The game does not run in either bowser for me sorry.

@littlebear What browsers did you try? Did you try the first link? I had it run in firefox, operagx, edge and also chrome from my phone.

EDIT: @ellaris Ok disabled privacy setting and its working now, played it a little and its fun, the music is good and the feel of the game is also good. The difficulty ramps up quickly here at level 3 or 4 but it stays fun :). The only real issue is there is no naming for the upgrades that I could see, there are a few educated guesses that I took but showing the names would be great, If I missed the names for the upgrades and they do appear somewhere then just point it out to me. Cool game and thanks for making it!

Hi ellaris. You deserved some comments on your game of course! Game works fine on chrome running in windows. Both windowed and full screen. Maybe I've missed someting but the birds aren't that fast to go to my mouse position.
I liked that there where chores to be made. I once had the white bar moving from left to right but a sheep didn't got fed and still the 'sheep where saved' .. I didn't mind :D
Well done!

Very interesting game! I would suggest making the birds move faster though, as I spent a lot of the game waiting for them to respond to the mouse cursor.

Not bad, figuring out which upgrades actually make things better instead of harder felt tricky(ie. more birds means more unintended herding while more speed without turning probably makes birds harder to control)

I liked the style of this game. Colour selection was quite nice and sounds worked with the style. I know there was only limited space on the ship to save the sheeps. I played until slimes came out so maybe there is more sheeps later as the difficulty started to rise. Not by slimes or time but by the amount of birds making it hard to control sheeps in correct place.

Also small explanation what different upgrades did. I just clicked randomly on those..

Overall nice game, good job!

I like the idea! Controlling the sheep is really hard, because the birds can decide to herd toward the cursor, instead of away from it. It seemed that the turn speed upgrade was the best one by far for that reason alone.

Herding the sheep was very chilled. Using the flocking bird to herd the sheep was in interesting dynamic. The upgrades needed a better explanation. I found myself selecting random upgrades but the gentle difficult meant it didn't really matter. Why do sheep collect vases?

At first I thought the controls were a bit too hard. But there is a learning curve to controlling those birds so I think it grew for me at least a little. Hardest situations were when new birds spawned from opposite sides of the map so I needed to first gather them somewhere and then start moving sheep. I think this is maybe unnecessary.

It is always cool to see upgrade systems implemented to jam games. Unfortunately, I was not able to decipher what each upgrade does. Some of the changes were so minimal so it was not possible for the player to interpret what they all do.

But overall, a solid entry!

@littlebear Thanks for trying again.

@littlebear @denvil @harmadillo @nash At first I wanted to use symbols and not have any text, bu I decided to add the tutorials, but didn't think about adding text to the upgrades, good suggestion. On the fourth map there is a list of upgrades but it's not labeling and can easily be missed.

@mdotedot The birds turned slowly so they tend to fly around the mouse, but if you move it around they fly towards it. As long as you save one sheep, that's enough.

@zerbu You mean turn faster or fly faster? They got a speed boost on spawn to get to the destination, I felt that with a couple of upgrades their speed was adequate, and starting slow might help players follow what is going on.

@harmadillo I was trying to draw stuff the sheep could carry, it ended to look like a vase so I decided to stick with it

great fun! very impressive. Really loved herding my sheep :)

Had tons of fun playing this and was terrible at it. If anything, I consider that a sign that the game has great potential. Loved the sheep! Well done!

Cool - guiding the birds around was really fun and I wasn't fully prepared for just how many extra mechanics would slowly be introduced over the different levels. I wasn't sure what the ugprades did though - I thought the icons mrepresented things like "attack" and "health" but it was hard to say for sure.

The game worked in the browser for me. I played it on itchio.

One issue I had with the game is a green text over the green objects. :D
I also couldn't figure out what upgrades (?) do, so I skipped them, lol

Congrats with finishing a game during a compo!

Liked the game.
The birds movement is very responsive and the sheep movement too. Good job on balancing overall, it's quite catchy sometimes to make sheep move where you want them too. The upgrade menu sometimes showed the descriptions, sometimes not, but was not a big problem cause if I see a plus sign - I click on it :D. Although after some levels the game seemed to become relatively easy, there were lot's of sheep and it wasn't challenging anymore to catch them. Don't know, maybe I just figured out better fly paths or maybe did good at choosing upgrades

Pretty fun game! Control is a bit hard in the beginning but the idea of herding the sheep with birds is very unique and interesting. The only problem is I don't actually know how those upgrades work, but that doesn't affect the gameplay much.

First - I love the name. The controls are a bit tough sometimes but I think that is intended. I'm not sure what any of the upgrades actually does, but I enjoyed playing the game.

grappling with the flocking pattern was frustrating in a compelling way, very clever! I felt that the level of tediousness wouldn't inherently be a problem for this kind of experience, but paired with the ambiguity of the upgrades, I found myself without that kind of tactical anticipation that I'd usually hope for in a game like this (if that makes sense). Very cool!

