I Made a Little Game About Ants Carrying Pixel Art Home, One Bite at a Time

As a kid, I could squat on the ground and watch ants carry things for a whole afternoon. A single biscuit crumb, a dozen ants in a line, hauling it back to the nest one trip after another.

Recently I turned that scene into a small browser game called Crumb Colony. A crumb is a scrap of food and a colony is a nest of ants, so together it means "a colony of ants hauling crumbs."

Open ants.pomodiary.com in your phone's browser and you can play right away. No download, no sign-up.

This post was first written in Chinese for the developer's WeChat Official Account (a blog-style publishing channel inside the WeChat messaging app) and adapted for English readers. The screenshots show the Chinese interface.

The home screen: 20 pixel-art dishes, from a sunny-side-up egg to a lotus-paste mooncake

How to play

Each level is a pixel-art picture made entirely of blocks. Below the picture is a tray holding four columns of colored boxes, each with a number on it.

1. You can only tap the box at the front of each column. When you tap it, it moves into one of the 5 slots in the ant nest.
2. Ants of the same color run out of the box. The number is how many blocks they need to carry away.
3. Ants can only bite blocks that are exposed, so the picture gets eaten from the outside in.
4. If the slots fill up and none of the colors inside are exposed yet, the nest is jammed and you lose the level.

That is all the rules there are. The hard part is the order: which color to send first and which later. You have to read the layers of the picture, and also see what is buried in the back rows of the tray.

Level 3, the pink-frosted donut: the teal stripes on the outer ring get eaten first

The best part is the ants themselves

What I spent the most time on was making the ants look like they are really working.

They come out of the box one after another with small gaps between them, so they never pile up into a clump. They walk in a line along the frame of the picture, only through cells that have already been eaten empty, and never climb over blocks. When an ant bites off a block, it carries it on its back to the nest, its legs swinging as it walks.

Turn on 3x speed and the whole screen fills with tiny ants running back and forth carrying colorful blocks. It is very relaxing to watch.

The further you go, the more tricks appear

Every few levels a new mechanic unlocks, with an explanation the first time you meet it.

Locks and keys. Golden keys are buried in the picture. Once the ants have chewed away everything around a key, it flies down and opens a locked box in the tray. While a locked box sits at the front, you cannot take anything from that whole column.

Level 6, the onigiri rice ball: a key has just opened a lock

Ice. Frozen blocks take two bites. The first bite cracks the ice shell, and only the second lets the ant carry the block away.

Level 7, the double-scoop cone: the whitish blocks are ice

Spider webs. No one can eat the blocks under a web. You have to release a soldier-ant box, the one covered in leaves, and let the red soldier ants bite through the silk. When the number on the spider drops to 0, it runs away.

Level 11, the blueberry muffin: there is a spider web in the middle

Big numbered blocks. A large block with a number on it takes many bites to carry away. The number is how many bites are left.

Level 9, the Italian pizza slice: three big "20" blocks

Linked boxes. Some boxes in the tray are joined by a line. You can only take them when both are at the front row at the same time, and they need two neighboring slots. If the free slots are not next to each other, the other boxes shuffle over automatically to make room. The pair only leaves together once the ants from both boxes have finished their hauling. This is the most brain-burning mechanic: one linked pair can block two columns at once.

Level 5, the mini burger: 34 and 21, and 18 and 11, are two linked pairs in the tray

If you really get stuck, there are 4 power-ups: Extra Slot gives you one more slot, Grab lets you take a box from a back row, Machine Gun blasts any 3×3 area of blocks off the picture, and UFO sucks one slot's color straight out of the picture. The price is that using a power-up costs you one star.

Hard levels should be hard, but always beatable

The 20 levels fall into five tiers: Beginner, Normal, Advanced, Hard and Super Hard. Roughly every 5 levels there is a hard one where you have to stop and think before you can get through.

When I set the rules for the hard levels, I held to one principle: never take away slots. The difficulty comes only from how the tray is arranged and how the picture is drawn. For example, putting a color you cannot reach yet at the very front on purpose, or burying a key box behind a pair of linked boxes.

But hard must never mean impossible. Before any level goes live, I have a program play it from start to finish to confirm it can be solved. Then I let a "computer player" that looks a few moves ahead try it over and over, see what share of games it wins, and tune the difficulty by that number.

One more small detail: the colors within a level are pushed apart using a color-difference formula. A friend had told me they could not tell black from dark blue, and that problem is now fixed.

Eat the whole picture and earn three stars

Or jam the nest

Go play

Open this in the browser on your phone or computer:

ants.pomodiary.com

Your progress is saved automatically in the browser. The first two levels are tutorials, and level 5 is the first hard one.