I won it without cheating! The trick is first reading the readme, so you understand how shepherds work, secondly starting over many times until you realize you need to start with a shearer and 2 houses, and third, being willing to let a few sheep die of thirst or hunger. Another good trick is keeping your shepherds at just the right distance - then a couple pixels one way makes them 'away', a couple pixels back makes them 'home'. Very handy!
Which leads me to a complaint: When the shepherds pick the sheep to take, they happily take ones that are dying of thirst. So when you have a mix of hungry and thirsty sheep, SOMEBODY's gonna die. Should've just extended the algorithm a little to pick the hungriest, least thirsty sheep.
This game is awesome!! And has so much to it for 48 hours. The sliding interface thing is great, the little sheep are great, the sound is great, the whole thing is polished and complete.
I would've liked if after you won, you kept playing, since it is kind of all about micromanaging. Although, there isn't really enough to do for that to work out, so it'd need to be expanded more, and then, well, that's a complete game, not a 48-hour game! As it is, it was a great challenge to try to meet, my favorite so far.
Minus: The only entry I've played so far that actually forgets the DEstruction instead of the CONstruction!
Another semi-minus: It really would've made more sense simwise if there was just a button to send shepherds home or away. It's sort of more interactive the way it is, with the whole RTS thing, but since it's just symbolic anyway, it's needless complexity. But it makes it seem more lively and real though, so maybe it's best this way. It's quite unique!
A bug that happened sometimes was that it would suddenly at random start jerking - not in terms of play speed, but rather, it'd grab a big chunk of the screen and start plopping it way off to one side (and back, alternating in a seizure-inducing frenzy), sort of like insanely bad shearing (no pun). Maybe a bug with dirty rectangles? Would go away and come back occasionally, usually about once per game. THis is with the pre-compiled windows version (and thank you for that, I don't want to install python, so any other python entrants, listen up! Widen your audience! If you don't have windows, ask someone else to compile it for you, I compiled somebody's entry for windows! *note: it wasn't python though, I can't do that, since like I said, I don't have it installed. So ask someone else!) |