Thirty-three years after Bernard Werber's book, “The Ants” are preparing to invade video games

If the insects imagined by Bernard Werber live their adventures in the forest of Fontainebleau, it is 400km away, in La Rochelle, that you have to go to meet the creators of the game. To bring the world of the Ants to life, a thirty humans got involved over three years. And the author himself became passionate about the project.

“I have a passion for strategy games”explains Bernard Werber. “I learned to play chess from the age of 6, and I was always looking for derivatives of chess games. There are plenty of strategy games in which you see crowds of soldiers fighting against each other, and for me making a game based on 'Ants' seemed a logical development because I have already witnessed, in reality, fights between groups of ants and groups of termites, and it’s spectacular!”

“I especially didn't want to stay outside the game, let it just be 'they buy the license and then I'll discover the game'. So at all stages, I participated, particularly on the aesthetics of the heroine , 103683.”

“An author who has an understanding and love of the video game medium”

To the point of adding small touches that are sometimes very specific: “One of Bernard Werber's first feedback was: 'could the ants have a movement where they would clean their antennae?'says Renaud Charpentier, co-founder of the Tower Five studio. “And one of the first animations that we added to the game was precisely that, on his advice. Because it fit really well. We were lucky to have an author available, and who also had a understanding, and even a love of our medium, video games.”

“Les Fourmis” is therefore a strategy game, with a particular bias: here, there is no question of observing the action from a distance as in the classics of the genre. You live at insect level, in the skin (sorry, the cuticle) of the heroine. “We wanted this third-person view, rather than what is often done in strategy games, an overhead view”specifies Renaud Charpentier. “In other words, an airplane view or a view above the map, which has the advantage of clearly presenting the action, but which has the disadvantage that we are no longer in the action.”

“The second challenge was the restitution of the universe, of the somewhat unique scent that remained for me from reading the book, in my 20s. That's why we chose to have sequences of tactical game, classic strategy, but also sections, adventure zones, which allow you to transcribe this feeling of both strangeness and gigantism that you have when becoming these characters.”

“There are completely invented sounds” originally inaudible to the human ear

To reinforce immersion, particular care was taken in the sound design, supervised by Vincent Miot-Sertier: “There are insect sounds that are completely made up, because either I couldn't record the source, or if I had recorded it, it would have been ultrasound, it wouldn't have been easy or interesting to work For example, for the spider, I made it growl, but also 'hoist', because that's what very large spiders, such as tarantulas or tarantulas, do. I was able to record, which we can hear even as a human, like a bumblebee, wasp, dragonfly…”

Painstaking work and great ambitions: the game from the small French studio will also be one of the first to exploit the capabilities of the PlayStation 5 Pro, which is released the same day.