UNDERLEAF

Small lives. Vast ambitions.

Build a colony. Explore the world above. Defend the queen below.

Underleaf is an independent ant-colony strategy game that combines resource gathering, underground construction and real-time combat. Guide workers through the grass, carve new chambers beneath the soil, raise specialised ants and fight rival colonies for survival.

Command groups from above or take direct control of an individual ant and lead nearby helpers yourself. A quiet patch of lawn becomes a battlefield of supply routes, guarded entrances and rival armies.

Your colony depends on one life: its queen. Protect yours, breach your rivals’ nests and become the last ant colony standing.

Underleaf is currently a playable Windows prototype. Its systems, artwork, balance and interface are still developing. The features below describe the current playable game, with future direction listed separately.

A world beneath your feet

For an ant, a garden is an enormous landscape.

Food lies beyond familiar territory. A nest entrance can become a dangerous bottleneck. Spiders threaten passing workers, termite nests defend their surroundings, and rival colonies compete for the supplies needed to grow.

The surface offers opportunity, but the nest is your home. Expand underground, organise your workers and prepare for enemies that can follow you through the entrance.

Underleaf combines ant-inspired behaviour with imaginative strategy-game units and abilities. It is a stylised colony RTS, rather than a scientific simulation.

The current playable foundation

Build above and below ground

Switch between the surface and your underground colony.

• Dig connected tunnels and designate new rooms.
• Expand space for nurseries, stores, farms and defenses.
• Construct additional entrances between the two layers.
• Place walls and gates to control access.
• Build towers and garrison them with Spitters.
• Open gates for movement or close them to block passage and direct fire.

Workers excavate and construct reachable plans. A new chamber needs a connected route before the colony can put it to use.

An economy carried on six legs

Resources must be found, collected and brought home.

Workers physically carry supplies underground and unload at a completed Store or the queen chamber before those resources enter your stockpile. Protecting the route home matters as much as finding the resource itself.

• Gather food, protein, sugar, building fibre, water and stone.
• Assign workers to keep gathering a particular resource type.
• Use Carriers to move larger loads.
• Develop fungus farms and aphid farming.
• Harvest dead ants, spiders and beetles for protein.
• Balance gathering, excavation, construction and colony growth.

New resources appear at random locations over time instead of refilling old deposits. Even previously explored ground can contain supplies your colony has not discovered yet. Send ants back into the world to find them.

Raise a colony with different jobs

The current roster contains 14 ant castes, with roles spanning labour, exploration, support and combat.

• Workers gather, dig and build.
• Scouts explore quickly and locate new opportunities.
• Soldiers form the melee frontline.
• Majors provide heavier protection.
• Spitters attack from range with acid.
• Raiders specialise in fast assaults.
• Gardeners improve fungus production.
• Aphid Keepers improve honeydew production.
• Carriers transport larger loads.
• Nurses heal nearby allies.
• Sappers excavate and breach walls.
• Wardens strengthen nearby fighters.
• Ram Ants assault structures.
• Siege Spitters deploy stone launchers.

Queue multiple ants in the nursery and plan your next reinforcements. Newly raised ants emerge beside the main entrance, making them easier to select and assign.

Research unlocks advanced castes, agriculture, defenses and colony improvements.

Command the colony—or lead from the ground

Underleaf supports both group commands and direct control.

• Select individual ants or drag-select groups.
• Use control groups to organise your forces.
• Issue movement, attack, attack-move and patrol orders.
• Hold positions to defend important routes.
• Take direct control of an ant.
• Recruit nearby helpers and move with a small squad.
• Switch between selected ants.
• Pause to plan and adjust the simulation speed.

Military ants automatically engage enemies they can see and pursue them a short distance before returning to their previous duties. Hold Position keeps defenders from chasing enemies away from their posts.

The queen is the objective

Rival ant colonies gather resources, raise units, research improvements and launch attacks.

Their armies can enter your nest and pursue your queen underground. Surface defenses alone are not enough if an enemy reaches an unguarded entrance.

• Defend your queen and the approaches to her chamber.
• Attack rival colonies above and below ground.
• Breach entrances and fight through defended tunnels.
• Eliminate rival queens to remove competing colonies.
• Win by becoming the last surviving ant queen.

Termites and spiders are hostile neutral creatures. They threaten nearby ants from every colony, but do not compete for victory.

A dangerous environment

Other colonies are only part of the problem.

The current prototype includes simplified, warned environmental hazards such as rain, mower passes, footprints, chemical spray and ground collapse. Available hazards depend on the map and match settings.

These events can interrupt gathering, threaten exposed ants and force you to reconsider where the colony should expand.

Campaign progression and custom skirmishes

The current campaign progresses through six map layouts:

• Clover Haven
• The Open Green
• Rootbound Border
• Foundation Cracks
• Behind the Skirting
• Pantry Frontier

The campaign currently uses conquest objectives, with research and progression carried forward. It is an early campaign framework rather than a finished story campaign.

Custom Skirmish lets you adjust the map, rival colonies, termites, wildlife, environmental hazards, resource gain, research rate, seed and game speed.

Choose no rival ant colonies for an open-ended colony sandbox.

Local saving and loading let you return to an existing colony.

Simple artwork, moving creatures

Underleaf currently uses original procedural 2D artwork with a readable top-down view.

Ant movement uses real ant footage as a reference for alternating leg groups, planted feet and gradual turns. Walking, standing and attacking use procedural poses, while spiders and beetles have their own body shapes.

The result is a stylised interpretation designed for the game’s scale. The screenshots and animation previews on this page show the current visual direction.

Planned direction

The longer-term aim is to develop the prototype into a richer colony strategy game, with:

• More varied campaign objectives and authored missions.
• Deeper ecology and environmental interactions.
• Further improvements to enemy behaviour and colony management.
• More developed logistics and underground planning.
• Continued refinement of creature artwork and animation.
• Audio, improved settings and more flexible controls.
• Further work on usability, balance and performance.

These are development goals, not guaranteed release dates or final specifications.

Current version

Platform: Windows
Mode: Single-player
Controls: Mouse and keyboard
Status: Playable prototype / actively in development

The current game uses simplified wildlife behaviour, environmental effects and building footprints. Artwork and systems will continue to change as development progresses.

Feedback on worker behaviour, nest construction, combat, controls and readability is especially useful.

About the project

Underleaf is an independent project from M-Interactive, built around the idea that a small colony can create a large strategy game.

The goal is to make the everyday work of an ant colony—finding food, bringing it home, expanding the nest and protecting the queen—matter alongside the battles.

Development is iterative. Features are tested, revised and expanded through play and feedback.

AI disclosure

Underleaf is being developed with substantial assistance from AI tools.

AI assistance has been used for programming, debugging, design iteration, written material and promotional artwork. The developer provides the direction, references, feature requests and feedback, and decides what belongs in the game.

The current in-game artwork is procedurally drawn. The promotional images were generated using game screenshots as style references, and the walking-and-turning GIF was captured using the game’s actual creature renderer and animation system.

AI assistance does not replace testing or revision. Underleaf remains a work in progress, and the aim is to be transparent about both how it is made and what is currently playable.

Grow the colony. Guard the entrance. Keep the queen alive.