Empires of the Undergrowth News

We've made some changes to the recent 0.13 build and released the patch for our Mac and Linux-running friends. Hurrah! If you experience any issues with the build, please pop by our Steam forum and we'll have a look.

V0.131

• Fixed a tooltip on the improvements panel
  
• Fixed an issue on Towhead where the tiles were over the top of the southern tunnel exit
  
• Fixed an issue where pressing [ on the keyboard at any point would kill the player's queen (accidentally left in from a test)
  
• Fixed an issue where the starting workers on the demo levels were showing up grey rather than the colony colour
  

V0.132

• Fixed a bug where the player could stay underground in 2.1 and 2.2 and just wait to achieve victory. Now on first nest attack the player's tunnel will open automatically
  
• Fixed an issue where selecting to restart 2.1 or 2.2 would switch ant type to mortar regardless of what the player chose
  
• Fixed a lighting issue on some undergrounds that changed lighting in certain camera positions
  
• Fixed an issue on towhead causing creatures to try and shoot down cliffs but constantly failing
  
• Fixed an issue that could sometimes spawn aphids and ladybirds in walls on Freeplay
  • Additionally any that were hiding in walls will now fly off (if you had horrible speeds in a freeplay save this could be you!)

Improvements / Changes

• Made the underground spider a smaller one on Towhead
  

Hungry Spider level

• UI now hides in photo mode
  
• Spider can now be controlled with the pan camera controls (WSAD or Up Down Left Right by default)
  
• Increased the range of Bite and Venom Strike to 150 (up from 100)
  
• Sped up the time it takes for abilities to deal damage. Animation is still same length but damage happens sooner in it
  
• Spider thoughts have been vocalised

It’s time for an update! We’re calling V0.13 the “Interim Update” - it adds a several things that were missing from the game and prepares the path for the major update to come. Without further ado, here are the patch notes! The game should update automatically through Steam.

Please note, right now this is Windows only. Mac and Linux users - we’ve still got a few bugs (ha, ha) to work through for these builds. We’ve made significant progress on that but just ran out of time tonight and didn’t want to delay for everyone. We’re confident we can get stable builds out for you lovely people in short order, so keep your eyes on the news page!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHjECOl1TJU

• Challenge modes added to Rising Tide and Queen of the Hill
  • The new challenge mode introduces a new creature – the beach tiger beetle larva. This critter lies buried waiting for unsuspecting victims to walk near its trap, then snatches them away in the blink of an eye!
    
  • They will only attack if your ants are alone, and can only be damaged for a short time after attacking. Will your colony accept the losses to get the food they need, or will they rip these ambush hunters from their burrows?
    
• New Freeplay map – Towhead
  • Set on a small island near the mouth of a river, Towhead offers a much more intimate experience on the surface, with higher densities of creatures
    
  • A map option allows a periodic flooding of the lower level. This will raise your score but at the cost of possibly losing ants and resources when the waters rise
    
• Minor Improvements System for Formicarium colonies
  • Got spare Royal Jelly laying around the nest? Fear not, we have you covered! Minor improvements can be accessed by selecting any already purchased species from the tech tree and selecting the icon
    
  • The improvements start cheap and get more expensive the more you buy for a species. Each ant species has their own different improvements which complement various play styles
    
• What is that pesky spider’s web at the back of the lab? Could someone have a look at that for us, please?
  

• Main menu is now a list to make it clearer to new users what content is available
  
• Creatures now have various sizes and some sizes can pass through others (this has been done on a visually logical level for example beach tiger beetles can walk over most none massive things, where as a hermit crab cannot)
  
• Tunneling to the surface now takes multiple ants and take 5 times as much digging
  
• Threat system added. Some creature’s attacks cause them to be a more desirable target for other nearby creatures (mostly in preparation for leafcutter update)
  
• Battle Arena creatures have been put into tabs based on which tier of the game they first appear
  

• Creature movement has been reworked - should now have less issues, creatures should walk more centrally in corridors and should be more efficient
  
• Ants now reserve space on tiles they are taking food to. If all tiles are reserved they instead take the food towards the queen (until all tiles fill- they then drop food as they do now)
  
• Increased main menu loading speed
  
• Multiple minor optimisations made throughout
  
• Optimisation added to creatures searching for other creatures
  
• Multiple game assets have been optimised
  
• Beach texture improvements (normal and roughness masks)
  
• Improvements to pathfinding underground (many distance checks are now tile based rather than path based)
  
• All audio passed through new filters and re-recorded, female scientist audio re-recorded
  
• New audio lines added in some Formicarium challenges
  
• New audio lines added to Freeplay (start and uber spawning)
  
• Ubers are no longer affected by food scaling and will drop full food no matter the Freeplay difficulty
  
• Food size now changes slower at higher food quantities
  
• Queen chamber workers now have a crown icon
  
• Ants hatch first from queen tiles
  
• Food spend is now taken from random rooms rather than the order they were built
  
• Ants no longer drop food when attacked if combat is turned off for the group
  

• Tiles can no longer be tagged for dig when the game is paused
  
• Fixed a bug with food pickup that could cause food to be stored not on top of a tile
  
• Fixed an issue that would sometime cause wood ants to misfire on surface tunnels
  
• Stun, confuse and other status debuffs are now hidden in fog of war
  
• Fixed an issue where AOE attacks could be blocked if something obscured vision
  
• Fixed an issue where loaded part-built tiles would appear full built but with a job to build them
  
• Various minor bug fixes
  

Greetings all! We hope you've enjoyed your summer. Time moves on relentlessly, and as we chug the first pumpkin spice latte of autumn we've made significant strides in the progress of the leafcutter levels as well as plenty of other exciting things. We've recorded with our voice artists Mary Jo, Eric and Callum (Scientist 1, Scientist 2 and Narrator respectively) for the next levels and we're delighted with their work. Before we conclude our work on 3.1, 3.2 and Formicarium Challenge 3, there are some missing bits and pieces in the existing game that need finalising in preparation. Our current plan is to do an interim update between now and the leafcutter update, and that's going to be fairly soon. Let's get on to what that'll include!

