I wrote my last game 10 years ago in college. It was a 3D multiplayer tank shooting game that I initially wrote in Java + OpenGL and then switched to Unity. Since then, I have barely touched a game engine except to play around with it.

So it was a pretty surprising decision to participate in my first game jam Bevy jam #2. I found a fellow developer Peter Hebden in the Bevy Discord channel and started grinding. The theme was ‘combine’. We both had the same idea of making a game where mutation was the focus of the game. Fortunately, he already had a lot of experience with game jams.

The first day passed with him creating a great proof concept of grabbing sheep and dropping them on each other. The amazing pixel art was provided by Alexander Noles. I was excited because I have never been a 3D guy and preferred 2D pixel art. I started working on the battle phase. I wanted to do something along the classic wolf-sheep predation simulation. In this way, we could combine different sheep in the herding stage and then have them face off against evil war machines in the combat phase. That would essentially be an auto-battler.

Implementation

We wanted to introduce different traits for the sheep that would gain strength when mutated with another sheep. Each sheep starts as a basic level 1 sheep that can be combined into sheep with different traits:

• Spear sheep: long attack range
• Tank sheep: more health points, stronger attack
• Medic sheep: heals other sheep in the area of effect

However, we did not have enough time to implement all this and resorted to combining basic stats, such as attack, attack range, and health. On the very last day, we added gameplay where the easiest way to win is to combine all the sheep.

Music

Since there was no sound, I wanted to come up with a simple song. In about an hour, I had created a simple, robot-sounding song on the MPC One. I wanted to create two different vibes, one for the herding stage and then another more aggressive vibe for the battle stage.

Later, I toyed a bit with the synths and had a couple of robot-sounding sound effects. Those were used for eating and spotting the sheep.

Conclusion

The feedback on the itch.io was also quite amazing. If we managed to get traits out I think it could be a solid game. It might be due to my inexperience and lack of time - I could not allocate all my time to the jam but I still learned a lot and consider this a very good experience. I learned the way of Bevy, game dev stuff such as sprite editing, loading, switching states … it was a win in my book. I might revisit the game to add the traits and make it more playable.

You can play our game War sheep on itch.io and the source code is available on Github.