Game pivot

The resources required for an ant colony simulation are looking to push the boundaries of the Playdate more and more with every change.

The goal was to have:

• At least 100 ants
• A 200 tile destructible terrain map (1 screen wide, 3 tall)
• A small ecosystem of neighboring creatures
• Food/resource management
• etc

A rough estimate of at least 500 entities total required for the ideal ant colony game.

Despite efforts to boost performance, frame drops occur when simulating ~800 very basic ants per frame. Performance issues are probable when simulating the final 500 entity ecosystem, unless the game engine is further optimized or the game scope is reduced.

While the performance concerns may be solvable, fixing them would require significant knowledge and time investment. I have chosen to pivot to a new game concept that requires far fewer entities instead. The engine should run well with less than 100 entities, which is plenty if you do not need to simulate swarms.

The game may pivot again after a prototyping stage, but for now almost all of the colony code is being reused to tell a story about revenge in an old frontier town.