It can take a few seconds before the game loads, there is no loading indicator.

Shepherds Journey

You are a shepherd, alone, accompanied by your trusty dog. On the gracing fields away in the far away mountains you guide your flock of sheep to food and ensure their safety against the elements.

Controls:

WASD/Arrow Keys: Moves the shepherd

Left Mouse: Moves your dog to the cursor location. Hold down to continously steer the dog

Right Mouse: Dog will move to the location of your cursor and let out a bark. This moves all nearby sheep in the direction the dog is facing.

Q: Recall your dog. The dog will now follow you by your side.

ESC: Open pause menu, here you can find options or you can restart the level. 

There is only partial gamepad support, but there is no way to control the dog. Works on the Rog Ally in desktop mode.  

Technology

• Odin + WGPU + SDL3
• Custom engine

Assets:

• Noise Alchemy (different sfx)
• Audiohero (bg music) 
• Dark Fantasy Studio (different sfx)
• pixabay.com (several sound snippets)

Pixabay Assets:

• freesound_community_cowbells-17248.mp3
• stu9-dog-howl-352680.mp3
• freesound_community-dog-panting-6876.mp3
• magiaz-dog_howling-418927.mp3
• magiaz-dog-432068.mp3
• magiaz-dog-441156.mp3
• magiaz-baby_dog-barking-531354.mp3
• stu9-monsheep-352819.mp3
• freesound_community-sheep-bleat-60778.mp3
• teoglas-sheep-bleating-223324.mp3

Interesting Reads:

Sheep are based around some papers related to how herding works in real life. It's similar to boids with prey and leader, with more sub-grouping. There is also some layer of randomness or jitter applied and some special manually handled cases to create more diverse events. This can allow a single sheep or a smaller group of sheep to split off. To make handling easier there are also different kinds of effectors, so instead of just a point effector there are also area effectors with a static direction. Dog bark command will create a field with a static dir to make it easier to steer the flock in one direction. The entrance to an enclosure has a funnel type attractor, to move the sheep towards the center of the entrance from the outside, and away from the entrance on the inside.

The sheep also behave differently when there are many and when there are few. With many sheep they tend to all follow a common direction and be pulled towards the center of their local centers. 

Some interesting links:

https://iquilezles.org/articles/distgradfunctions2d/

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rsif/article/11/100/20140719/35292/Solving-th...

youtube video about procedural animations

https://gist.github.com/munrocket/236ed5ba7e409b8bdf1ff6eca5dcdc39

AI Disclosure:

- Generative AI has not been used for this game or the gameplay code. LLM was used to help with some issues related to builds for web and windows. The engine, created outside the jam, had more AI involvement. The engine in this case does not involve gameplay logic, art, custom shaders or other major pieces of work created or used in the jam. For the engine it was used for unit testing, repetitive work and help with some of the more complex issues.