The sound design of the game is gritty and realistic, like the audio from a nature
documentary film’s closeup scenes of insects. In contrast, the music is cheerful and eclectic,
pairing exotic acoustic and percussive instruments with electronic embellishments. The audio
design is intended to give Leafcutters the feeling of a window into the real world, but with some
reference to its video game heritage.
The overall aesthetic is designed as a vignette into a world which is both familiar and
alien, to present the real world as a space for exploration.
The Game System
We will now examine the game system of Leafcutters, based on Tracy Fullerton’s list of
formal elements of games.46 Leafcutters is a single-player, player-vs-system game, the objective
of which is to grow a colony population of 50 ants.
In this description, the syntax “Trigger → Urge” represents a trigger and urge pairing,
such that when the trigger is true, the ant will experience the listed urge. The term “cooldown,”
applied to urges and behaviors, refers to the amount of time which must pass between executions
of the same behavior by a given ant.
In Leafcutters, ants are delineated into four castes: forager, midden worker, nurse, and
queen. While the names and physical appearances of these castes are based on scientific
knowledge of leafcutting ants, the three worker castes (forager, midden worker, and nurse) are
functionally equivalent in the game. Because each caste can be given its own set of triggers and
urges, the separation of castes allows the player to create specialized groups of workers. The
appearances and names of the castes, while not systemically significant, hint to the player how
such groups of workers might be specialized, and they are meant to prompt the user’s curiosity
regarding the roles of these castes in real ant colonies.
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46 Fullerton, Tracy. Game Design Workshop. 2nd. Elsevier, Inc., 2008. Print.