Jen Nichol (XBOX Game Dev Community Manager) interviews Willem Willemse, the solo developer behind Idle Not Idle Games in Johannesburg. The conversation is a rare honest look at what solo development actually demands — beyond the coding.
The thesis is simple: solo devs don’t just build games. They become the entire team, often without realizing how many hats they’re wearing until scope catches up.
- Willem started focused on coding, but became storyteller and designer out of necessity — “to actually make a proper story, there needs to be some form of narrative experience”
- A structured roadmap (art update → level design → skill systems → story integration → playtesting) keeps solo projects from unraveling
- The hardest bottleneck isn’t code or art — it’s feedback. Over 1000 views on his playtest requests, zero people actually opened the project
- An entity system rewrite cut resource usage while supporting more NPCs, teaching the lesson that sometimes rebuilding is faster than retrofitting
- Tool affordability is a binding constraint: “If I can afford them, I’ll use them. It’s an affordability issue.”
- Self-doubt is constant: “I do not feel as skilled as I think I am sometimes”
The lessons section is the most directly useful part — earned observations from shipping, not theory:
- Feature creep is constant and finishing matters more than starting
- Simple tools beat complex workflows every time
- Technical constraints shape player experience
- Confidence can be as important as skills
The 1000:0 ratio of views-to-actual-playtesters is the kind of data point that sticks with you. It names a problem every solo dev faces but few articulate.