Underfoot Queens is an ant themed 4x where you will lead your species across generations. Explore, forage for food, expand your colony, fight off competitors, and survive the elements on your path to evolution. In the end, only the most adaptable species will survive.
- Explore and gather resources - Carbohydrates, proteins, water, building materials... Your colony will need them all and you must explore to make sure you don't run out of stocks.
- Manage your colony - The population inside your nests will grow from egg to worker stage without your intervention, but you need to control their growth and guide them through food shortages, diseases and other dangers.
- Fight for food, fight for supremacy - Fight other insects, both wildlife and rival colonies.
- Adapt and Evolve - Every species you see in-game has a dna code. You can improve or worsen yours by breeding during the nuptial flights, starting a new game from scratch with your new genes.
- Permadeath - How far can you lead your colony before it succumbs? Will you risk another year or reproduce as soon as possible to avoid uncertain doom?
- Unlock new species! - Not all progress is lost when you lose your game: While playing you will get achievements that will potentially unlock new species. These new species will be fresh starting points for your journey, each with their own strengths & weaknesses.
This is Underfoot Queens roadmap to the Demo, the roadmap shown here will change once that milestone is reached. Keep in mind some of this features will not completely be finished when released, I'm a big fan of iterative work and later updates will either polish or balance said mechanics and add more content tied to them.
I have divided the core features I want in the game in 4 big updates:
- The Foundation Update - This update introduced core systems to the game such as saving/loading, settings, translations and also reworked the whole breeding phase to give the player more agency. It wasn't a very meaty update from a gameplay perspective but the game is more solid now!
- The Regional Update - The big feature here is, like the name says, the regions. A lot of this feature is not clear (I don't know what's feasible yet), but fear not! This update will also bring a lot of minor mechanics that will make the management part more interesting, like diseases, freezing and rain. You know, fun stuff.
- The Warfare Update - Are you tired of predating on those poor aphids? Is the world to tame for you? Don't worry this update will bring PVE to the table so you can lose your game to a full ant invasion!
- The Biomes Update - Biomes! More species! More mechanics related to those species! This update will add a lot of content to previous established mechanics and polish before the demo release.