Hello everyone, I'm here to showcase a indie game idea which I hope will become reality in early September this year, here is the basic concept: The game is top down, you are a shepherd what needs to take care and defend his sheep in order to make money to buy more sheep and other things, like shearing stations so you can sell their wool, you can also breed them and sell them at half the cost for a market sheep. But the challenge will be in defending them from wolves and robbers, Wolves will attack you if your sheep are grazing near the forest and robbers will steal them if they are grazing near the road. You can only control 10 sheep with your character, but you can hire help.

You win in 3 ways :having 100 sheep, clearing the forests of sheep-eating wolves, or clearing the robbers camp. Robbers and wolves will have very distinct combat mechanics, so each win condition is different .

Here is the list  of content, I want to keep the scope realistic:

1. The sheep of course, they are pretty dumb and will take orders from you or your shepherds, run away from wolves, and can be sheared or sold for money , they need to graze at least 2 hours per day to survive.
2. The local shop where you can buy and hire things and people, you have to walk to it.
3.  Time system , you wake up at 5 am  and go to sleep at 9pm, or else you get penalties.
4. Shepherds, you can hire them at the shop and they will graze sheep,  where you assign them, you can also assign the time when they do it, they will have individual bonuses and traits, some may have increased flock size and others will attack wolves.
5. Wolves, will try to come and eat sheep, in large numbers, quick, melee enemies.
6. Bandits, will try to come and steal the sheep , are armed with guns and more powerful than wolves.
7. Hunters, they can't take care of the sheep , but will help you attack wolves.
8. Mercenaries , like hunters, but for bandits.
9. Dogs, will increase flock size and help you, also super cute.
10. Shearers will shear sheep and sell their wool for you.
11. This feature is a maybe, or a potential update, missions ,which will appear randomly and you can complete them for money, or refuse them, something like a hunter who wants your help to hunt a dangerous tiger, or a man who wants you to rescue his son kidnapped by bandits, something like that to break up the routine.

That is it for now, I'm jumping into development, will update you once I have a prototype.

Tell me what you think and also if you have any ideas on how to improve the game!

I had made the prototype and also a project page for the Shepherd which you can find on my page, it will have all the devlogs there.

The prototype consists of

-sheep (white squares) which will wonder around when they are in a pen, then if the shepherd orders them, they will go to the grass to graze, then they can be ordered by the shepherd to move back into the pen, they can also be attacked by wolves, which they will run from, currently it kills the sheep upon touching, but so does the shepherd who will go attack the wolves when he sees them, I will work on the combat mechanics later, because they are non essential to the core loop. 

-shepherds, one of them can only control 10 sheep , are assigned schedule by the player.

-a pen, for containing the sheep

-a  grass field, somewhere for the sheep to graze

-wolves, to attack the sheep

-wolf spawner, to spawn wolves

Now, to be frank I spent most of my time on the sheep a.i. and it was fairly difficult to code, but once I got the hang of states machines I managed. Currently the graphics are only squares and they will remain like that until I finish most of the code, I like to do the art later in a project. I had a problem with obs so I couldn't upload a video ,a screenshot of the squares will have to do for now.I think this is enough for today, I will do more tomorrow.