A lovely green Formica ereptor colony from jasong





The interim update will include the challenge mode for levels 2.1 Rising Tide and 2.2 Queen of the Hill. It was always our intent for each tier to have its own special mode with an extra challenge - and we're now at the point that we want to get this all up to date before any new levels arrive.



A screenshot of the beach tiger beetle larva in progress

Activating challenge mode on the 2nd tier levels will introduce lightning-fast beach tiger beetle larvae to the fray. Even in their larval forms, the beach tiger beetles are extremely deadly. They live in small burrows, lying in wait for a hapless victim to pass by - which they then grab with frightening speed. Matt has done some beautiful work bringing these living nightmares to our game - have a look at the screenshot below.





We have introduced a new way of spending royal jelly to improve certain aspects of your formicarium colony. The type of tweaks that can be made depend on the creatures themselves, but there are 2 types for workers and queens and 4 for the black ant soldiers and wood ant ranged units (there will also be 4 for the leafcutter majors when they arrive).

Spending jelly will give a stat improvement. This can be done multiple times but will cost much more each time you do it. It'll also be a way for those of you who are sitting on a cache of royal jelly to spend some of it before the next update (but please don't feel like you have to grind for it - you don't!). The exact ins-and-outs of this new system will be detailed when the patch comes.



The recent recording sessions with our lovely voice actors have given us the opportunity to add some dialogue we felt was missing from certain points of the current game - particularly in freeplay. There will be some extra narration for this game mode, as well as some small bits and pieces for the campaign levels.



Whilst you’ve been getting heartily stuck into Freeplay and the response has been great, we realise that there’s not much in the way of variety at the moment. To that end, the interim update will include a brand new Freeplay map! Towhead is set on a small sandbank in a body of water, which has some interesting implications for resource gathering. It hasn’t been decorated yet but you can see how things are shaping up from the in-editor screenshot below.

The work-in-progress Towhead. Note the unusually-shaped underground spaces!

And now, back to the leafcutter update...



Whilst previous levels were set on a beach in a temperate environment, the next set of levels take place in the humid subtropical rainforests of Ecuador with its clay-rich soil. This gives a distinct red hue to the underground.

The leafcutter queen beneath the rainforest soil

Various castes of Atta cephalotes patrol their nest

We also have luminous fungal growths illuminating our Leafcutter colony instead of the crystals from the beach levels - a little extra flavour given that the leafcutters themselves are fungus farmers!

Illuminated by fungal growths!



Here's the current animations for the leafcutter major. Pay particular attention to that leaf-cutting action - after all, that's what leafcutters are born to do.

https://youtu.be/DKB7cy8AWeI



Liam put together this little montage of test material showing the various ways that the leafcutters are being worked on. You can see an example of the upcoming size hierarchy system that will allow some ants to literally run under the legs of bigger ones, as well as seeing some of the vertical ant movement that Matt has been working on to allow leafcutters to collect cuttings from leaves above floor level. There's also a small audio snippet of what Scientist #2 is up to in the next update. Frankly, he scares us.

https://youtu.be/mEhlDIJny8s



Anyone who has watched the live streams will have seen how putting levels together is a time consuming process (even ones that do not have a story), so to help with this we have developed plugins for Unreal Engine. These allow us to change tiles with a variable size spherical tool in many ways (raise, lower, dig out, make indestructible and even paint) not only speeding up level design but making it more intuitive.

See a short demonstration of John using the new in-house tools on Giphy

Please note that although this time-saving measure is a good thing for the project, we are not currently planning to release a level editor for the game. For now these are UE4 plugins that benefit us - if everything is going well when the game graduates from early access, we might revisit the level editor idea. But not yet!



There has been little in the way of live streaming recently - and for good reason. John likes to keep his streams relatively spoiler-free, and pretty much all of his current work has been leafcutter-related. We don't want to spoil all that good stuff for you prematurely.



It's rare that we see an EotU-playing YouTuber who's also an antkeeper IRL, so of course we're going to watch their videos when we do. ManOftheAntz plays the game from a remarkably unbiased perspective, given the subject matter, and manages to be damned entertaining whilst he does it. We've thoroughly enjoyed watching his trials and tribulations with EotU, and we look forward to seeing how he does with the upcoming content!

https://youtu.be/iLZ9TH3mMAc



As has fast become a tradition for the newsletter, we like to trawl through Steam screenshot uploads and manually-emailed submissions (send them to [email protected]) for fun screenshots. F12 does it by default on Steam, if you'd like to participate.

The ants go marching 4 by 4, hurrah! Thanks to Johathon for emailing this in

The destruction of an uber devil's coach horse by joshua.schneider

A never-ending battle? Crabs vs crabs in the Battle Arena from Bilbo Baggins