Colony — a cozy ant colony game for the browser

Paint glowing pheromone trails across a backyard, guide your worker ants to food, grow your colony, and defend the Queen against spiders and beetles. Colony is a complete, polished HTML5 game contained in a single self-contained file — no libraries, no build steps, no external assets.

Gameplay

Pheromone trail painting — drag on the grass to draw glowing trails; ants sense and follow the strongest scent, and trails decay naturally over time.
Colony economy — hire Workers and Soldiers and buy four upgrades (Speed, Carry, Trails, Soldier Strength) with escalating costs.
Enemies and defense — spiders hunt your ants in the open; armored beetles march on the nest and attack the Queen. If her health ring empties, the run ends.
Escalating waves — a new wave every 30 seconds with tougher enemies, plus rainstorms that wash your trails away and force you to re-route.
First-time tutorial — an interactive coach walks new players through painting, gathering, hiring and upgrading step by step, with a spotlight on the relevant button. It runs once, can be skipped at any point, and can be replayed from Settings.
Full game loop — main menu with saved stats, pause menu, how-to-play screen, game-over screen with run statistics, best score and instant restart.

Features

Fully responsive — fullscreen canvas that adapts from phones to desktop, playable with mouse, keyboard and touch
Settings screen: independent music and effects volume sliders, mute, screen-shake toggle, tutorial replay and best-score reset — all saved in localStorage
Procedural audio: every sound effect and the ambient music loop are synthesized with the Web Audio API — no audio files to host
Game-feel polish: hit-stop impacts, squash-and-stretch animation, particles, floating text, enemy spawn telegraphs, nest delivery pulses and rain splashes
Accessible: ARIA-labelled controls, visible focus states, keyboard shortcuts, respects the reduced-motion system preference
Resilient: auto-pause when the tab loses focus and a free rescue worker if the colony is wiped out — no soft-locks

Technical specifications

Type: HTML5 Canvas 2D game written in vanilla JavaScript — zero dependencies
Main file: index.html (approximately 132 KB) with HTML, CSS and JavaScript inline
Network: makes no external requests — no CDNs, web fonts, image files, analytics or ads
Runs offline — from a local file, any static web host, or embedded in an iframe
Storage: best score, wave record, volumes, mute and tutorial state saved with localStorage
Browsers: all evergreen desktop browsers (Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari) and mobile browsers (iOS Safari, Android Chrome)
Performance: 60 FPS on mid-range hardware; sprite caching, offscreen buffers and pooled particles

Installation (3 ways)

Test locally: unzip the package and double-click index.html — it runs fully offline.
Publish: upload index.html to any static host (shared hosting, Netlify, GitHub Pages, Cloudflare Pages, itch.io HTML upload).
Embed: place it in your page with an iframe at any size — the game resizes itself automatically.

No PHP, no database, no server configuration and no build tooling required.

Package contents

index.html — the complete game
documentation.html — full documentation: installation, controls, a customization guide for non-coders (exact search strings for balance values, colors and branding), troubleshooting and FAQ
README.md — quick-start readme
LICENSE.txt — license terms and credits
assets/screenshots/ — ten real 1280×720 screenshots of the game screens

Customization

No coding experience needed: game balance constants (starting food, wave length, costs, speeds) sit at the top of the script, the color palette lives in CSS custom properties in :root, the title and tagline are plain text, and the tutorial is a data array you can edit or extend. The documentation lists the exact text to search for each value — edit, save, refresh.

License

Sold under the standard Envato Regular License: use the game in one end product for yourself or one client. End users of your product may not extract or reuse the game’s source code, and the file may not be resold or redistributed as a standalone product. An Extended License is available if you need broader usage rights. Full terms are included in LICENSE.txt.

Support

Questions before or after purchase? Contact Tawajo — www.tawajo.com. English documentation included with every purchase.

Colony | Ant Territory Simulation HTML5 Game