Empires of the Undergrowth News

We're very pleased to announce that our first major update for Empires of the Undergrowth, the Leafcutter Update, is now available for Windows, Mac & Linux! Featuring an all-new rain forest environment with new critters of all sizes, two new levels which will see you face off against fully-fledged colonies, and a new Formicarium Challenge where the dastardly scientists have something special planned for you.

The jungle floor stirs. Ants of all sizes creep out of their holes to harvest the nearby foliage, travelling far and wide to find the choicest leaves. The odds are stacked against these fledgling colonies - you may be tempted to discount creatures that forage for leaves but with huge crushing mandibles on their side, they are not to be underestimated.

https://youtu.be/HoRqZa7BH9Q



New Formicarium Tier Added

• New playable species - The Leafcutters
  
  
  
  • Featuring 4 sizes of ant (minims, minors, media and major) which can walk under / over one another
    
  • Major leafcutters are tank units with very high health and come in two forms:
    
    
    
    • Stun majors stun targets for 4s and at level 3 will slow them to a crawl for a further 4s
      
    • Taunt majors force targets to attack them for 4s and at level 3 at 50% health will reduce all incoming damage by 80% for 4s
      
    
    
  • Unique resource management
    
    
    
    • Leafcutters need leaves to cultivate a special fungus which is their only source of food!
      
    • Leaves can be gathered on the surface from various climbable plants
      
    • Once gathered leaves are taken to a leaf drop-off chamber
      
    • Each nursery built spawns a free minim ant (tiny leafcutter)
      
    • The minims take the leaves from the leaf drop-off to nurseries where it is cultivated into fungus that can be spent
      
    • Once fungus is spent, its remains will need to be taken to a refuse chamber where it can safely decompose
      
    • The distance between nurseries, leaf drop off chambers and refuse chambers affects the efficient processing of leaves leading to some careful colony design decisions.
      
    
    
  
  
• Two new levels in the rainforests of Ecuador
  
  
  
  • Two very different levels with unique challenges and threats with carefully designed difficulty settings to suit you level of play!
    
  • The new environments offer a host of new fauna and flora and have a very different feel to them from previous levels
    
  
  
• A new formicarium challenge - What has the evil scientist got planned this time?
  
  
  
  • Do you think you could hate the evil scientist any more? We think you might after you see what he has in store!
    
  
  
• Add the mighty leafcutter major to your formicarium!
  
  
  
  • 4 unique upgrade options
    
    
    
    • Sharp - This aura causes attackers of the major and any nearby friendly creatures to reflect an amount of damage back to themselves
      
    • Resilient - This aura causes the major and any nearby friendly creatures to take less damage each hit
      
    • Durable - All incoming damage to the major is reduced by a set amount
      
    • Shockproof - Limits damage to the major in any single hit
      
    
    
  • 4 improvement upgrades to spend that extra jelly on!
    
  
  
• More than double the enemy creatures!
  
  
  
  • Variety is the spice of life and the rainforest is the king of variety! Each of the new creatures comes with its own stats and abilities and will require their own approach to take down
    

Other changes and improvements

• Creatures sizes mean you can get more to the front line
  
• Minimap now displays food that can be collected
  
• Quantity held by all food types is now displayed when showing tile info
  
• New enemy creatures have made there way into the battle arena and freeplay
  
• Freeplay setup dialogue changed to use more screen space for options
  
• Pheromone marker assignment panel now displays the living ants from chambers
  

Balance changes

• Queens have been given 50% resistance to slow their deaths
  
• Queen Second Wind invulnerability duration increased to 30s (up from 20)
  

https://youtu.be/5j4xo7WiwC4

Only a few days to go now ... get ahead a little by looking at this brief explanation of the leafcutter food mechanics.

https://youtu.be/5j4xo7WiwC4

Please enjoy our updated trailer, featuring the leafcutter ants and rainforest environment!

We're very pleased to announce that our first major update for Empires of the Undergrowth, the Leafcutter Update, will be coming to the game on April 25th! Featuring an all-new rainforest environment with new critters of all sizes, two new levels which will see you face off against fully-fledged colonies, and a new Formicarium Challenge where the dastardly scientists have something special planned for you.

https://youtu.be/HoRqZa7BH9Q

The jungle floor stirs. Ants of all sizes creep out of their holes to harvest the nearby foliage, travelling far and wide to find the choicest leaves. The odds are stacked against these fledgling colonies - you may be tempted to discount creatures that forage for leaves but with huge crushing mandibles on their side they are not to be underestimated.

