Empires of the Undergrowth News

Once again, the Hungry Spider has crawled out of his hole. This time he's in a better mood, having just finished his Christmas shopping and gotten everything wrapped and ready for the little ones. However, envious eyes are looking over his haul - and he'll need to protect it!

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The Festive Spider level is here once again for the season. Find it by clicking on the gift that has appeared on the main menu. Whilst you may be familiar with the upgrade system and control scheme from the Hungry Spider level, this game mode is more akin to a tower defense. Like the Hungry Spider level, it is incredibly difficult - very few players have defeated all of the waves and saved Christmas for their spiderlings.

Building towers is vital - whether recruiting funnel web spiders to slow enemies and snatch them away, or wood ants to launch acid at them, you'll need to think about tower placement and longevity to be succesful. Placing towers costs life, so you'll need to balance this single resource carefully.

A little tip - the spider's abilities are also extremely useful for making sure enemies don't get away with your precious presents. It'd be a good idea to start with the Crippling Venom ability to slow enemies from afar.

Merry Christmas, ya filthy animals!

Welcome to 2021’s last newsletter! We’ll get straight to the point about where we’re at with the fire ant release plans after this introduction. We’ve also got a very special extra level set to come out shortly before the holidays next month – so plenty of details on that. There’s a final creature we want to show off, some finished animations and game mechanics for a creature revealed a while back, and some finished artwork for the swamp environment in which the 4th tier will be set, as well as the first of our carnivorous plants.

Trap jaw ants on the march from Kacper on our Discord



Those of you who have been following along on our social media and particularly our Discord will probably have gotten the impression over the last few months that we intended to get the fire ant update out before the end of the year. Indeed these were our plans, and obviously shortly before Christmas would have been the ideal time for that – but we’ve realised that we won’t be able to hit that goal.

As is always the case with game development and ambitious projects, pinning down how long things take is exceedingly tricky. What would appear to be an easy task ends up taking a long time, unexpected complications arise, and priorities change. We are confident enough at this point to say that the update will come in early 2022, but exactly how early is yet to be finalised.

Our marketing team will be getting together soon to work on some promotional material, and a short while after this we will have a much better idea of when we’ll be able to give you a date for the long-awaited update. Expect some more firm news on this before the end of the year!

We can let you know that we’ve been working with the voice cast again recently, and it’s been great hearing new words from devious scientists and sombre narrators again. We took advantage of this fact to have the narrator record some extra voice lines for a new extra level. Which leads us on to:



Although we realised we wouldn’t be releasing the 4th tier this year, we still wanted to do something a little special to close out 2021. Many of the extra levels are rather fanciful, playing fast and footloose with reality and we get very silly scenarios such as Beetles Rise Up! Not so with Hibernation, which will play out much more like a campaign level and is based on a real-world scenario. In it you play as wood ants living high in alpine mountains – where winters are harsh and ants must adapt or die.

It will be arriving shortly before Christmas, and it’ll be the first extra level to have completely new narration and music. Liam has snuck plenty of Yuletide-themed tunes in the new music! Here’s a little preview of that:

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To survive and compete against nearby colonies, your wood ants will have to gather not just food, but slow-decomposing vegetation as well. As vegetation is broken down, it releases heat in much the same way a compost heap does. Decaying pine needles will warm nearby creatures in the nest, staving off the harsh cold outside and allowing ants to remain active for longer.

It’s shaping up to be a really fantastic extra level, and combined with the winter-themed music it should feel suitably seasonal. The ultimate goal is to allow your colony to settle down for the winter, safe with its warm vegetation chambers gently giving off heat, and enter a state of torpor until the spring sun warms the colony again. It’s set to be released just in time for all your holiday ant action.



The last of the amphibians that will be in the 4th tier update is the eastern newt (Notophthalmus viridescens) – more specifically the juvenile version of it, known as the red eft. They are bright orange or red, and have toxic skin – any assailant wishing harm upon the newt will have to cope with the potent tetrodotoxin. In-game, this is likely to manifest as them reflecting back some of the damage they receive back at their attacker as venom-type damage.

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They love damp, swampy conditions – and your fire ants have made their home nearby. They will be unimpeded by water, and will be able to swim across the surface to reach islands much more easily than the invertebrates.



Our small but skilled art team has been working away on the swamp environment for several months now, and we’re now at a point where we can show off some of the surface! Whilst underground is a teal-tinted world full of roots, slime moulds and other such growths, the surface is green with algae, mosses, leaves and carnivorous plants.

A ramped area in the swamp adorned with dead wood, moss, lichen and algae

This damp environment will have changing water levels and a variety of new resource types, such as seed-rich pinecones and nectar-like secretions from the carnivorous plants. A huge variety of creatures live here, making their homes in the unique ecological niches allowed. This includes creatures adapted to hide amongst the traps of the meat-eating flora, such as the green lynx spider.

