Gameplay
This game uses the Unity Nav mesh system for all the movements. The player can click anywhere on the screen and Jetts the Dog (the black square) will move to that location. As Jetts moves towards the sheep (the white spheres), the sheep move towards the brown area known as their pen. The level ends when all the sheep are either dead or put in their pen. The ultimate goal is to get the sheep into the pen with as few clicks as possible. The Fox (the red square) and he will leave his fox hole home and run to eat the sheep. The sheep will run away from the Fox and ignore the Dog if the Fox is too close. Sheep can die by getting eaten or by running into the water. With 10 different levels the difficult ramps up with more sheep, more obstacles, and bigger bodies of water
Coding and Game Jam Challenges
Some of the main challenges when coding this game was learning the Nav Mesh system. It was daunting but proved to be a very effective means for point and click navigation. This game jam was only 3 days long over the coarse of a weekend so establishing the basic gameplay was key in the first day. I knew I wanted to do some sort of point and click to command the dog agent but coming up with a herding mechanic was trickier. I was thinking of having the player click and draw out the path for the dog and the dog would have to run in but for times sake I stuck with what I know and its distance checks. The sheep tracks the dog and the fox and if the dog gets close enough it will move towards the pen if the fox is too close it will run in the opposite direction from the fox which often leads them to doom. The Fox has the same function as the sheep. It finds a random sheep in the area and pursues it, if the Dog gets too close the Fox will retreat to its foxhole. I chose the simplistic polygon models because I wanted to mainly focus on the gameplay. I created the music in this game with Bosca Ceoli a great program that’s free for making music.
Natedog769 