Although we have a policy of not announcing dates until we’re 100% sure, it is safe to say we are now very, very close to getting the leafcutter beta out to Kickstarter closed beta tier backers. Those of you who are on this tier, please keep an eye on your emails over the next week or so. The coming build for you guys will be feature-complete from a gameplay perspective, but will be missing some things like sound effects (the new creatures currently all sound like the Devil’s Coach Horse adult). Those will be added in throughout the beta as we continue development.

Leafcutters gather leaves in level 3.2 Front Line

As a quick explanation for everyone else – the closed beta group consists of people who supported us at a certain tier during our Kickstarter campaign in 2016. The beta typically lasts a few weeks, where we take feedback on things like balance and glitches. It really helps us polish things to be great for everyone and gives a bigger sample size than just the four of us on the team, and it means when we get the update out to everyone it’ll feel really good to play right from the off. Of course, things like balance and glitch fixes don’t end when the beta does (the size of the beta group doesn’t come close to all users!) so we will still be very grateful for your feedback as things continue.

A short time into the beta, we should have a fairly good idea of how long it’ll take us to deal with the resultant feedback and it’s at that point that we’ll decide on a release date. Exciting times!

Leafcutter-shaped Formica ereptor ants in the new formicarium

Since we’re so close to having things ready, there hasn’t been much in the way of “new” stuff to show over the past month (not because there’s nothing left, but we’ve reached a limit on things we want to share without spoiling the upcoming content too much).



One of the more fearsome beasties you’ll encounter in your life as a leafcutter colony is the leaf mimic praying mantis. There are several sizes of mantis, but in its final instar it’s an outright terrifying opponent that even well-prepared players will find difficult. Here’s a preview of her in the Battle Arena, against a fairly typical mix of leafcutters. She has some unique stealth abilities due to her natural camouflage – note that she doesn’t appear on the minimap until she decides she’s going to attack, and the ants have to be very close in order to spot her. This makes more sense in the context of a rain forest floor covered with leaves.

https://youtu.be/7BFaTYxfmGk

You’ll also notice that she has the ability to pick up an ant and consume it, instantly killing it and restoring health. This gives her remarkable durability, so she must be overwhelmed quickly and with large numbers. Majors are a little big for her to eat in this fashion, but minors and mediae go straight down the hatch!



Here’s a sped-up look at the enemy leafcutter colony you will encounter in level 3.1, The Harvest. It’s controlled by the AI (but it has a pre-built nest layout, which makes sense for the campaign levels). Fully autonomous AI colonies will eventually feature in Freeplay.

https://youtu.be/j1WgzrUmMMA

Some of the ants have a green cloud surrounding them. This is a status indicator showing the ant has recently been in a refuse chamber – which causes sickness to ants that aren’t minims. You’ll want to build your refuse chambers away from thoroughfares and brood chambers.



Here’s a couple of screenshots showing some of the cosmetic variations we’ve added to the appearance of some of the creatures – in this case the leafhoppers and the harvestmen. Although not strictly necessary from a gameplay perspective, we’ve taken the time to do things like this in order to try and reflect some of the huge natural diversity that exists in rain forests. Of course we can’t come close to how diverse they actually are, being the richest terrestrial environments on the planet – but we can try to replicate it in a small way.





Here’s something a little different – an in-editor look at 3.1 The Harvest. We use Unreal Engine 4 to build Empires of the Undergrowth. It’s an incredibly comprehensive and featured development environment, and this video shows a little behind-the-scenes look at the workings of a level.

https://youtu.be/9xnQ9D-iIKM

The white lines on the plants are mathematical objects called splines. These act as a guide to the pathfinding AI and indicate that these are plants that can be climbed and harvested by leafcutters for their fungus farms.

The bright green and red on the floor is called the navmesh – it indicates the areas of the map that are navigable by creatures. It’s a static object on the surface, but often has to be re-computed underground because the player changes it with their digging!

The screen with the large, complex-looking flowchart is called a blueprint. These are a powerful feature of UE4 which we find particularly useful for AI behaviour. In this one, you can see that every few seconds it “thinks” – indicated by the orange line as it follows the algorithm and reaches a decision. This is the AI for the enemy ant colony in level 3.1 – it reacts actively to the player, making its own decisions instead of following a timed script, like the colonies in 2.2 do.



