I like the concept and I'm a big fan of it being a mental health companion - a bit like that forest app that went viral (sorry cant remember the name).

But I do think that the mechanics linking the ant colony and the player's mental health need to be designed in a "healthy" manner.

If breath work is what you want to encourage, maybe best to link that to the colony's well-being without ants dying.. Not sure how it would work but just highlighting that it won't scale as the colony will need more and more food than the player is willing to breath through and that might be frustrating/demoralising.

All in all, I think there is definitely something here! It's quite mesmerising to watch.

Another thing I think can be improved: the controls. There's too many options. Just start with really good defaults and maybe only expose a fast forward slider that's a simple 2x, 5x, 10x time speed up.

I hope this helps and well done!

https://www.forestapp.cc/ This one? :) It's actually called Forest, so you did remember the name, hah. I agree, it is similar. I feel it is also very similar to Finch, https://finchcare.com/, but they really ramp up the cute/support where I'm trying to bring more Dwarf Fortress vibes to the pet part.

Yeah, this is definitely a very blunt MVP. I have some loftier ideas for how to engage the user, but they take a lot more programming, so I just kinda crammed the goals together so I could start showing people and speaking more clearly about the end vision.

I agree that ants the player feels bonded too should not die. I think there's room for having ants of varying sizes, and maybe just the large ones being named, and allow the small ones to be more like fodder. And yeah, I need to figure out what my goal number of ants is for the colony. I'm treating performance like I want to have thousands of ants, but I don't feel like users will be able to bond to more than a handful.

Understood on the controls. I'll work on improving the UX a bit.

Do you think people would accept the "This website wants to know your location?" if I made the lat/long stuff automatic by using geolocation apis? I feel like those inputs add a lot of visual weight, and it's not very clear what the intent is behind them...but the end result of having in-game day/time linked with your IRL day/time I find compelling.

It is the just Forest haha.

Yeah, having a target number of ants or varying sizes could be interesting but I don't want small ants dying either :'(

Agreed in game time is nice to match up to real life. But, do you really need detailed location data though? You can get rough location/timezone in a much less intrusive way using IP. You could even get timezone just in JS on the client side even. That should be enough to match up time (not sunset sunrise but better than nothing and less input from user)

Yeah, fair, ants shouldn't die. I will think on it. Maybe they just go low on energy and hibernate. :)

Yeah. All of this code is written in Rust and running in WASM. I found it challenging to interface async JS callbacks with my Rust code. After I spent a bit of time trying to get what I thought the easiest route was to work (geolocation API) and failed on a simple callback, I decided to just throw in the lat/long inputs and see if people liked the feature at all. I agree that the best solution is one where the user doesn't even have to think about this feature

Afraid I don't have much in the way of experience with Rust or WASM so can't help there.

Maybe instead of lat/long, you expose a dropdown of popular cities? Again not bulletproof but does make the user's life easier

You should look for help or comments on the incremental_games subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/incremental_games/ !

Besides you can also look at galaxy.click website, to host your game and get nice features likes votes and comments.

Anyway, nice work and keep it up!

Sure, I'll give that subreddit a try. I did outreach to r/playmygame yesterday and received a bit of feedback. I haven't found Reddit to be as useful of a feedback tool lately, though. I used to market products to it incessantly, but in the past few years I've stopped feeling like I relate to the audience on there as much.

Very cool :)

It's a nice idea but this:

> Ants get hungry and starve if not fed every 24 hours.

is not great for something related to improve mental health

Yeah, that's totally fair and has been brought up to me before. I agree, but I also think it's important for users to feel like they have stake in the game. Do you have suggestions for how to better walk that line?

Also, on a technical level, this is an idle sim which runs client-side. I don't have the ability to simulate an arbitrary amount of in-game time in a fixed amount of real-life time. So, while the intent is to have the ants get hungry, the simulation pauses after 24 hours of away time. So, in practice, the ants stop growing rather than starve unless you check on them repeatedly and also don't take the time to feed them.

Imma go ahead and agree altho maybe people wouldn't mind if there was a post-dated way to make sure there's a food reserve that the antz "know" how to tap into but that is maybe not preferential for their predominant nutritional/existential needs and appetites.

This way, people have an incentive to "tend to their garden", even if/while depressed, but there's not the worse case scenario where their lack of tending to it results in the mass death of all their new friends

Edit: win/win/win/win (you+player+digital ants+society

Edit: like how in Animal Crossing, weeds buildup but you can like pay to clean it up automagically.

What's this—a digital farm and mental health companion—for annntz?