Hi !
I must say that sheep carrying around vases is pretty cool. (and it made me smile while trying to picture a sheep with a vase on its back going to a ship scared of birds chasing them)
Nice concept, a little bit hard / random-ish to control which can be a bit annoying but it's part of the fun of herding sheep with birds.

I had some issues where sometimes upgrade were explained and sometimes not it might just be a display issue.

Really nice for a compo build !

I had fun playing this :D
Good job!

good:
- very unique and interesting mechanics/control scheme! there are definitely things to practice here
- lots of systems/gameplay (upgrades, slimes, scarecrows) implemented

bad:
- sound/music isn't _bad_ but doesn't really seem to affect the atmosphere of the game at all; it's not relaxed, tense, energetic, or highly thematic? pushing the music in one direction would've been great, and some bird/sheep noises would've gone a long way
- doesn't evoke the theme imo

@ampo @anthony-katona @germdog53 @passbykamenrider @candlesan As part of the tutorial on the 3rd level you get a list of the upgrade effects, I now realize I should just had the upgrade names underneath. I feel like I made a big improvement over my last LD, where the only instruction/explanation was to click.

@indivicivet I agree it isn't very on theme. However I have a few excuses, no grand limit, but little limitations adding up. The sheep have a limited carry space of one vase, the ship with limited space can carry only 6 sheep, after taking a long time a white plague runs through the map greatly limiting the play space, the slimes limit the space you can herd your sheep towards or if they eat one they limit the space on the ship you can occupy with sheep, the scarecrow limits the space your birds can access.

Fun game! I had absolutely no idea what I was doing but had a blast playing anyways :laughing: In particular, not sure if I missed it but there was nothing explaining what the power ups did so I was just picking random ones (except the clock...I figured out that one I think).

I really liked how the sheep ate whenever they walked by a field (even if they didn't need to!). It made them seem like they had personalities/were alive and added an element of strategy to try to direct them away from fields to speed things up.

Overall a lot of fun, well done!

@perfectsquare If you were thinking the amount of time between summoning new birds, that would be the hour glass. The clock gave the birds an extra two seconds of life. But it was my fault for not explaining it properly, and doing a not so good job ant art and iconography, except for the sword, everybody got that one and it wasn't that important, especially at the beginning.

The sheep had a hunger meter which would go down, if you didn't get them to the ship fast enough they would get hungry and you would need to feed them again, they fed until they got full to top them up and smooth the journey to the ship, so they don't just get hungry right before it, as that would be annoying. But I actually prefer your take on it.

Game is original, I like the way birds are moving even if it can be frustrating to not control exactly where they go.
Like other said it was impossible to know what the upgrades did (except the attack one i guess which helped killing slimes)

Simple art but nice to look at!

Really great game! The fact that you had to control the birds as a whole flock and then control the sheep indirectly was a great innovation on the basic idea of herding. The graphics and audio were great and fit together well.

I wasn't sure what was up with some sheep randomly not moving. Was that a bug or intended? Also, adding a price and a name/description to the shop items would have gone a long way. But I'm nitpicking. Overall amazing job!

Coool concept. I like how many different mechanics you implemented. At times it was very frustrating to control the sheep, but I guess that's the point.

The mechanics remind me a lot of this old PC game:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheep_(video_game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheep_(video_game%29)

Although it's much harder to control the sheep in yours on account of the birds (and because in Sheep they had a "grouping" mechanic where the sheep would tend to stay near one another).

I think the core gameplay here is really solid, and I like the way the vases, scarecrows, and fields add to the game, but I wish there were more variation in the levels themselves. Something like this I think would benefit greatly from deliberate level design rather than relying on random generation. I also seemed to run into an issue in later levels where a large number of sheep would get stuck near the middle of the screen and remain uninfluenced by the crows.

@henk I opted for the sheep moving towards their closest neighbor, I think if they moved as a group it could be a bit too easy.

That's a good point, doing the levels manually would decrease the quantity but increase quality, which would benefit a jam game. Although I'm mostly experienced in random level design, so doing it myself wouldn't necessarily be much better (this time).

Yea, it looks like there is too much sheep being transported to the next level (every sheep that ever got on a ship gets to go to the next level, even if they weren't on the ship the last time), and some of them seem to get stuck after entering the map, but I think I only had like one (unless they were stacked) close to the left edge and not in the center, although that probably depends on where the sheep was at the time the ship left.

Worked fine for me in firefox. It's a tricky puzzler, very cute and a creative way to use flocking and stuff. I hope you get high marks for innovation!

I thought they were bats. Then I remember the name of the game. Then I said "oh". Nice one!

@dhargan Funnily enough, the idea came to me because of a different game I was making a while ago, it was supposed to be about Dracula, one of the mechanic was summoning bats, I found that mechanic to be actually fun (unlike the rest of the project), so thematically speaking or if anyone asks it's more fitting for day birds to be herding sheep, I think you're the first to notice they have heritage in the creatures of the night.

