Introduction

Hi everyone,

In this devlog I'll be sharing my work on a game called Sheep Aren't Weak, together with one of my closest and talented friends Daniel Bentovim, who came up with this neat idea. During the work on the project, my main focus will mostly be on development while Daniel will make the art and animations for the game.

*If you're interested in Daniel's work, you're more than welcome to check it out through one of these links - Instagram, Behance, DeviantArt

Concept

It's wolves vs  sheep, a match to the death! If you choose to play as a wolf, you'll need to slash through your enemies to earn points. If you play as sheep, your goal would be to push as many wolves as you can over the edge to earn point. 

Devlog

#Day 1

Today the plan was to start with very basic stuff just to prototype the main mechanics of the game without focusing too much on design. So this is what I worked on:

• Player Controller
• Sheep Movement
• Sheep Dash

While working on the sheep dash move, I tried to also work on the wolf's response for that move. Unfortunately it was a bit more time consuming than expected so I will have to work on that part on another day. 

#Day 2

Today I wanted to keep working on the sheep dashing mechanism until I was comfortable enough to continue. There's still some stuff to do there but for the time being this should be enough. So after this part was done, I decided to move on to the wolf mechanism to work on the following:

• Wolf Movement
• Wolf Attack Pushback.

There's still some things that aren't clear to me about 2d top down movement but I intend to figure this out as I continue working on this project, to make sure I don't face a lot of bugs along the way. 

Day #3 -

Today I was working on refining the wolf mechanics as well as the general player flipping of the characters. I also, started adding some sprites to the characters to get a better feeling of the characters in the scene.

I feel like today I spent too much time on the small details. Learning from the last jam I participated in, I will try to move on and deal with it after I've prototyped the basics of the game. 

Day #4 -

Today I had a chance to work on the game for a bit, so I decided to dedicate my time working on the enemy AI. On the design side of things, Daniel also got some work done, specifically with the wolf walk animation, which turned out really really cool!

I ended up working on a simple patrolling system, which knows how to stay within the bounds of the platform. It took some time to figure out the right way to do this, but overall this looks like a good start. 

Day #5

Today I went back to fix some stuff and make the code more efficient overall. I also continued with the NPC behavior and added more logic to give things a better feel while Daniel worked on the sheep animation:

• Updated wolf attack to work vertically and not only horizontally.
• Added proximity detection for NPC to start following opponent when in range
• Added non-collision logic for when NPC allies are close to each other, so they don't get stuck in place or go through each other

Day #6

Today I was focused on developing further the sheep character behavior. I also made a few changes to the code so things are a bit easier to manage moving forward:

• Camera follow
• Created health bar ui for the sheep
• Developed the health bar behavior when sheep is attacked by wolf
• Created character select script(building infrastructure for future work on the character select menu

Didn't come across too many challenges but I did recently meet with Daniel and we actually did a lot of good work scoping our first version of the game. We've got a few more mechanisms to work which we hope you all would enjoy :)

Day #7

Today I wanted to continue my work on the sheep mechanism so I can start getting a feel of the character in the game. I worked on fixing and adding some stuff to the existing code but I mainly put my focus on the throw mechanism. 

 I still need to fine-tune the throw and add a proper bounce back behavior after wolf is hit, but for the time-being I think this is a great start.

Day #8

Today I worked on refining the rock throwing mechanism so it's a bit more consistent between each throw. I also started applying some of the animations Daniel created inside the game itself. Check it out! 

Day #9

Today I continued playing around with the sheep UI to display the rock ammo as soon as it's picked up. I also got more character animations from Daniel so I started adding them everywhere :)