I want a Sim Ant game but with bees

Gaming@beehaw.org – 89 points – 1 years ago

Beehaw has me thinking about bees..

Sim Ant was such a nice little game when it came out (yes, I'm old) and it ought to be fun to have something similar but with bees.

Does anyone know if such a game exists? I looked around a bit and found Bee Simulator on steam but that's more playing a single bee, not managing the entire hive.

Might still be neat though even if it's not quite what I had in mind.

Anyway, just.. wanted more bees. :)

Give Hive Time a go. It has been a while since I played it in its early days but it was a fun bee hive management game.

The author is quite a fan of bees so I imagine he has done them justice.

https://cheeseness.itch.io/hive-time

Oh wow, this project looks like a really awesome management game! Thanks for sharing!

Edit:

Huh, I already own it without knowing it too O_o

I do that too. Especially with books. Start doing research for something new to read.. finally settling on something that sounds really good.

Only to find I've already gone through that exact process and bought the book a few years back but never actually read it.

It was in style giant charity bundle. The game is fun for a single party through I think.

I just gave this a play-through because of your recommendation. What an adorable game! Thank you for sharing it.

That's pretty neat!

How about Apico?

+1 for Apico - it's a love letter to the minecraft Forestry mod.

Interesting, going to have to check it out!

I liked sim ant too. Also it's amazing that the brain remembers those games still, it's been like over 30 years... But they made a super strong impression at that age.

Maxis were pretty impressive back then! Pioneers really.

Yeah I remember everyone having a lot of respect and you would hear things like "it's a maxis game so it's going to be awesome".

I wish I could go back to that age sometimes because I don't get nearly as excited about games anymore as an adult, and that's a shame. It was great to be really excited about a game like that.

It's a hard quality to keep, things were new and exciting back then. We've seen so many games by now that there's not much left to impress. How often does something truly new and ground breaking actually come around?

That's not saying that there's no good games any more, there are but most of them are spins on something that's already been done.

But yeah.. that sense of wonder and excitement, it's a precious thing.

I am confident I could program a game like that; but I don't know enough about bees to make it half as realistic as Wright made SimAnt.

I also suck at art so it'd either have to use random assets or be entirely text-based.

See, now we just need a graphics guru and probably a sound person and we can have something going!

Maybe a biologist as well?

Why bother making something new when perfection already exists?

(kidding)

Haha never heard of that one!

I only want it if it comes with a college-level entomology textbook about bees packed in the box with it, like SimAnt had.

I think I still might have the box and the book laying around somewhere!

Itch.io had a big game jam on the theme of bees a little while ago so I'm sure if you poke around on there for a while you'll find stuff that scratches your itch.

SimAnt was amazing. I just want it on GOG. :(

Yeah.. it's playable in the browser on a bunch of places and probably easily available as abandonware as well. But yeah, it's sad how few old games are available for actual purchase.