Interesting game! I had fun playing, the only downside is that when you get to much birds, they just swarm the sheep instead being near it and it makes very harder to guide them, especially from corners. Overall, nice game, I really enjoyed it.

@bobafett89 Yes, that is a bit of a problem, you could still gather the birds in a line and move them outside the map while you give some time for the sheep to move out of the corner. I definitely should have made the sheep moving away from map edge not exclusive with the bird herding :/. I think it's a problem of not revisiting the old code, because "I already made it and it's working", so then the new code is much better but some old things added at the beginning are not so much up to date.

Nice game! very fun to play :smile:

Very realistic! The sheep are very dumb in this game and make it quite challenging.

I played through 15 maps and I think I've seen most of the content, but I wish there was some kind of endgame. As of right now, I couldn't find a way to lose or win.

The game's color palette combined with audio feels very nostalgic to me. Great job!

@woona Yes, that is a problem. The idea was to get it to about level 10 and make it hard until level 20, possibly until it gets impossible to beat. I kinda made the game easier (so you could treat it as an easy mode) so people wouldn't get frustrated or find it too hard, It would've possibly be nice to have several difficulty modes with tweaked stats. As it stands, the idea is to eventually get overwhelmed by the smiles, every level they get their spawn time reduced and every 5 level an extra slime is spawned, so in theory eventually you could lose the game, but it would probably take quite some time (bit of a cheap trick, I'm sorry).

I unfortunately didn't have an idea for an end goal except for, until you lose, because it's impossible.

Very nice game, I like the controls, but I had issues when the sheeps were up against the edges of the screen. I didn't see the text for the powerup at first, just wondered what the different icons meant, might help if you moved the labels to the powerups.
All round very nice job. :thumbsup:

Simple and sweet visuals together with unique imaginative gameplay and an impressive amount of content! It started out slow, especially waiting for sheep to eat and respawning your birds, but it picked up! I think having the music loop not feel as repetitive would help with that (by making it a few bars longer with variety before looping). Thanks for a creative entry!

Well I was hooked, despite disliking the premise, I mean flocking sheep using unruly birds is the last thing I would expect to enjoy. However, I did stop at level 17, perhaps due to missing challenge as saving one sheep is enough, and I guess my choice of upgrades was smart enough to not expect any real blocker soon. IIRC the curve was "hmm, cute" (levels 1-3) "deep immersion" (levels 4-14) "getting old" (levels 15 - 17).

But the atmosphere, humor, graphics, and programming is all quite good for 48 hours window, great job.

Very unique, I still don't know if one can "get good" at this game or not :P

Okay, stopped at level 12, because it became a bit repetitive. :smile:

I liked the game, it felt like the idea behind it was: "Ah, I want to do something with flocking and steering behaviours - what can we do?" - and it came out pretty well. It was really hard to interpret which upgrades do what, so I just randomly chose stuff. Also the currency seemed to be off, prices were like in the hundreds, but you only had a few points and somehow 140 are 2-3 points or something like that. :thinking:

It broke my heart that you only could save 6 sheep in each level. :broken_heart:

@skosnowich that was exactly my idea, unfortunately I didn't come up with an end goal, so ye, it's repetitive until you lose (which is not easy). I came short on the upgrades and didn't explain and label them properly, the cost actually goes up by 1 whenever you upgrade something, the numbers at the bottom is the percentage multiplayer to the base stats from your upgrades. You can put the blame on those who voted for limited space :laughing:

I'm not sure, but I had the impression the description of the upgrades only comes at the second or third map. Maybe they were there before, but I did not see them.

The birds are really hard to control at the first map, and I was about to abandon because I thought all the maps would be painful like this. This risk would have been decreased if I knew at start what the upgrades do.

One more thing about the upgrades: tell how much points it will cost before we select it. They do not all increase at the same rate, so I did not remember which upgrades I bought a lot, and got confused.

I like the idea of "white plague", because sheeps are white as well. It's fun.

An upgrade to buy bigger boats would have been cool.

There are little birds and big birds. I don't know if it's important or if it's just for visual variety.

I reached map 10, then I must admit I got a little annoyed and stopped.

@recher Yes, the upgrade names were part of the tutorial and only display on the 3rd map. I definitely failed with conveying their purpose and cost.

That's a good point, I think the upgrade system was somewhat detrimental for the gameplay feel, because it was supposed to be a bit hard to control the birds, but not to the extent that it's not fun. Because of the upgrades I had to tweak the feel to hard to control, a bit difficult and eventually easy to control. I actually decreased the frustration a few hours before the deadline, making the birds slightly more responsive and upgrades more prominent.

The background was black by default, I didn't have a reason to change it, and white is high contrast to black.

That's actually a very cool idea, there could be some problems with displaying the boat, but overall I think it would be beneficial, thanks.

They should be the same size, one is darker and flies at a curve.

Great work! I like flocking action in birds, neat to make a whole game mechanic around it. There's lots of places where you could add content or gameplay but at the same time what you already have is great and there's a simplicity to it that is kinda nice. Either way, great job putting this together.