[ramikalai]

I like the concept and I'm a big fan of it being a mental health companion - a bit like that forest app that went viral (sorry cant remember the name).

But I do think that the mechanics linking the ant colony and the player's mental health need to be designed in a "healthy" manner.

If breath work is what you want to encourage, maybe best to link that to the colony's well-being without ants dying.. Not sure how it would work but just highlighting that it won't scale as the colony will need more and more food than the player is willing to breath through and that might be frustrating/demoralising.

All in all, I think there is definitely something here! It's quite mesmerising to watch.

Another thing I think can be improved: the controls. There's too many options. Just start with really good defaults and maybe only expose a fast forward slider that's a simple 2x, 5x, 10x time speed up.

I hope this helps and well done!

[SeanAnderson]

https://www.forestapp.cc/ This one? :) It's actually called Forest, so you did remember the name, hah. I agree, it is similar. I feel it is also very similar to Finch, https://finchcare.com/, but they really ramp up the cute/support where I'm trying to bring more Dwarf Fortress vibes to the pet part.

Yeah, this is definitely a very blunt MVP. I have some loftier ideas for how to engage the user, but they take a lot more programming, so I just kinda crammed the goals together so I could start showing people and speaking more clearly about the end vision.

I agree that ants the player feels bonded too should not die. I think there's room for having ants of varying sizes, and maybe just the large ones being named, and allow the small ones to be more like fodder. And yeah, I need to figure out what my goal number of ants is for the colony. I'm treating performance like I want to have thousands of ants, but I don't feel like users will be able to bond to more than a handful.

Understood on the controls. I'll work on improving the UX a bit.

Do you think people would accept the "This website wants to know your location?" if I made the lat/long stuff automatic by using geolocation apis? I feel like those inputs add a lot of visual weight, and it's not very clear what the intent is behind them...but the end result of having in-game day/time linked with your IRL day/time I find compelling.

[ramikalai]

It is the just Forest haha.

Yeah, having a target number of ants or varying sizes could be interesting but I don't want small ants dying either :'(

Agreed in game time is nice to match up to real life. But, do you really need detailed location data though? You can get rough location/timezone in a much less intrusive way using IP. You could even get timezone just in JS on the client side even. That should be enough to match up time (not sunset sunrise but better than nothing and less input from user)

[SeanAnderson]

Yeah, fair, ants shouldn't die. I will think on it. Maybe they just go low on energy and hibernate. :)

Yeah. All of this code is written in Rust and running in WASM. I found it challenging to interface async JS callbacks with my Rust code. After I spent a bit of time trying to get what I thought the easiest route was to work (geolocation API) and failed on a simple callback, I decided to just throw in the lat/long inputs and see if people liked the feature at all. I agree that the best solution is one where the user doesn't even have to think about this feature

[ramikalai]

Afraid I don't have much in the way of experience with Rust or WASM so can't help there.

Maybe instead of lat/long, you expose a dropdown of popular cities? Again not bulletproof but does make the user's life easier