This isn't my first game jam, but it is my first time making a project using Unity DOTS, which is basically some fancy experimental stuff that makes everything difficult in return for smoother performance. The main inspiration for this project came from videos about ant simulations by Sebastian Lague and Pezzza:

Most of my work so far has just been troubleshooting, and what I've achieved is fairly easy in a normal unity project, but I've found it tough since there's not too many tutorials for DOTS and it has a habit of slapping me with a red error message. Today I just started simple and wrote a script to make my placeholder 'ants', which look suspiciously like red capsules, wander around. The results seems pretty decent, I haven't made a standard unity project to compare it to but I can have 10,000 of them wandering around while maintaining 50+ fps, and a slightly less ideal but stable 10+ fps for 100,000.

My goal for tomorrow is going to be to introduce a physics system so the entities can bump into each other and walls, as well as detect and collect food.