Idle Beekeeper

Transform your room into a miniature apiary. Experience bees fly around your room collecting nectar and earning you money in this mixed reality incremental game.

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Inspiration

This project combines my previously released mobile game "Idle Farmyard" (An incremental mobile game) and my current project "Project Nectar" (A VR beekeeping simulator game - due in Q1 2026).

I wanted to experiment and have bees flying around the player's rooms leveraging the mixed reality capabilities of the Quest 3. I decided to take the bees from Project Nectar and combine them with the incremental game mechanics of Idle Farmyard and provide players with a peaceful game where they can sit back and watch bees forage for Nectar in their own home.

How the game works

In this idle game your bee will collect nectar from flower you purchase and earn you money. You can spend that money to upgrade your flowers to increase:

  • Production Rate | How quickly the flower produces nectar
  • Bee Speed | How quickly the bee travels to and from the flower.
  • Bee Capacity | How much nectar the bee can transport from the flower at once.

You can also buy new flowers to give the bees an additional source of nectar.

Currently the prototype has been limited to 3 flowers but this would be expanded to many more flowers in the next phase of development.

Core Technical Features

  • Passthrough | Allowing players to experience bees flying around their own home
  • Scene Mesh Awareness | Allowing the player to place the beehive and flowers on real life objects
  • Hand Grab Interactions | Allows the player to use their hands to place the objects in their world
  • Pokable Buttons | Allows users to interact with menus with immersive poke actions
  • Hand Gesture | Leveraging the hand swiping gestures players and intuitively and naturally change the colour of their beehive
  • Spatial Audio | Listen to the bees fly past you on their way to forage for nectar.
  • Game Saves | The game saves and loads your progress allowing you to jump right back in to where you left off.

How I built it

This game was built using Unity 6.2 and Meta's All-In-One SDK.

I leverages the power of Meta's building blocks to quickly get up and running with a mixed reality Rig that was aware of the player's environment. I imported the samples to quickly see how certain spatial features could be accessed (such as the hand swiping gesture).

I downloaded a free farm UI pack from the Unity Asset Store for the menus. (https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/2d/gui/farm-game-ui-starter-2d-318607)

I found royalty free music on Pixel bay: https://pixabay.com/music/solo-guitar-the-beat-of-nature-122841/

I used Google Fonts for the icons in the menus

I used some existing models from Project Nectar for the beehive, bee and flowers.

I was able to iterate quickly using Link mode with the Quest 3 to test new features. I occasionally made an actual built to test spatial features on the device and to leverage Meta Developer Hub’s Metrics Hud to ensure performance was stable.

Challenges I ran into

Time. With limited time to be able to dedicate to this project I would have liked to add more and polish the game further for the submission.

Occlusion. Early on I ran into issues where the occlusion materials weren’t working very well and also the depth settings seemed to be in order my hand was hidden behind the virtual objects. To quickly get around this I switched from “Real Hands” to “Virtual Hands”.

Then at some point occlusion seemed to stop working on objects, at which point I decided other features were the priority and I moved on from it as it wasn't game-breaking.

Accomplishments that I’m proud of

I’m proud that I was able to finish a prototype for a new game while exploring a world of spatial SDK features I’d previously not used.

Also keeping a project within the planned scope is also a personal achievement.

What I learned

  • Passthrough capabilities
  • Mixed reality Occlusion capabilities
  • Hand Interactions
  • Gesture features

What's next for Idle Beekeeper

The plan for Idle Beekeeper is to get some testers to play the game to validate the idea and mechanics. If the game has a positive response I'll continue to develop it and aim for a release in Q2 / Q3 of 2026.

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