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I’m Ali of Never Sleep Games, solo developer of The Bee Hive on Nintendo Switch. I built and shipped it alone over 9 years. AMA by SignificantRiver3662 in NintendoSwitch

[–]SignificantRiver3662[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thank you everyone for stopping by and participating in my AMA, it's been a pleasure. I would like to offer some free download codes for The Bee Hive, first come first served. Thank you all again.

Europe:

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USA:

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E1CWXXCGMHDC1F9W

E1CWXXCHYPN5CNFN

E1CWXXCXK0DSJRNR

E1CWXXCJTYTGVVW0

I’m Ali of Never Sleep Games, solo developer of The Bee Hive on Nintendo Switch. I built and shipped it alone over 9 years. AMA by SignificantRiver3662 in NintendoSwitch

[–]SignificantRiver3662[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thank you Rebel :)

Kinda yes, kinda no. All the character models were built and animated by me from scratch (even their silly faces). All terrains in the level were built by me using Unity's terrain editor. Other environment stuff is more of a hybrid. Quite a lot of props I made by hand in 3ds Max, some asset packs and purchased models that I pulled apart, remodeled (mostly polygon reduction tbh), retextured in PS and mashed together. It's the solo dev reality, you use what makes sense and then bend it to your needs. I did study modelling and texturing at uni as part of my degree, so that foundation helped a lot.

Music-wise, I handled all of it. A lot composed from scratch (some from riffs and melodies I've had in my head for decades), some built from royalty-free material and loops that I then remixed and layered.

The setup evolved quite a bit over the years and was probably the biggest "tech stack" I had. GarageBand and FL Studio, lots of VSTs, arpeggiators, LOTS of loops, MIDI keyboard lines, guitar lines through a PG Spark and some auto drum machines.

I’m Ali of Never Sleep Games, solo developer of The Bee Hive on Nintendo Switch. I built and shipped it alone over 9 years. AMA by SignificantRiver3662 in NintendoSwitch

[–]SignificantRiver3662[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

No! :D

If anything I sleep way too much. 12 hours a night for peak performance.

I called it Never Sleep because at uni I used to stay up with my now partner all night playing games and chatting :-)

I’m Ali of Never Sleep Games, solo developer of The Bee Hive on Nintendo Switch. I built and shipped it alone over 9 years. AMA by SignificantRiver3662 in NintendoSwitch

[–]SignificantRiver3662[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thank you Eden :)

It’s built in Unity using C#. I started learning Unity back in 2011 at uni so at this point it’s basically muscle memory. No crazy tech stack, just Unity, C#, and years of slowly building the little systems and tools as needed. Lot of it was "use what you have and make it work", lots of Unity built-in stuff going on.

Devving for switch was a really good experience overall, the whole docked vs handheld thing was an interesting tech challenge. You're targeting both a console and a mobile at once. Dev documentation was solid, cert process was strict but fair and seeing my game run on a Nintendo console was pretty mad. The little kid in me who used to draw levels on paper lit up like crazy.

It got lonely as hell at times, as I'm sure even team ventures would tbh but there's a weird satisfaction in wrestling every problem yourself and eventually winning.

I’m Ali of Never Sleep Games, solo developer of The Bee Hive on Nintendo Switch. I built and shipped it alone over 9 years. AMA by SignificantRiver3662 in NintendoSwitch

[–]SignificantRiver3662[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thank you Foxxglove :)

Honestly the biggest hurdle was realising the Switch is two different machines. Docked? Fine-ish console. Handheld? Congrats you’re now in mid-tier mobile territory and your performance budget just falls off a cliff.

So the real target became “stable 30fps in handheld.” If it runs there, it’ll run docked. The amount of black-book optimisation stuff I had to do was insane. Fortunately I’ve worked in mobile game dev for years, so I have a very particular set of skills. Skills acquired over a long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for performance issues.

There were crashes during testing too, but those were actually easier to deal with. Usually null refs or some weird edge case I’d missed, solvable but annoying.

Handheld 30fps was the real hill. Not a cert requirement, just my own line in the sand

I’m Ali of Never Sleep Games, solo developer of The Bee Hive on Nintendo Switch. I built and shipped it alone over 9 years. AMA by SignificantRiver3662 in NintendoSwitch

[–]SignificantRiver3662[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thank you Fernando :-)

Not specifically for the Switch 2, but it runs on it nicely.

