Sheep Dog was a project I set out to do within seven days, like a personal game jam. My goal was to complete a game before school started again and to get motivated for the coming courses. 

The first two levels and the basic game idea of finding sheep and bringing them back to the farm was something I came up with during my level design course right before winter break, and my plan was to create five levels with this simple game loop that got progressively harder by hiding the sheep in places where the player had to think creatively to find them. 

While working on designing the camera system I made the camera follow the player, but after some consideration and playtesting, I decided to have camera anchors that the camera would move to if the player moved on the trigger. Old school resident evil style! This made it easier for me to hide things behind the camera borders and surprise the player with the next area. I did end up using the original camera system in the final level though.

While working on the dialogue system it started out as the whole text showing, but to give it some extra spice I made the text scroll. By doing this it felt like someone was typing it out and that is how I got the idea of the game being sentient. While moving in this direction and writing the dialogue for an A.I. that makes games, it felt very meta and I wanted the player to be part of making the game, at least in some way that I could achieve in the remaining days. 

I started designing the control panel and the level that the player had to use it in. This stage was probably the most fun to design the level and decide what variables the player would be able to manipulate.

Some problems I encountered during the project was

1. Using rich text tags and having a scrolling text system gave the problem of showing the tag before it was complete. I solved this by adding an if statement in the loop that checks for "<", if the symbol appears it will immediately type out everything until it finds the ">" symbol making the rich text tag invisible.

2. I didn't have enough time to playtest and find bugs. This could be solved afterward, but normally I would have a period of playtesting and bug-finding before shipping.

Overall it was a very fun project! It was rewarding to achieve my goal of completing the project within 7 days, even if it went over the scope I had. Oh, and the soundtrack was amazing! Check out the creators! 

Hunting Dog and Guard Dog - Spring Spring - https://opengameart.org/content/hunting-dog-and-guard-dog

Two Left Socks - congusbongus - https://opengameart.org/content/two-left-socks

Glitched Nescaline - Gumichan01 - https://opengameart.org/content/glitched-nescaline - https://soundcloud.com/gumichan01