A wide area with a nest in the background on level 4.1, titled “Cold Blood” (WIP)

We’re well into the decoration phase now, with our dedicated environment artist Dan flexing his painting muscles to give the two campaign levels of the fire ant tier their distinctive final look. The rest of the team have been waiting as patiently as the rest of you have to see the results, and we think they’re stunning.



When one thinks about carnivorous plants, the Venus flytrap is what immediately springs to mind. Although there are many kinds of plant adaptations that can extract nutrition from animals, such as pitchers and sticky traps, the iconic, dramatically-spiked leaf traps of the Venus flytrap are the most famous.

Two flourishing flytraps

The trap heads themselves are adorned with tiny, barely-visible trigger hairs. If more than one of these hairs is touched in a short enough space of time, the hairs will trigger a relay of chemical and mechanical actions that close the trap, and the struggling of the doomed invertebrate only makes the trap hold on tighter. Eventually, the trap will seal, forming a kind of “stomach” in which to dissolve the prey. Inevitably the victim is broken down into a liquid by digestive enzymes which is then absorbed by the plant.

A closer view of the leaf traps themselves

Despite their name, flying insects make up a very small proportion of the plant’s diet – roughly a third of its prey items are ants. Plants that consume animals do so as an evolutionary adaptation to poor soil quality in their area, lacking in phosphorus and nitrogen.

A closeup of a single trap, showing the tiny trigger hairs

The in-game mechanics of the flytrap will involve them exuding a kind of sugary nectar-like food on the traps, which will likely look similar to the honeydew globules that aphids provide. There will be a percentage chance to trigger the traps, killing any ants currently on them. There will be a balancing act to collecting enough of the nectar to make it worthwhile whilst being able to respawn lost ants sustainably.



Related to the environment work detailed above, Dan C was kind enough to provide me with a breakdown of a rocky material used in the fourth tier campaign levels. It shows the amount of detailed layers needed to make surfaces realistically react to light, from the base layer, to displacement mapping (adds runtime detail to geometry), to normal mapping, which is a computationally efficient way to add extra non-geometric detail.

Many layers go into making a realistic material



We announced the red velvet ant (Dasymutilla occidentalis) a while back, but we thought it’d be nice to show some of its movement and in-game mechanics. This creature is in fact not an ant at all, but a kind of wingless wasp. The females crawl on the ground and amongst vegetation, their bright red striping a warning about their excruciating stinging capabilities. They are not colloquially called the “cow killer” for no reason!

At high health, she will use her jaws to bite assailants. Eventually, as she feels more threatened, she will enter a state of panic when her health is reduced below a threshold amount. Her movement will become much faster, and she will switch to using her sting – one of the most potent insect stings in existence. The sting will allow her to cut down fire ants much faster as she fights for her life.

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She also has an extremely tough exoskeleton, allowing her to take a lot of damage whilst in this frenzied state. You’ll have to weigh up the cost of replacing the ants you will inevitably lose before engaging in a tussle with this notorious resident of the green swamp.



Back in early October developer Liam, product marketing manager Dan and community manager Mike travelled down to London to go to our first live event in over two years – EGX 2021 at the ExCeL centre. Our main aim was to get back into the swing of things with live events, and of course to show off the game to new and old players alike!

The three stages of man – Dan P, Liam & Mike at our EGX booth

It was fantastic to be able to see people playing the game in person after so long (whilst frantically taking mental notes on what needs to be improved, I think we should warn people off freeplay somehow until they’ve played the campaign!) and it was wonderful to see people discovering it for the first time. We’re hoping to do more live events again going forward if the world allows it.

We exhibited alongside Paul Hervé, developer of Adapt



Every time I write a newsletter I look forward to this part. If you’d like to submit an Empires of the Undergrowth screenshot for consideration in a future newsletter (or the occasional community Screenshot Saturday on Twitter and Facebook) then by far the easiest way to do so is to join our Discord and post in the screenshot channel. To get some nice angles, remember to use photo mode – F9 by default. If you hold down shift whilst hitting F9, your camera will be unbound to the surface for added creativity.

An uber whip spider strikes in this shot from Frazzz (check out his YouTube!)

The truth revealed by Atta cephalotes Boi An uber falls from HamAndCheeseSandwich



With our bimonthly newsletter cycle, that concludes the newsletters for 2021.

It’s been a challenging year for all of us, for very obvious reasons, and I said the exact same thing last year. In spite of that, we sincerely hope you’ve had reasons to be thankful and celebrate too. Our friends in the US have just had thanksgiving, and this seems like a good moment to try and remember what we’re thankful for. We here at Slug Disco are eternally grateful and thankful for the patience, support and kindness you’ve shown to us, as we continue to shape our vision for EotU and Slug Disco as a whole. We know things take time – but they’re worth the wait, and the wait is no longer so long. Look out for more news before the year’s end, and we’ll see you in 2022 to continue our journey into the Undergrowth.