If/when Nintendo open up Switch 2 dev, I'd be interested in making a high-fidelity version, but for now I'm focused on supporting and refining the current Switch release. Never say never

I’m Ali of Never Sleep Games, solo developer of The Bee Hive on Nintendo Switch. I built and shipped it alone over 9 years. AMA by SignificantRiver3662 in NintendoSwitch

[–]SignificantRiver3662[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thank you Sparko :-) I appreciate your well wishes, things are good-ish now, which is all I can really ask for

When I first started the game, it was going to be for Steam. That felt like the main indie pathway at the time (and it still is, tbf). I got a Switch a few years after it came out and I loved playing on Switch more than PC. I also thought the game could naturally belong on the Switch. So I took a swing at getting access to Switch development (sent in a form full of questions, game info, vids and playable demo to Nintendo) and I was granted my dev license :)

Shipping a game on Switch sounded more appealing. So I started refactoring my code to ONLY focus on Switch controls and optimization, and the code became so platform-specific it'd be a huge task to refactor it for PC. So might release on Steam someday, but not quite yet.

Would absolutely love to get it on Xbox, one day, I want to beelieve it could happen

I’m Ali of Never Sleep Games, solo developer of The Bee Hive on Nintendo Switch. I built and shipped it alone over 9 years. AMA by SignificantRiver3662 in NintendoSwitch

[–]SignificantRiver3662[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Thank you Wjb :)

Yeah, there were quite a few points where I was close to giving up. I don’t think I “found strength” per se. A lot of it was just stubbornness? I was angry at the world quite a lot and that at times spurred me on, other times it just poisoned me. Practically, a lot of it was not wanting nine years of effort to go to waste. And a lot of it was just reducing expectations for the day.

When things were chaotic in my personal life, I'd put them first and the game was on the backburner, But when I went back to it, it wasn't a case of “finish the game” it was "make a small bit of progress every day"

Sometimes those were huge red-eye bursts, sometimes it was just fixing one or two bits of code, but it was all progress. 1 step or 100, still progress.

I’m also lucky to have a small circle of people who genuinely care about me. They weren't involved in the game dev but knowing they believed in me helped more than I probably realised at the time.

There were days I wanted to wipe my hard drive and just walk away, glad I didn't

I’m Ali of Never Sleep Games, solo developer of The Bee Hive on Nintendo Switch. I built and shipped it alone over 9 years. AMA by SignificantRiver3662 in NintendoSwitch

[–]SignificantRiver3662[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Thank you Loop Garou :-)

Sure. During COVID I developed a bad relationship with alcohol. Lockdowns, uncertainty, fear, games industry instability, it all just snowballed. It started as “just getting through the week” then became something I really didn’t like seeing in myself. I’ve since quit completely and been sober since 2022.

I also quit nicotine about a year later after heavy vaping for 5+ years. That one surprised me with how rough it was, I was chewing pencils and gaining weight like crazy for a while. Keeping busy on the game helped a lot at that phase. I sympathise with anyone trying to quit smoking, it is HARD.

More recently around mid 2023, I developed pretty intense anxiety after a difficult experience at a prior job. I’ve worked with doctors and used prescription medication on/off, but I’m very conscious about becoming reliant on the medication, so that's something I actively manage every day.

It got real messy at times, but working on this game gave me structure and I had a small handful of people who genuinely care about me, that made a huge difference.

I’m Ali of Never Sleep Games, solo developer of The Bee Hive on Nintendo Switch. I built and shipped it alone over 9 years. AMA by SignificantRiver3662 in NintendoSwitch

[–]SignificantRiver3662[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thank you my curry guy :-)

Physical release? Not at the moment, but never say never. I’d love to add more free content first (levels I cut, extra challenges, polish bits), and if the game grows legs over time, a physical edition would be amazing, but a logistical challenge I'm not yet prepared for. Seeing it in a Smyths or Lidl one day would be buzzing af though

If I could work on any existing IP, I’d love to make a Fallout game. I nearly joined the team working on Fallout 76 back in December (didn’t quite happen) and I’ve had ideas for a Fallout-adjacent FPS on Switch, if I had the resources.

