Highland Sheep Games English 4

Vera

Among other ideas our planning had shown that the best setting for our purposes and abilities would be the chapter (in Conner MacSheep) about the Highland Sheep Games.

It was easy to imagine the various disciplines as individual minigames. Although we had to adapt a few of the sports to make enjoyable games the concept almost wrote itself.

The ‘Biting Patterns’ from the book for example reasonably did not work very well as a game since the sheep eat artistic patterns into the lawn. Changing it to ‘Puzzling Patterns’ where the player has to assemble a pattern from a template allowed us to add time and number of attempts to calculate a score.

Puzzling Patterns Tutorial

Another advantage of planning out the whole game as a compilation of minigames was that the resulting disconnection from a production viewpoint meant we could essentially ‘start over’ four times and have a reset where we could apply our learnings from the previous minigame. The short and fun nature of a minigame compilation also fit the format of a promotional game quite well.

We decided to start out with Jump for Height as our first minigame. I started programming and Elfi began drawing sheep to find a fitting artstyle for our game. Next the drawings had to be fit to the technical requirements of our animations.

To be continued …