I have now built a game in 48 hours! And you can play it here! (I think I may be a little excited. And I didn’t even lose that much sleep.)

Built in Unity, with sound effects in Bxfr and some levels in Photoshop (really!).

Stuff that didn’t get in (in order): fluid simulation (spent 3 hours researching first day, didn’t really need it), pathfinding (spent 4 hours researching second day, replaced with vector steering), procedural terrain generation (turns out that the textures I had already thrown together were varied enough, you probably won’t notice it’s missing).

Features that are in:

• Sheep!
• Terrain editing!
• A tiny world that’s sinking
• Level progression
• Sheepdogs to herd sheep
• Wolves (that eat sheep)
• Alligators (that also eat sheep)
• Sound effects!
• Horrifically messy source code provided!
• And more!

I think the game is definitely about herding sheep now.

There’s a lot of stuff that I’d have liked to have done with it, tech-wise, but right now I think I just need to concentrate on fleshing out the whole herding and flocking experience. Mechanics, not glitz.

Play it here.

Well, it’s still not much of a game, but it does work a lot better. The travelers (or are they sheep? or cats?) are, if anything, even more unmanageable. They like climbing hills, they don’t like swimming, and they can’t scale cliffs. And every time you get them all to the exit, you get to start again with even more of them.

Well, I got distracted trying to implement pathfinding and lost a few hours before deciding that I’d be making better use of my time just getting the tiny travelers moving. So they’re kind of dumb, and only really know how to walk in a straight line right now.

I think that was the right decision to make this time, though. I’ll learn how to implement A* some other time. This time, I just need to try to make it playable.

Play it here