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Shepherds Journey's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Artwork | #531 | 4.240 | 4.240 |
| Audio | #536 | 3.760 | 3.760 |
| Enjoyment | #2230 | 3.440 | 3.440 |
| Creativity | #3137 | 3.560 | 3.560 |
| Narrative | #5643 | 2.240 | 2.240 |
Ranked from 25 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How does your game fit the theme?
A play on counting down sheep to fall asleep. You are a shepherd herding sheep into their enclosures
(Optional) Please credit all assets you've used
see description on itch page
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Comments
Really enjoyed this game! art style, vibe, and sound design all fit together really well. sheep are so small and cute :)
Such an original concept, and the visuals and vibe is super cute. Love what you did to achieve the cloud shadows on the terrain!!
Really cute and relaxing game. Liked the overall vibe. It was an interesting way to look at the theme. Doing this on a custom engine is also super impressive, great work.
This is so cute (;~;) I wish I could be a shepherd in real life with my cute little dog. I love everything about this game and am very impressed with the movement of the sheep and dog, super realistic and fluid.
SO pretty! I love the look and feel very polished. The doggy is so cute he is my friend. I got stuck at one point because a sheep went missing no idea where it went. I walked through the forest out into the infinite (I think?) field to look but then I got lost lol
Thank you for the kind words. The forest was a last hour addition and I managed to create some gaps in it which allowed the sheep to run off. I only noticed it a few minutes before deadline. The trees have a small visual overlap so the sheep are probably lost forever once they wander into the forest and beyond.
This game is actually impressive ngl the fact u did this with ur custom engine is crazy for a jam i really loved the graphics probably the best i have seen so far it looks so awesome i loved the mechanics of the game aswell as the dog who i can send him to bark at a specific location with my mouse and call him back, its really fun and one of my favorites from the jam, well done.
Thank you for the feedback. Much of the art style is noise for the grass/trees, SDF shapes for the animals and a fullscreen effect that dithers and applies posterization. The SDF for the animals took most of the time (check out iquilezles for some inspiration), but overall it's surprisingly simple. Glad to hear you liked it!
I'm one of the dev of Sheepherds, so let me tell you I know all about sheep herding in a video game, and yours is nice!
I found them a bit "lazy" (loosing speed quickly) and hard to wrangle, but it gives a relaxing vibe that is supported by the cute visuals: you create a beautiful little experience, congratulations :)
Thanks for the feedback, Sheepherds seems like a fun game. Guess you had to tweak and fine tune quite a bit to get a good game feel that wasnt too frustrating. I tried to use average velocity to some degree but found it a bit dangerous to tweak with so little time, more than once the sheep just run off without stopping. I didnt find a good way to easily tweak the values depending on the amount of sheep nearby either, so a small change in a value could lead to pretty different results. I ended up with tweaking it towards smaller packs as that was the easiest to make flow nicely.
It's an interesting topic and challenge to make it feel nice. So many small tweaks and additions that can be added to sort of fake the natural flow. Probably a lot of level design tricks that can be used here as well. Gotta take a closer look at Sheepherds :)
Yeah, the fine-tuning of it is very challenging: it took us a few days to have it working OK, and months to have it exactly the way we wanted (including re-writing parts of the maths themselves).
Every slight change on one parameters can give a completely different vibe (or not work at all), so what you did in such a short time is great!
Always nice to stumble upon a more relaxing game (even if the sheep's behaviour did annoy me sometimes, but such is the life of a shepherd).
I really liked how the sheep behaved - it felt very natural, which is really impressive. The sheepdog was also a great addition, but I wish it had a bit better pathfinding, as it kept getting stuck in the starting box!
The visuals are really nice, and the music / sfx compliments the theme quite nicely. Great job :D
The herds are very enjoyable to interact with! Also very on-point visuals
This is a hidden gem. It has beautiful climatic style and is very memorable despite the simple formula. Great job!
I love this, this look cozy and all but when there is lots of sheep it's horrible and so hard to control. beside that the game is fine
Thanks for the feedback, the herding does require a lot more work to make it feel great so I get that it gets annoying when there are lots of them. One thing I tried to tweak toward was divide and conquer, but too little time left in the end to properly balance things. As can be seen by the lack of depth in the different levels.
Love the art style and the relaxing gameplay. Great atmosphere.
grass is great!
A really beautiful game! Peaceful, fun, and very impressive on a technical standpoint. Especially with the time! Nice one!
I really like the cozy feeling in this game. It is me, my dog and lots of sheeps.
Very beautiful game and nice vibes! I was hoping for a dog that can help around or some sort of upgrade and there it was in the second level xD
Beautiful, the posterized grass is very nice. I felt like I couldn’t get sheep in very well because they moved about as fast as I did and I couldn’t redirect them, but it makes sense for the style of the game. I see the sheep flock behavior and different area effectors in action, but disappointed to see AI use in the custom engine.
So smooth and relaxing to play, nice work
This game is so beautiful and was a delight to play. The dog's movement and reactions from the sheep felt very fluid. Well done!
Cute! Very satisfying, good aesthetic, and the herd system works really well. Love the included research.