Tower Five reveals all on accurately building a microscopic world in Empire of the Ants

During my time in Germany for Gamescom back at the tail end of August, I had the luxury to meet up and chat with the developer behind the upcoming strategy game Empire of the Ants. This ambitious project is very unique because it's built on a very small level, revolving around insects and the troubles and battles to survive in a miniature world.

In the interview with senior game designer Matthias Varlet, I asked about how the team went about accurately representing such a miniature world, preserving all the key intricate details along the way.

Varlet told me: "So, well, we use a tech that is called photogrammetry for all the environments. And then we have our artists that kind of touch on those elements to make them a bit more beautiful or make them pop a bit more. But it's basically photos that are transferred into 3D models, and then we just make them a bit better. That's for the kind of environment elements.

"Then we have the insects themselves, and they, well, for these, we have our 3D artists that actually have done an awesome job where they just basically make a lot of research on the insect itself, on its characteristics, how it moves, what it looks like under all the different things. And so we've seen, there's a lot of videos on YouTube, which are amazing. We didn't know that before we started the project, of people... I would say cultivating, but that's not the right word. They kind of have ants and make the city of those ants grow. And by doing that, they document what they do. And with that, we could actually have a lot of very good images of how ants behave and what they do and what they look like.

"Same for all the other insects. There's a lot of documentation online and stuff. So we documented ourselves a lot. And we're like, okay, let's go and see exactly how this insect is and how it lives and how it moves so we know exactly how to animate it, not only how we can represent it in 3D."

You can see the full interview with Varlet below, where we also talk about the strategy systems, the multiplayer elements, and the fearsome spiders that can be found in-game.