Since we’re so close to having things ready, it’s time to start thinking about trailers. We love a good trailer – they’re a great way to build up some awareness and, dare we say it, hype for a release. We have a background in short film-making, in fact it’s the shared hobby that brought all of us together many years ago!

https://youtu.be/TUsKMPSYPOs

The above is a look at an in-progress shot designed by Liam. We make custom builds with trigger-able camera moves to capture our trailer footage using OBS. Ignore the sound for now – as mentioned above a lot of the new sounds aren’t in yet; that will all be sorted later!



Every so often, John has been posting recent changes to the source control of the game on our official forums. These can offer a little insight into what’s currently being worked on. As before when we’ve done this segment, here’s his full post but here’s a few selected highlights with some extra commentary to give more context.

• Minimap displays gather-able resources – all food items that can be gathered, whether they be leaves for the leafcutters or dead creatures for other ants, will now show up as a dot on the minimap. This should help players direct their forces to resource-rich areas with more certainty.
  
• New Freeplay setup screen added – John has expanded and re-designed the Freeplay setup screen to be a bit clearer. This is the first step in his overhaul of Freeplay which will begin in earnest once the leafcutter update is out.
  
• Prepared documents for localisation – we’ll be adding the first two translations to the game soon (German and Chinese) and there’s been a lot of prep work involved in this process.
  
• Lots of work on the trailer for leafcutters – Liam has been designing shots for the upcoming trailers, as detailed above. He’s been making custom builds of the game that showcase designed camera moves.
  
• Gather and aggression buttons updated for colour-blind – it was pointed out to us that our colour scheme for the gather / attack toggle buttons is difficult to differentiate for people with colour blindness. They now have a visible line across them when switched off.
  
• Added in chunks for every creature in the game (no longer will harvesting a fish produce a Devil’s Coach Horse leg) – up until now, harvested creature chunks all shared the same models and textures. Matt has put in some work to make sure this is no longer the case.
  
• Added canopy shadows to the new levels – as is fitting for the rain forest, the third tier levels will have a dappled lighting effect on the surface to represent bright sunlight filtering through the treetops.
  

We’ve been spoiled for choice on the beautiful screenshots this past month – you lot have really been upping your game! It’s been difficult to choose three really good ones from many very pretty examples, but here they are. As always, take your screenshots on Steam (F12 is the default key) then upload them when you exit the game from the window that pops up. You can get some great angles by using Photo Mode (F9 by default).

Alternatively, you can manually email screenshots to [email protected].

Uber beetle bearing down from returning contributor AK_tion_47

Ladybird massacre from Hilfspage

Beautifully captured tiger beetle larva from returnee MorPacke

We're now much closer to our first major update, featuring leafcutters. As well as continuing development of the update to completion, we've been dealing with quite a lot of meta-requirement systems in the meantime, such as subtitles (which will be a long-overdue feature beginning with this update). Once we're at a point where we can get meaningful feedback from our closed testing group, we will release it to them and that will soon give us a good idea of how long it will take to correct any detected issues. As always, our policy is to not give vague guesses on release timing, only solid dates once we're certain of them - but we're feeling good about the current pace of things and the rate at which the remaining task list is being ticked off.

A cloud of venom surrounds this Formica rufa queen from alexraptor554

There's been plenty of good visual things finalised and ready to show off over the past month - some of which show off some leafcutter mechanics. So let's have a look at some of the fun things that await when you introduce Atta cephalotes to your Formica ereptor colony!



Rainforests are hugely diverse - they're the most diverse land habitats on Earth; rich in speciation and sheer variety of solutions to evolutionary problems.



We've worked hard to make sure that's reflected in the fauna, but just as importantly the flora of our Ecuadorian setting. Here's a closer look showing some of the plant life in a recent art pass of level 3.1 - the first leafcutter level.







Leafcutters gain their nutrition from the fungus they grow in their gardens, sprouted from decomposing leaf cuttings harvested from the surface. The minors, mediae and majors collect cuttings and drop them off in designated chambers.

The minims (the smallest leafcutters) then take the leaves to the brood chambers where the fungus grows (this includes the queen tiles). The fungus will grow as leaves are added, then diminish as it is used up by new hatchings and tile placement – it then produces waste which must be managed. The short video below demonstrates this process.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9Vzu-5qVVc



Placing a pheromone trail marker near a plant will draw leafcutters assigned to it – they’ll see the plant as a harvestable food source, just like seeds or dead creatures in previous levels. The major, mediae and minor workers climb the stem, taking time to cut a chunk of leaf before taking it to a drop-off point in the nest. As detailed above, the minims will then take it to the fungus gardens.

