From a two-week prototype to a seven-person studio: the case of the mobile strategy game about ants, Ant Colony

3.8 million downloads, of which 2.7 million are organic.

About the project in his column for App2Top, Evgeny Antipov, CEO of the Pixel Cells studio, shared his insights.

Evgeny Antipov

The project started as a prototype that was created in two weeks with no monetization or future plans. Today, six years later, it's a fully-fledged growing product developed by a team of seven people.

The Beginning

In September 2018, I was in the midst of a yearlong challenge where I dropped out of college and quit my job as a 3D modeler to spend a year making games. I wanted to see where this path would lead. I didn’t know how to make games, so I was vigorously studying Unity and writing to everyone on forums, offering to collaborate: I wanted to prototype as many ideas as possible.

One of the people who answered my call was a developer under the nickname Denismann. He was also new to game development and enthusiastic about his ideas. Some of those resonated with me, and we started working together on one of his projects.

One evening, I stumbled upon a YouTube video titled ANT TERRARIUM, SPIDER VS ARMY, or something like that. I devoured it in no time. Then watched the next video. And the next. Ants were doing incredible things and behaved exactly like NPCs in my favorite genre — RTS. That's how I conceived the plan to create an ant strategy game.

I immediately infected my colleague with this idea. The first thing we did was check the market. To our surprise, there was only one ant game on Google Play. And it was in Korean.

Thus, we faced a maximum-level challenge: to create a project that hardly anyone had done. Original and complex. Although where there is complexity, there is interest: in my opinion, nothing is more exciting for a developer than writing unit behavior from scratch.

We spent two weeks non-stop on Discord and produced a playable prototype. In it, you could infinitely create ants and the underground. Ants searched for food, carried it home, raided enemy bases, and there was fog of war and a minimap.

We were very pleased with our work. We uploaded our game Ant Colony: Simulator to Google Play, made two quick updates, and parted ways. I went on to prototype the next projects, and Denismann received an offer from an IT studio for the position of a junior developer.

Three to four months passed. I received a notification from Google Play about updating some libraries in the game. I logged into the developer console, and just for fun, decided to check the game's reviews. I read one, two, ten, a hundred... hold on. I checked the downloads. The game was featured. Downloads were soaring at a rate of 300,000 a month. A ton of organics.

Our prototype proved its viability. People were interested in a small pixel game about an ant colony. A game without ads, IAPs, offering just 30 minutes of gameplay, lacking any mobile optimization, gained an audience. Magic! In total, the game was downloaded by over a million users. Moreover, it even sparked a wave of clones in the Play Market.

The Second Part

A couple of years later, we decided to create a complete product. A second part taking into account players’ wishes.

Interestingly, the team found me themselves. All the developers came from the first part. They wanted a sequel, they wanted to make a bigger game about ants, to hit the mobile store again.

We began developing the second part on January 1, 2020. Initially, the team consisted of three people:

• me as a game designer and UI/UX;
• Victor, a developer of his own successful mobile ant game, as the programmer;
• Artem, a freelancer artist.

The game was developed as a pet project. This meant everyone worked on the project as time allowed. Nevertheless, we tried to become more organized: structuring our tasks, ensuring transparent agreements, tracking tasks, and maintaining documentation. We worked like this for four years until at the end of 2023, we decided the project was ready for a soft launch.

These four years were challenging.

Running a pet project like an unfunded startup is a constant balancing act.

Firstly, maintaining motivation and focus is difficult without player feedback.

Secondly, it is crucial to maintain good team communication — disagreements often kill projects in the early stages.

Thirdly, survival occurs under chaotic conditions — only over time does structure emerge: processes form, responsibilities get distributed. Each team member during this period must exert tremendous effort for the project to succeed.

By the way, we first showcased the game to the world at the White Nights conference in Istanbul.

Finding a Publisher

A year before the soft launch, we realized we needed a publisher. We needed both finances and expertise.

We planned to attend a conference, set up a booth, and choose from publishers who would come to chat. We knew that mobile publishers suitable for us would be at the event. Plus, I had volunteered many times at gaming conferences and had an idea of how to set everything up.

At events, there's always a clear contrast between teams with bright promos, brochures, stickers, interactive setups, and developers with bright eyes answering questions at the booth, and the rest who only have a laptop on an empty table.

We did our “homework” excellently — printed promos, found a girl to help at the booth, procured tablets, and prepared QR-coded presentations about the game.

Ultimately, the conference went well. There was a line at the booth. The girl and I struggled to answer everyone. Several dozen publishers invited me to talk. We had a real choice.

We returned home and started drafting a table with all the offers to make a decision. The key factors were:

• contract format;
• language of communication;
• experience in mid-core games;
• experience in strategy games;
• developer percentage;
• required SDKs;
• proposed burn rate;
• feedback on them from other studios.

Here's the problem: the table clearly showed that studios interested in us lacked experience with similar projects, yet for studios we wanted to consider as potential partners, our metrics weren't high enough. This was our first project, and expertise was not a minor factor for us.

Other parameters, of course, were important too. For instance, communication in English could become problematic: not everyone in the team had a good command of the language. We also needed some funding to sprint towards scaling the content.

While gathering information about publishers and discussing who might suit us, a colleague from my previous job reached out to me. Together we developed a game called Freaky Stan. He mentioned that their studio was not only a developer now but also a publisher, and they were interested in our project.

Bingo. Everything aligned. They offered monetization and content expertise, technical support, testing assistance, and communication in Russian. I personally knew the whole team that would support us with the project and had no doubts about their skills.

Thus, in January 2024, we signed a contract with Hypercell Games.

Restructuring Processes

After connecting with the publisher, we revamped monetization — adding a systemic meta and witnessing a significant increase in LTV compared to the prototype. Then we proceeded to official release, during which the game was featured until its first million downloads.

All of this allowed us to finally believe in tomorrow and begin transforming a creative collective into a full-fledged studio.

Initially, we introduced fixed working hours. More employees began working full-time. Then we started implementing the concept of sprints, timelines, planning beyond one update. The team already consisted of seven people, and project structuring was becoming increasingly important. Over time, weekends emerged in the studio, followed by brief vacations. We addressed staff relocations. Work responsibilities became more clearly distributed and documented. Each stage involved extensive work in implementation. Our CTO Victor burned out multiple times while establishing working mechanisms but persisted and continued to build the system.

Relocations, force majeure, and financial and legal processes consumed much unbudgeted resources, exceeding the studio's monthly turnover. It's challenging to be prepared for such situations. But this is the inevitable phase for anyone wishing to take the next step to become a serious studio. We believed, and still believe, in our product and our team, so all issues — financial, team, and process-related — were resolved no matter what.

Status and Future Plans

We have 3.8 million downloads on Google Play and App Store, of which 2.7 million are organic. The game is officially released but is more accurately in the late beta stage. We intend to fine-tune the functionality that we believe constitutes a release-ready version by year’s end. Every few months, an update comes out that makes us say, "Now this is a full-fledged game," but then we think of something else. For at least the next five years, we have ideas on how to develop and grow this project in terms of content.

We anticipate entering China, Apple Arcade, Steam. Once the core gameplay's development is finished, we plan to parallelly start a reskin of the game in a different setting. It's very risky to keep all your eggs in one basket. Given our resource positions, a side-step involving a simple reskin of the existing game is the best way to expand boundaries.

We believe that heartfelt games can be hits. And we intend to prove it!