Greenfoot is halfway between Scratch and Phaser in the sense that you get a visual environment to work in but you are forced to write actual code rather than dragging blocks around.

There's an awesome demo of ants by one of the creators of Greenfoot at http://www.greenfoot.org/scenarios/1016 where the ants release a pheromone as they bring food back to their ant hills. You can download the code from chapter 11 of the "book scenarios" zip file from https://www.greenfoot.org/book/

You can check out my "Butterfly" example at http://www.greenfoot.org/scenarios/19985 and the code behind it at https://github.com/pdurbin/greenfoot-butterfly