The leaves will diminish visually as they are harvested by the leafcutters, giving a physical indication of when the resources are used up and new grazing pastures must be found.

Below is a rather pleasing close-up of this process happening.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cfg9T-q_VKk



This pair of pictures shows the near-completed interface modifications needed to bring leafcutters to the game. You’ll notice a new resource bar at the top of the screen. Green on the left represents fungus available to spend, grey is space available on the nursery tiles to grow fungus, and red on the right is used fungus that needs to be disposed of.



Over time, the fungus produces waste which must be removed and taken to special chambers (right of the first picture). The refuse chambers will have a detrimental effect on nearby brood chambers, so it’s wise to build them a good distance away from where your ants pupate and travel – non-minim ants walking through them will take a speed and attack de-buff as well as suffer damage for a time. This represents the disease that the real-life counterparts of our leafcutters aim to avoid by having dedicated refuse areas. Waste decays and disappears over time – faster for upgraded refuse tiles.





"Yes, yes, I know how to use a trowel!" - Scientist #2

The colony’s current home is not suitable for the next set of tests. In order to continue the experiment, the scientists will need to relocate the queen to a new Formicarium. She and a few of her workers will be relocated into this new setting, which has a few… extra features.



When this process happens, the colony will need to leave its food, construction and territory behind. However, it will be rewarded an amount of royal jelly for each territory point and item of food (spent or unspent). This can be spent on the new leafcutter majors or any upgrades and improvement the colony needs – this will help it get quickly back up to speed. All upgrade paths and minor improvements will also carry over.



The change will happen just before you move on to tier 3 – in the level selection dialogue there will be a button which will unlock the 3rd tier levels.





Last month, John posted some select notes from the source control (update log) of Empires of the Undergrowth, to give a little insight into what each of our developers has been doing. He’s made another post along these lines in the meantime, and as before we think it’d be fun to go through some of these notes and give a little extra commentary to them. We encourage you to read John’s original thread, and indeed sign up for our official forums whilst you’re at it!

• Changed the way ramps work when the tide rises (ants no longer fall through) – this was the cause of a hardware-specific crash that had plagued us for quite some time. As it turned out, some ants when caught on ramps were falling through them to infinity – and in certain situations this caused a game crash on some systems. A tricky one to fix, but perseverance got us there! This has already been implemented in the current playable build of the game.
  
• Tweaked uber resistances – in certain situations and with certain colony setups, some uber creatures had become practically invulnerable. This was an oversight and not intentional – although uber creatures are still extremely tough and deliberately so, there should be fewer situations where they are unbeatable. There’s plenty more tweaking work to be done on freeplay, and indeed once the leafcutter update is done John will be focussing on another freeplay pass.
  
• Set tabbed minimaps to always have home nest on the left – the coming updates will enable multiple true colonies in a limited sense. To access their minimaps, there has been a new system made to keep them accessible as tabs behind the player’s own.
  
• Ants that enter an enemy colony are now tracked– similar to above, you’ll be invading some other nests if you dare.
  
• Subtitles for all levels added – a long-overdue feature and one important for accessibility (and localisation) but one which needs a lot of grunt work. We’re at a point now where we want this functionality to be there going forward – it’s important to the future of the game and our community as a whole.
  
• Tweaked the dissolve in various ways – this refers to the visual effect when a foreground object needs to be partially obscured by dithering so you can see through it. It’s particularly important for the Ecuador levels, which have a lot of low-growing foliage.
  
• Preparing in-game text for translation – localisation is important for the success of a game. We’re getting there.
  

Looking through the things you guys do with the simple tool of Photo Mode (F9 by default) or otherwise is always an excellent palate cleanser after writing one of these newsletters. It refreshes the soul. By default, F12 will take a screenshot in Steam. You can get it to us by simply uploading to Steam Community (a dialogue box allowing you to do this will pop up when you exit the game) or by manually emailing the screenshot to [email protected].

MorPacke back again with this fantastic wood ant colony shot

Sinister spider from Daethalion

A valiant effort to ward off an uber beetle in this colourful shot from MasterAntlion