Mike & the Slug Disco Team

It's that time of year again. The nights are drawing in, the air is getting colder.... and the Hungry Spider awakens, and finds that he is ravenous.

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The Hungry Spider level will be around for the remainder of the spooky season - to access it, click on the cobweb that has mysteriously appeared in the lab. In this level you directly control an endlessly starving wolf spider (although I am of the belief that he has some sort of terrible metabolic issue) as he eats his way around a web-shaped map.

To those who haven't played this one before, it is a brutally difficult level and few have achieved victory in it. The uber creatures are the real killer, and you'll have to take them all out to win. Upgrade your abilities as you level up, improving your chances against the monsters.

But in the end, of course, the real monster is you.

Discard the shackles of oppression - in our latest extra level Beetles Rise Up!, you must grow your beetle pack to annihilate your captors. All of your beetles are controlled by a single pheromone marker - simply move near beetles to add them to your pack, bolstering your strength. Kill all enemies and free all beetles to win! Game knowledge from your campaign and freeplay experiences will be helpful; it'll allow you to gauge threats before you take them on.

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Your game client will not need to update to get the new level; it will already be there.

This extra level is inspired by Beetle Uprising, a game by our friends at Iocane Games! It's a deeply complex genetics game with real-time tactics and some colony management elements. Check it out here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/662680/Beetle_Uprising/

Notice about the campaign we must post with each new extra level:

For those concerned about extra levels taking up dev time, please know that compared to the campaign content, these missions take practically no time at all to develop - just a few short hours apiece (you can watch us do most of the development for these on stream). Because they all use existing assets, systems and artwork, one of our devs can create an extra level very fast indeed.

We're still charging full steam ahead with the fire ant update - we just thought there's plenty of you who would appreciate something new to play in the meantime.

At this stage in the development cycle for the rest of Empires of the Undergrowth, we’re very close to having all of the creatures for the 4th tier complete (as well as a sizable chunk of the 5th tier ones). Our environment artist is working hard on perfecting the aesthetic of the Green Swamp, as the art team populates it with appropriate (and sometimes dangerous) flora.

An infestation of harvestmen from TheRealStormCZE on our Discord

We’re ready to show off some of the underground look that the fire ants and their enemies will inhabit, as well as focusing on something that has, until now, evaded the Undergrowth entirely – vertebrates! The fire ant levels will feature a number of backbone owners, and we’ve been dying to show them off to you. We’ll also talk about the events we’ve been part of recently.



We showed off some early work on the underground look for the 4th tier last time, but we’ve now completed it, so let’s revisit!

The fire ant levels are set in the Green Swamp, a nature preserve in North Carolina. Fire ants are not native to this area, but considering their invasiveness this is not an issue. We chose the green swamp specifically for its lush plant life, specifically the Venus fly trap (which we’re not quite ready to show just yet) and the wide variety of game-appropriate species inhabiting it.

The eerie glow of the underground

A few months back we hired Dan C, who has taken to the role of environment artist with great enthusiasm. His vision for the Green Swamp was of an eerie, teal-lit underground, reminiscent of a glow worm cave.

Fire ant workers come to clear the nest entrance

Inspired by various slime moulds that grow in damp conditions, he’s created this wonderful aesthetic which is quite different to anything that’s come before it, and adds some nice contrast to the bold redness of the fire ants themselves.

The slime mould-inspired lamps and growths are generated for us by the engine as we work

Next time around we’re likely to have plenty to show for the surface too! We tend to show things off on Saturdays as part of Twitter’s Screenshot Saturday weekly hashtag, so remember to follow us on our socials to see stuff as soon as we post it.



The amphibians (the class Amphibia) are one of the five major classes of vertebrates. They’re widespread around the globe, and modern amphibians all exist in three orders – the frogs (Anura, 90% of amphibians), the salamanders (Urodela) and the caecilians (Apoda). We’re representing frogs and salamanders in Empires of the Undergrowth.

Coming into making this game, we were all beginners at nearly all aspects of game development. As we’ve continued the project all of us on the team have improved in the areas we’ve worked at. When we started all this, the idea of including the more complex considerations that go along with vertebrates (musculature, skin, more complex movements, etc) didn’t seem like something we wanted to touch on but that’s all changed. Let’s talk about some of the 4th tier’s amphibians.

[h2]Pine Woods Tree Frog[/h2]

The pine woods tree frog (Hyla femoralis) is a small frog that favours dark, damp conditions – making them ideal swamp dwellers. Despite their name, they are often found on the ground as well as in trees! They inflate their throats to make a distinctive, fast croaking sound (sound effects are a work in progress), especially at dusk. They’re fond of an insect supper, and ants are certainly on the menu.

