Posted October 23, 2022 by Cunning Hound
Turns out it’s possible!
I had an idea for a sheepdog game a while ago but never got around to making it because there were so many things I wanted to put in and didn’t really know where to start. When I saw the Trijam theme (“Isolated”), I figured there was something that could be done with the concept. The time limit made me focus on really stripping everything back to absolute basics, and made it easy for me to take all of the more complex ideas I had and just throw them out of the window.
So: there are lots of sheep. One of them must be isolated. They all run around sometimes doing their own thing, sometimes forming little flocks, and they run away from the dog.
How I used the three hours First dev session - 1 hour:
Second dev session - 30 minutes:
Third dev session - 1 hour:
Final session - 30 minutes:
What I’m not quite happy with Well now I look at the uploaded build, the sprites are clearly far too high resolution for the size I’m using them at and that leads to weird aliasing effects.
Sheep navigation has a lot of room for improvement. They often walk into each other and then just stand there jiggling about, which as far as I’m aware is not something real sheep tend to do. Also they sometimes get trapped on the edge of the dog’s influence and turn around 180 degrees over and over and over extremely quickly. Again, I’m no expert but I’m pretty sure that’s not typical sheep behaviour.
It’s too easy. I’d like to play with the parameters for sheep behaviour a little more and add in some obstacles or other challenges. Three hours didn’t leave much time for balance.
What I didn’t get done I always planned to keep it pretty basic, but there were one or two things I hoped to add which I just couldn’t quite squeeze into the three hour time limit:
I think most of that would have been possible with one hour extra. Oh well!