Project 034 Interim
By Johnathan Fisher and John Luke Tyler

Ants and their colonies are very interesting subjects to us. Why do these ants do so much for the queen and receive barely anything in return? Well, no one will ever know the full answer to that problem. We do know quite a bit about ants though. This enables us to have enough information about ants to make a game that simulates a normal ant colony. This is why we chose to make a game of an ant colony. We are very interested in ants so we have enjoyed this project and hopefully will keep enjoying it.

In Antopolis (the name of our game) we actually don’t have a real life problem in it. We couldn’t find a problem that deals with something about ants so we decided just to try and simulate an interactive ant colony. We chose this because we are very interested in ants and we like to program games a lot. We have had lots of experience with GML (Game Maker Language) so this should be a challenging yet fun project to do. We are really looking forward to the competition because we like to win. Even if we don’t win we are still proud of being in the competition and trying.

So far we are pretty good with all of the graphics but we need to start really working on the actual programming some more. We have been studying GML and all of its commands and functions. This is very helpful because it will be a lot easier for us this way. With all this studying we are beginning to almost memorize the whole GML language. I am quite a bit on my way of memorizing it. If I ever do memorize it, I will be able to program Antopolis with ease (It will still be very time consuming). Not only those but we have been studying the actual life of an ant and its colony. This will also come in helpful.

Our main goal of course is to finish this game. If we indeed do finish it we are hoping it will be much like current ant life. If it is not too much of a simulation, we will try again most likely but also find our own mistakes. Although finishing it is the main purpose, if we finish it ahead of our schedule we will most likely attempt a major debugging process (if it has any bugs or glitches). Also if we can we will make it a multiplayer LAN game. This will be a big challenge to us so if we finish it we will be extremely proud of ourselves. This AiS Challenge will be very helpful when it comes to getting into a good college. We are very thankful that it exists.

References

http://www.infowest.com/life/aants.htm
http://www.uky.edu/Agriculture/Entomology/entfacts/struct/ef603.htm
http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~mburo/ps/RTS-AAAI04.pdf
http://www.insecta-inspecta.com/ants/army/
http://www.duke.edu/~carl/papers/AndersonMcShea.pdf