Concept

For my midterm project, I decided to make a game based on one of my favorite fables, The Boy Who Cried Wolf! The story goes that the boy, a shepherd, gave a false alarm to a village about a wolf coming to attack their sheep. Having done it two times, the third time, when a wolf was actually coming, the villagers did not believe him, leaving the sheep dead. There is a valuable lesson in this story, but as a child, I always wished they had saved the sheep. Why not believe the third time, you know, just in case? So, I decided to create a game in which a shepherd needs to collect his sheep into a pen before the wolf arrives to eat them.

Progress

For now, I have created the sheep and shepherd graphics and shapes which are underneath the images. The shepherd moves the sheep as he gets close to them and the sheep move around each other if they get too close. What is left is the sheep pen and the interactions concerning it. As for the graphics that are left, I intend on making the wolf, start and end screens, all pixelated as that is what I aim for the game to look like. I have also created the tree graphics which I will place around the screen.

Challenge

The most challenging part as of now is the sheep and pen interactions. Since the sheep move by 15 pixels as the shepherd approaches, it will take some thinking and logic to stop them from moving through the fence. I have experimented a bit and some solutions worked to a certain extent while others failed miserably. Since that is the last part of the game that needs to be implemented, I will put in some work to make it as smooth as possible. I have imported a library that makes shape interactions easier to handle.

The game might not be extremely complex at its core, but I have limited myself to only one or two libraries. The rest I wish to finish using pure JS. If possible, I also wish to create a second phase of the game where the shepherd and the wolf fight if the sheep are placed in the pen on time. If I have time left, I will try and make this possible or simplify the fight in order to incorporate it into the final version.