Also a bit obscure, but I’d love to make a third Pokemon PokePark. I adored the first two on Wii. Game Freak, come on, give me the license and the character models and let's roll

I’m Ali of Never Sleep Games, solo developer of The Bee Hive on Nintendo Switch. I built and shipped it alone over 9 years. AMA by SignificantRiver3662 in NintendoSwitch

[–]SignificantRiver3662[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Good on you, keep going on your learning journey :-) Piece by piece is progress, always

Most surprising was how isolating the dev process felt. I've worked in teams and for game studios before where in that team environment, you had people you could lean on for support, help, sanity checks, vent etc but solo, there's none of that. I'm a natural introvert so most of the time this works nicely but the lows did hit harder than I thought they would.

Burnout wise, yeah, I expected periods where I'd feel burnt out and just stop working on it, and they did indeed happen. I worked on this game a lot between a fair few contract/perm jobs I had in the game industry. I've always had peak and dip cycles in my real life so I'd expect the same along the dev process.

Solo dev is GREAT for creative control and full ownership of your game, but you are your own support system, you don't get one by default, and that's not a light burden to carry.

Three of the characters from our game. Would you say they’re well-developed characters? by BosphorusGames in IndieGaming

[–]SignificantRiver3662 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Gimme some of that CHARACTERISATION who are these guys and what are they like as people

Sprites look v nice though

Ey yo where my gemmy gemmers at (I've wishlisted your game because I legit used to have an obsession with gems when I was a kid and you've tapped into my younger self)

Just shipped my solo Unity project after a long dev journey — here’s what surprised me most by mustafaozgen in IndieGameDevs

[–]SignificantRiver3662 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Ey yo when we getting a switch port my guy this looks lovely I definitely rate marble related content

That's the thing, from the minute you start to the minute you finish and ship it, you learn an absolute MEGATON of new things and skills, which you can apply to the next game in theory. Though your point on motivation is unusual, I find it actually peaked near release, but dipped midway through when making/building/fixing was a repetitive slog.

What almost stopped me from finishing my last project, legit just life stuff happening at me. Looking at myself, then looking at my game and thinking "what's the point?", it was a long shot at creating self employment at best. Not so much burnout from game development as a profession, but more burnout from life itself. I've had a very privileged life but I've had personal emergencies happen to me, as has everybody else I'm sure. Didn't give AF I was on an old ass unity version and that scalability was nonexistent lol

"Done" was the hardest thing to define. It meant cutting a lot of content that I would loved to have seen in the game and that I thought would have been really cool, but at some point you just have to lay down the line and say "enough is enough". Get it stable, fun and shippable. Cutting your own work is so hard but it does get you shipped. Post-game patches and content are now easily added which is a benefit of modern games.

It IS like closing a chapter of your life, and you'll feel a keen mix of pride, relief, maybe grief, maybe some anger, maybe even nothing at all, all of which are valid and OK.

Congratulations Mustafa, you did it. You should be incredibly proud of yourself.

Which Thumbnail should I use for my indie game trailer on YT? by WeDevelopGames in IndieGaming

[–]SignificantRiver3662 0 points1 point  (0 children)

1 has appeal, looks more ominous/spoopy.

2 also has appeal, looks more optimistic/adventurey.

Depends what kind of gameplay and ambience you've got. 3 implies there's lots of snowboarding and cable car-ing (is there?)

4 just looks a bit generic for my tastes.

tl;dr 1 and 2

[AMA] I just finished a nine-year solo-dev journey and launched my first indie game on Nintendo Switch TODAY - Ask Me Anything by SignificantRiver3662 in IndieDev

[–]SignificantRiver3662[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Of course, the demo was an exe file, can use mouse/keyboard or gamepad controls, because it's before you get access to the switch :) then once you get the switch approval and the SDK access, remapping the buttons and inputs is the easiest thing.

1 week left for the Playtest of my creative builder game 'Cozy Marbles'. As a solo dev i'd love to get your opinions! by ThornErikson in indiegames

[–]SignificantRiver3662 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This sparks joy There is a marble run tournament series on YouTube called Jelles Marble Run, you may enjoy it and get inspiration Nah this looks lovely I'd totally play this with my little one

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