Make a game in three hours?

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:

• in the first 20 minutes or so I set up a sample scene and made a basic player controller
• the rest of the hour was spent teaching the sheep how to walk around independently, how to form flocks, and when to do each

Second dev session - 30 minutes:

• taught the sheep to run away from the dog
• made the pen detect when there are sheep in it

Third dev session - 1 hour:

• added logic for spawning sheep when the game starts
• added a way to detect when the right sheep is in the pen
• made the pen close the gate

Final session - 30 minutes:

• fixed a bug with detecting when the sheep has been rounded up into the pen
• quickly drew sprites for the dog and the sheep
• realised I was down to 5 minutes so quickly added a “Play again” button and called the submission done

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:

• multiple levels: some kind of progression to have multiple sheep which must be rounded up into different pens would probably only be like 5 minutes of work, honestly.
• tutorial: just a basic “this is you <insert dog here>, use WASD to round up the marked sheep into the pen” screen before loading the game
• more art: a sprite for the pen, some walls around the edge of the field, a bit of texture for the grass
• dog wagging: I already made the sprites for the dog to wag its tail but didn’t have time to configure the animation

I think most of that would have been possible with one hour extra. Oh well!