[ Winter Games 2025] Sheep!

[Thirsty Panther]

This will be my entry into the The Winter Games Tournament. 

My game is called Sheep!.

The idea is the player plays the part of a farmer who is trying to get his sheep into a pen.

I've stated creating my assets for the game.

Using Blender I've created some fences , gates and Sheep.

Youtube is so helpful in finding how to create these assets.

The fences and gates I learnt from Himel in this video.

 

Grant Abbitt has an introductory video in getting started with Blender. He makes some blocky Minecraft like sheep which I hope will work just fine for my game.

I have some sheep sound effects from Imphenzia.com

I have some music from a Humble Bundle that I purchased recently.

I still have a lot to do.

I need a player character. Not sure if I should make this myself or use a premade asset. Time is the limiting factor.

Code the whole game. I plan to base my game around Josh's pathfinding example, but instead of the enemy  (sheep) running towards the player they will run away.

The player then has to herd the sheep into a pen before a timer runs out.

The AI for the sheep behavior I will use Kinesis. I watched this video which explains it well.

Hopefully I will have time to update this thread as I progress to getting some of those sweet sweet prizes  

[Thirsty Panther]

An update on where I'm at.

I've imported a farmer model by Imphenzia from his Crispoly character set.

With only just over a week to go I don't have the time to make my own farmer character.

I imported him into Miximo and added an Idle, walk, run and dance animations to the model.

I then imported the character and animations into Leadwerks.

I found Josh's 3rd Person character script and attached to the farmer.

ThirdPersonControls.lua

I needed to make some minor changes to the script so that the speed of the animations ran in synch.  I also had to reverse the direction the camera faces as Miximo characters imported in Leadwerks face the opposite direction to the Leaderks default. 

Next I started on the AI script for the Sheep behavior. My initial idea was to keep it simply and just have the sheep randomly change direction and jump in that new direction. I got this idea from Thin Matrix who used a similar technique in his game Equilinox. He used this as a way of hiding his poor animation skills and moved his animals using code. So I thought it would work for me as well. Unfortunately my programing skills are nowhere as good as his and I ended up having a number of problems with it. The sheep would fall through the ground ( no collider on the sheep), they would disappear ( no idea why) or they would just slide across the map. Funny as it was to watch, it wasn't getting my game done. I'm now just using "turn" and "move" to give movement to the sheep. I still need to add the influence of the farmer and I like the sheep to "flock" to make the game feel more realistic.

Hopefully I can get all this done in the next week.

I'm really enjoying getting back into making a game. The last few years I've spent watching Josh develop Leadwerks 5. I'd mess around with the vegetation system or the tessellation system but Leadwerks was never stable enough to spend time creating a game on.

I'm also enjoying seeing what others are working on as well. 

All the best to the other developers who have entered the tournament.