Sheeping Around: Inception

This post introduces my game Sheeping Around to the world. It has come far along now in its development, but it had its humble beginnings at a game jam.

I had the first idea about this game when working for a game jam called BYOG (Build Your Own Game) at NGDC (NASSCOM GDC) 2012. It was the first conference and the first game jam I ever attended. The theme was ‘Sneak’. I came up with the idea of sheep being sneakily stolen away. I paired with my friend Kushagra to make a Flash game for it. It was a grid based turn based strategy which looked like the image below at that time:

We figured the idea was too ambitious for the short duration of the game jam and implemented something else for the lack of time. We called it Feed the Gods.

The original game idea always remained in the back of my mind, while I kept my focus on work, other projects and life in general. In 2015, I began some serious work on the turn based strategy logic for the game and involved my friend Rahul for the art. I was heavily inspired by Final Fantasy: Tactics Advance for GBA and wanted to make a fox and sheep sneaking game with those mechanics.

I built a simple text based prototype first. You played either as the team Shepherd (green) or the team Thief (red). You controlled the characters and moved all of them to the desired destination, and you could do an action (by selecting one from the list of actions). Your goal as a shepherd was to graze sheep, and as a thief to steal sheep by using relevant actions. Typical tactics game logic.

With Rahul’s help, I integrated some fancy looking art into the project, and the result looked something like the image below:

Due to some financial reasons, the project had to endure a long haitus, and would be eventually resumed in mid-2017. That is also the time when I started playing Card Thief, which is the game that inspired me to turn Sheeping Around into a card game.

Stay tuned for the next post about my inspiration for the game in its current state and more updates.