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[h2]Narrow-mouthed toad[/h2]

The narrow-mouthed toad (Gastrophryne carolinensis) is native to much of the United States. Its diet consists primarily of ants – a trait that will make it one of your bitter enemies when the fire ant update comes for Empires of the Undergrowth, despite its cuteness! It is not technically a toad, but is colloquially called one because it is mostly terrestrial.

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[h2]Dwarf Salamander[/h2]

The dwarf salamander (Eurycea quadridigitata) represents the Urodela order, one of the three modern orders that make up the amphibians. It prefers swampy conditions and spends much of its time burrowed in the leaf litter. Its serpentine movements will be based on older code that was never finished for the cut velvet worm from the 3rd tier. This system allows it to bend its flexible spine as it travels, trailing its long body after it. There’s still some tweaks and adjustments to be made to the animation systems of this creature, but it’s far enough along to show you the main points.

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[h2]American Bullfrog[/h2]

So on to the biggest of them all! The American bullfrog (Lithobates catesbeianus) is widely spread around the world due to human introduction, but their native range is the eastern United States. Large, noisy and usually very hungry, bullfrogs are not fussy in their diet. In fact, generally speaking, the diet of the bullfrog consists of whatever will fit inside the bullfrog.

A bullfrog attacks a spicy snack (bombardier beetle)

Like the other frogs, the bullfrog is able to use its long tongue to grab and eat enemies at a considerable distance. As a titan, it can be climbed upon by swarming ants, dealing extra damage to vulnerable spots on its body. We won’t post any videos of this titan-class creature until closer to release. It’s on course to be the largest actual creature that will be in the game, if you don’t count the scientist (we don’t).



With much of the world getting closer to some semblence of normalcy, events are starting to happen and we’ve been fortunate enough to join a number of these remotely over the past couple of months. Our first in-person event in nearly 2 years will be EGX 2021 in London, starting on Thursday 7th October (next month at time of writing)!

[h2]EGX 2021[/h2]
Three of us from the Slug Disco team (developer Liam, marketing content creator Dan and community manager Mike) will be joining our friend Paul Herve where we’ll have two booths at EGX, one showing Empires of the Undergrowth (a great opportunity to talk to us about the fire ant update!) and the other showing Paul’s awesome upcoming creature evolution game Adapt (more on this collaboration coming in the future). We’ll be in the EGX Rezzed Zone for all 4 days of the event (Thursday 7th October – Sunday 10th); come and find us if you’re in the area. We’re quite friendly.

The last time they let us out in public – EGX 2019 along with Ecosystem & Beetle Uprising

[h2]Indie Arena Booth[/h2]

The most outright fun event we were virtually part of this year was the Indie Arena Booth as part of GamesCom 2021. The Summercamp of Doom event was presented in a top-down RPG format where you gained XP by interacting with NPCs, and unlocked badges by talking to the denizens of virtual booths. It was a ton of fun and certainly a unique way to present things! The demo we developed for this event included a fire ant demo level “The Promised Land”, which has disappeared for now but thanks to everyone who played it whilst it was there. Fire ants will be back with tier 4!

Our virtual booth in the Summercamp of Doom!

[h2]Big Indie Pitch[/h2]

The Big Indie Pitch runs regular competitions for indie developers in a variety of categories. We entered a while back, and to our astonishment won first place in their Digital Big Indie Pitch (PC+Console Edition) #9! Liam was interviewed afterwards, so if you’d like to hear a little of his perspective on how the games industry has treated us read through that article. Liam stresses that a combination of sheer optimism, belief in our product and a generous smattering of luck got us to where we are now. I feel he leaves out a lot of hard work over a long time! Thanks so very much to Steel Media Ltd. for running this fantastic event. We’ll be making good use of that promotion package!

We won!

[h2]BitSummit[/h2]

Lastly but by no means leastly, we had a physical booth at this year’s BitSummit, which is Japan’s longest-running indie games festival. We couldn’t be there in person due to the pandemic, but it was fantastic to know our game was being exhibited on the other side of the world! Japanese is one of the additional languages we intend to translate the game into for full release.

Our booth at BitSummit. One day, we’ll be there in person!



Something a little different for Screenshot Central this time – the three shots I’ve chosen all come from one player. Frazzz is a YouTuber and long-time coverer of Empires of the Undergrowth, and he recently played the aforementioned “The Promised Land” on his channel whilst it was an event. Thanks to him for sending in these excellent fire ant snaps – he’s really got an eye for them. We look forward to lots more Empires content from him!

Usually I take these screenshots either from our Discord or from the Steam community uploads; those are the easiest way for me to see them if you’d like to have your screenshot selected for a future newsletter.

A fire ant hatches Fire ants link their bodies to create a short bridge to a nearby island The queen is attacked by a group of bombardier beetles – the end is nigh