Didn't know being a sheep keeper would be so hard! Had a good time though. Art and sounds are very pleasing, could use some more snow though for the vibe. Also I like that the sheep have their names. Makes you sadder when they freeze :(.
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Sheep Keeper's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Presentation | #10 | 3.975 | 3.975 |
| Enjoyment | #10 | 3.675 | 3.675 |
| Overall | #13 | 3.725 | 3.725 |
| Creativity | #17 | 3.675 | 3.675 |
| Cozy Winter Vibes | #35 | 3.575 | 3.575 |
Ranked from 40 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Comments
Love the concept of this game ✨
However, we think, and like other players mentioned, that some mechanics allowing to defrost the sheep and to make them more resistant to the cold could be interesting to implement.
Maybe more fire areas could be unlocked, with more time at the beginning to go cut some wood and/or adding chests with hats, gloves, etc. to put on the sheep ? Something to call back the sheep, like a bell to ring could be added ? There could also be an option to obtain shepherd dogs ?
For now, we had no choice but to protect only one of them if we wanted to keep playing, it's so sad 😭
Nonetheless, the controls are nice and work really well and the assets you chose are very nice !
Can't wait to see how you'll update this game 🌈🐑🌲
One of the best games here! The art is particularly good, and the herding mechanic felt very responsive and fun to figure out. Great job.
A pretty proposition, but quite challenging! I really appreciate the graphics and functionality of the “lumberjack”! I think the “survival” genre may be somewhat at odds with the idea of a cozy game, but I found myself feeling comfortable in this game, so thank you for the lesson :)
In order to master this game you have to strategically choose one lucky sheep to survive them all.
I found that if I let my facade of a human soul slip I could keep the game going indefinitely by just letting one sheep enjoy the fire rather than keeping them all in. Since the stakes were high since the start (all the sheep ran away ASAP) I did not care for trying to recover them all since the difficulty of doing so would mean immediately losing the game.
I think if you were to keep working on this, having the sheep leave in stages, slowly building up the chaos of the player having to manage them all, it would have a much greater impact on the player since they can get a hang of the gameplay loop ( and also bond with the sheep ).
While the main concept is simple, having an extra mechanic to let the player finely control or predict the behavior of the sheep could be a great way to add some skill threshold on top of the existing arcade-esque gameplay, rewarding players with a keen eye, or with proper preparation.
Dare I say maybe giving sheep some sort of upgrade that let them behave differently, e.g. This sheep will attract other sheep to itself when it runs, or something like that to give the player something to work with and characterize their sheep to make the gameplay more interesting.
Overall I liked what I played thus far, great job! (Also, I liked the throwing wood mechanic, more of that plz!)
Thank you for the very detailed comment and constructive feedback! You hacked the game and we would have probably made it less challenging if we had more time. There are a bunch of parts that need improving, but we wanted it to be polished before adding more to it. The current fire maintenence / sheep holding conflict is where we thought the risk/reward would be interesting to see what will players decide. Granted, that currently you leave with a bittersweet feeling because the majority of the sheep freeze, but we plan on fixing this after the jam ends :) . Agree that some sort of mechanic to unfreeze the sheep or to be informed that one of them is getting restless and will probably leave is a very good point.
The game is enjoyable, but it quickly gets boring, it lacks variability in mechanics. I liked the other aspects. The art is especially good
Thank you for playing and honest feedback! Yes, we didn't have time to implement other mechanics or variations to them for some additional risk/reward factors so at some point you basically repeat the same action which can get boring quickly. After the jam we will collect all of the feedback, see how to improve it and make it more fun :)
I tried, they all died by the cold, 10/10 experience
Really cozy and I enjoyed the lighting a lot! Well done!

I'm so sorry, they all died slowly. I blamed myself, but I had to pull myself together. I did everything I could to keep Sir Sheepothy Pleecewell alive :D I'd appreciate it if you checked out our game too :3
Lesson learned today: I am a terrible sheep keeper xD
Great game, cute art style, well-rounded mechanics, complete and polished game loop. Good job!
Minor suggestions for the future:
Maybe add a sprint button next time?
If you wanted to further work on this project, I think it has a lot of potential. You could add upgrades, levels, make a story mode, or even make it a roguelike. It would totally work.
While I wouldn't exactly say this is a "cozy" game, it was fun! The art, animations, sounds, lighting, controls... they were all great and this style and feel could be made into a fully complete indie game that I would play. Cozy games are typically meant to be low stress, low intensity games with few or no fail states. Even though this game was the opposite of that, it was presented so well that I have to give it good ratings!
Good job to your team!
Oh noo, all my sheep froze. But i really like this game! The pixelart is good, the atmosphere is nice and the gameplay is challenging but not too punishing. Really cool entry!
The game gets pretty challenging because those sheep can’t stay still. As it progresses, it feels like they start moving faster and faster.. though maybe that’s just me ahah
Pretty fun experience overall :D
Such a enjoyable game, and the execution is excellent. Well done !
The graphics are really good, and the gameplay is too. Sadly my sheep didn’t survive very long, but I still had fun. I didn’t notice a strong winter vibe, but it was still a cool experience — good job!
If you have time, I’d really appreciate you playing my game too.
Very good job. Love the graphics and tha game play. Nice font
Very impressive for a game made in 3 days! If i understand it correctly you used free assets but still you guys implemented it perfectly and the mechanics work perfectly. The music is a big plus too. I don't know if seeing all my sheeps freezing was cozy but it was fun tho lmao. Really well done!
Thank you! Yes the assets are all free and the coding parts were done by us. We scoped the game low with two loops "fighting" against each other so the player has to choose what to do. Balancing the game was not feasible so we decided to try and polish as much as we can and hoped that people wouldn't get too frustrated :D
Thank you for playing and for the kind words! The visual assets were indeed mostly free, however the music was created by one of our team members, kyledelastreetcat!
We agree that the freezing sheep isn't terribly cozy haha. We originally envisioned a mechanic which would allow you to thaw your sheep back out, but weren't quite able to get to it.
One of my favorites so far
My feedback (Please take it constructively)
What worked well:
The gameplay premise is neat and well thought out for a jam game. Excellent job of providing players with more than one thing to think about, and forcing them to balance their time and make decisions.
It's super cozy. The bells on the herder, snow particles, and lighting all come together cohesively and are just such a vibe.
What could be improved:
In my opinion, the mixels here were quite distracting. Inconsistent pixel sizing can work well if used carefully, but here it added noise and made it feel tossed-together.
From my own experience and looking through the other comments here, it's really hard lol. As a general tip, and I know it's hard to find time to balance in a jam, but try to make jam games easier than you think they should be, unless you have a specific reason to do otherwise.
thank you so much for the feedback! this is genuinely super helpful.
the mixels are something that didn't occur to me, but now that you've pointed it out I can't unsee it haha. we randomize some of the scaling on the tree, bush, and rock assets to give the map a bit of variety, which I think is where most of the different pixel sizing comes from. I think if we were to have made the assets ourselves and had the time to, we might have just made different assets for the different sizes. it's definitely something i'll keep in mind for future projects, thanks for pointing that out!
the game indeed came out a bit harder than intended! the core gameplay mechanics came together about 24 hours before the submission deadline, so we didn't have as much time to playtest and tweak it as we would have liked. ideally we would have made the sheep stay much closer to the fire at first and stray further over time.
this was our first jam, so we didn't anticipate how the difficulty would come out (or at least I didn't). we'll absolutely try and suss that out a bit more for future projects (especially for cozy ones haha!)






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