I finally took my thumb out of the place where no man has gone before, and released a demo version of Sheeplings at a couple of message boards. This is what I call iteration 1, or version 0.1. If you’re interested, here are some screenshots and the download link:

http://www.sheeplings.com/sheeplings1.jpg
http://www.sheeplings.com/sheeplings2.jpg
http://www.sheeplings.com/sheeplings3.jpg
http://www.sheeplings.com/sheeplings4.jpg
http://www.sheeplings.com/sheeplings5.jpg
http://www.sheeplings.com/sheeplings6.jpg

http://www.sheeplings.com/Sheeplings.exe  (~5 MB, Windows 2K/XP. Maybe 98/Me.)

Some feedback has been gathered from this, and here’s a brief summary:

The Good

• A few people actually like it (gasp!) and suggest that it could work decently for casual gamers. Others seem to think that it could work for children at least.
• Except for some issue with the particles in one instance, there don’t seem to be any major bugs.
• The graphics and sound appear to be passable – this is something that I didn’t really expect.
• This demo is finally out the door, so I can concentrate on improving and eventually finishing the game.

The Bad

• The game isn’t varied enough.
• The art styles clash; there’s inconcistencies between the pixel art and the hand-sketched art. And some of the art ought to be re-done.
• A few people found the mouse control bad.
• The gameplay gets frustrating if the sheep get stuck against the wall and such.
• A storyline would be good to add.
• Some features of the game ought to be explained better.

The Ugly

• Nah, nothing really ugly. Just wanted to make the trio complete.

So, what will I do about this? These unnumbered points work well, so I’ll continue to use them.

Results

• I’ll add keyboard/gamepad control, so that people get a choice of how to move the dog.
• If I can get the art, I’ll add other animals to be herded around. Different types of sheep, or – as was kindly suggested – flamingoes and such. That just cracks me up. Imagine a herd of flamingoes jumping around. That even beats my Hot Chocolate mode that I wanted to include: the sheep would run around sheared and buck naked.
• I’ll ponder if a storyline can be added, to gradually be revealed when playing.
• More explanatory screens, but preferably ones that can be disabled.
• Improve the sheep-avoid-static-objects algorithm.

This should work for starters at least. Then we’ll see if I can tweak things even further! All in all, Sheeplings doesn’t seem to be a complete waste of time at least.

Feel free to comment and suggest other improvements! Feedback is extremely welcome, even if it’s just a “don’t quit your day job” comment.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 19th, 2006 at 10:27 pm and is filed under Indie Games, Sheeplings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.