for an online game.

I think your game play would not work.
Multiplayer games where all the players half to act like drones are not realy fun for the masses. A game like Lemmings is more interesting. Where as a player controls a massive amount of drones to make them do a task or tasks. This gameplay has been proven to work.

Maybe if you change your gameplay around this could be a good game.

I have a serious hate for ants. Hate them, unnatural creatures.

... but it's still a crazy cool idea.

As someone said, the possibilities are endless.

For a related idea, and maybe to get inspiration on monetization, you might want to look at http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/

The idea there is that people can buy a single pixel on that page for $1 (although the minimum buy, is 10x10 pixels). The guy who did that made his first million pretty quickly.

If you can somehow have micropayments where people can buy their ant for $1 (or $0.01, whatever), and maybe buy bigger ants for more money .. or sponsor ants like on the site above.. etc., this could make money. Again, the possibilities are endless, the challenge will be in nailing down one feature-set to start with. Technical challenge may be significant, too, depending on how this is delivered.

This could generate money for some time until the novelty wears off. Long-term revenue sources/growth is not as clear.

Novel and interesting idea, it would certainly be cool to watch massive ant-wars in action.

Possible games: King of the ant hill, dodge the magnifying glass, race to the picnic, kitchen invaders, using teamwork to transport a heavy food item... So many possibilities.

Great, this game would be so much fun to play with friends. Has anyone ever heard of (I think it's called) "Sony station"? Basically it's how they distribute a bunch of low-tech mmos. This would be great for it.

This is an interesting idea Julius. I wonder what the people playing it would act like? This unknown aspect of people's behavior is what interests me about this idea as it is kind of like an experiment that is carried out on the web. Would people act like ants, or more like flocking birds? Nobody knows! Would people try to sabotage the teamwork?

On the downside, I wonder how long the game could hold a person's interest level. I suspect there would need to be some sort of changing features of the game that changes the gameplay somehow in order to keep people interested in it. I also don't know if people would accept having their behavioral abilities reduced to the level of an ants.

Sounds like it would be fun to play and neat to design - especially coming up with ideas to make the game play interesting. But, I just don't see how it could make any money. A pure ad-revenue stream just doesn't seem like a viable way to finance an online game.

I remember wishing for this back when playing SIM Ant. I guess you could apply the same theory to SIM Tower too.

I'd like to see this - dunno how it'd pay. I think you'd need to have a bit more identity with the ant. Cross it with R-type and allow ant powerups :) Ant romance? Big jaws? Stingers? Wings? Egg sacs? How much versatility do you see in this? Personally...I reckon this would be the HALO-as-it-should-have-been...but with Ants....

Games players dont really want to be ants - they get enough of that in real life. They want to Gods, Kings or Heroes. No ant can be a God, King or Hero - they all just interact in preprogrammed ways to produce complex-looking behaviour.
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On the other hand Lemmings was great. It gave you the chance to command a large number of simple-minded creatures in order to solve problems that required intelligence and creativity. Darwinia is a more recent example of this idea.
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Combine these concepts in a multiplayer web environment and you have a game where the players compete against each other to win prizes such as food and territory. The players would design the behaviour of the ants, and then release them into the wild to take their chances. The design factors would be things like how agressive the ants are towards enemies, the proportions of different ant types that are produced, what types of food they prefer and so on.

Throw in some environmental factors like weather, fire and so on to add to the challenge. The behaviour of the colonies will evolve, and we could also have physical evolution where sucessful players can introduce changes to the ants such as size, speed, strength, and maybe even new types of ant that do not exist in nature.
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There should also be bot-colonies which follow standard rules for ant behaviour and physical evolution.
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This has a lot of potential, and could be very popular. Good Luck.

Another simple idea is that users gain access to more ants over time. This way one person could control more than one ant and would add a new dynamic to the game.

However, this should be restricted in some way so that users don't get so powerful that new people don't want to join.

great idea! but on the thing about "we need money" its simple: you get sponsers! you might have to start off with getting buy paying for the site by paypal donations, but when you start to get even a little popular, then ask sites if they will sponser you: pay you a certent amout of money in exchange for you putting a link on your site, or paying a small amount of money to you per click on the link to their site or something. then you should advertise somehow (find sites that have a "your link here" and/or put out an add on google, etc.) and if people like the game in practice as well as they evedently do in princible, then you should have a well-enogh income form it ot keep the servers up, and buy new ones to expand as needed. you might even have some extera for your pocket!

I'll just say that I like the idea...