PixAnt Farm (Idle)

Overview:

Have you ever wanted your own virtual farm of pix-ants? Probably not yet, but now is your chance to do just that! Grow your colony of ants from the ground up and watch as they autonomously explore the screen, eating pellets as they encounter them, earning you the ability to unlock new ant colorations and upgrade their automatic feeder! If all that automatic feeding makes you feel too distant from your ants, you can always turn it off and feed them yourself. Not only that, but you can also give them names, manually move them around the farm with drag and drop, lead them with the mouse, or steer them with the keyboard. You can also build obstacles, mazes, housing areas, and draw shapes of all sorts for them to explore. This will keep your ants plenty entertained for hours to come, and they will enjoy exploring every accessible inch of your creations.

Gameplay Objective:

This idle game is intended to provide a low-stress and laid-back gameplay experience. There are no major calamities to be concerned with because the primary objectives of this game are enjoyment, creativity, and unlocking new features. This game is intended for everyone of all ages, especially the aspiring entomologist (who does not mind the biological inaccuracies of ants) or a kind caretaker that just likes the idea of small virtual insects as pets. Can you upgrade all the way to the 100th ant to unlock the queen? Start playing today to find out!

In-Game Objectives:

• Grow your ant farm to 100 ants!
• Fully upgrade all of your ants’ base colors and stripe colors!
• Fully upgrade the automatic feeder!
• Have fun!

Automatic Saving:

Apart from save state file corruption (see below), you never have to worry about saving your work! That is because this lightweight game automatically saves your progress as you grow your colony and as they eat food pellets. You can exit the game whenever you want and rest assured that everything, except the food pellets on the screen, will be restored on the next restart of the game (unless the option to restart the game from scratch is selected).

Automatic Saving Occurs When:

• A brand-new game state is fully initialized either without a preexisting save state file (like during the first startup) or the game progress is intentionally reset to its initial state. This ensures that the save state file is created or recreated in its initial state.
• Immediately after an ant is renamed. This ensures that the ant’s new name is saved and will not be lost on exit.
• Immediately after buying a new upgrade such as an ant, a base color, a stripe color, or an auto-feeder speed enhancement. This ensures that the upgrade is saved and will not be lost on exit.
• Immediately after every animation frame. This ensures that the total eaten food pellet count and the ants’ new locations are saved and will not be lost on exit.
• The upgrades window is closed or the ant selection is changed from within the upgrades window. This ensures that the newly-selected coloration for the last-selected ant is saved.

Warnings:

Save State File Corruption Can Result in Loss of Game Progress: Background Information: As the game application runs, it dynamically generates and saves its internal game state to a file known as the “save state file” in the same directory (folder) as the binary executable file of the application. This file contains all of the information that is persisted through restarts of the application and records the upgrade levels of the different ants, the upgrade levels of the auto-feeder, the locations of wall blocks and ants in the ant farm, the names of the ants, and other related information. Corruption of this file, which happens when data gets saved incorrectly or incompletely to the file, may result in the progress data of the user being lost either directly (when the corruption occurs) or when the file is reset by the application (when the corrupted file is detected to be invalid).

Causes of Save State File Corruption: Save state file corruption can occur if the program is abruptly interrupted or terminated during the write-process of saving the game state file to disk. For example, a hard shutdown (i.e., a hard power off), a power outage, a power surge, a system error, a hardware failure, force-killing the application (e.g. with Task Manager), etc., while the game is actively running (particularly when it is saving its game state to its save file) can all cause corruption of the save state file. Additionally, some viruses, hardware faults, spontaneous bit errors, etc. can also be responsible for save state file corruption as well, which can occur even if the game is not actively running. This game is moderately susceptible to save state file corruption (as are many games) because during standard operation (i.e., when one or more ants are being animated in the ant farm), it saves the game state after each frame of animation to automatically track the number of eaten fo