top of page
Context
What is the future of Social Gaming?
Founder and product manager at Game Night Studios. Before scoping any systems, we asked ourselves a guiding question: what is the future of social gaming? We wanted HERD to be a net positive for the people who played it, and landed on games as a social outlet as our answer, but only if the game was built from the ground up to be social and collaborative, not social features tacked onto players who are really just doing their own thing in the same space.
What was needed
Defining Explicit and Implicit Social Features
A way to make collaboration a requirement of the core gameplay loop, not an option. I split the problem into two categories: explicit social design, direct tools for players to interact, like voice chat, emotes, and shared customization, and implicit social design, systems that force players to collaborate to succeed, even without saying so. The clearest test of whether we'd gotten implicit design right was the flock of sheep: managing them needed to require more than one player, not just allow it.
Work I did
Building a Collaborative Herding Mechanic
When early testing made it clear the leader-and-follow system wasn't working, fixing it meant rebuilding a core mechanic mid-development, time that could have gone elsewhere. I made the case to our producer that this system was central enough to what HERD was actually trying to be, a genuinely social game, not just a game with social features, that it was worth reallocating time to rebuild properly, and got the time approved.
The underlying priority shift: we'd been designing for exploration, sheep that follow a leader, and moved to designing for shepherding, sheep that require a group to direct, because shepherding is what actually produced social gameplay.
Our first version took cues from Pikmin: a single player could "lead" the flock by whistling, and the sheep's AI would follow. It had three real problems. Players would accidentally steal leadership from each other by whistling over one another. The on/off toggle didn't read clearly without on-screen text, so players would spam the button and get nothing back for it. Most importantly, it wasn't social, only one player was ever in control.
I redesigned the system around what I call the river method: instead of one player leading, the flock behaves like a river, moving in a direction on its own, and any player can whistle to startle the sheep and redirect the flow slightly. That solved all three problems at once. There's no single leader, so no one can steal control. The toggle became a single whistle icon, and we leaned into the spam instinct instead of fighting it, tapping the button faster increases the startle's potency. Most importantly, it became social: players had to coordinate their whistles and find formations together to actually keep the flock on course.
What Changed
75% Cut in Disengagement, Communal Gameplay
This redesign was one of the choices behind the 75% cut in onboarding disengagement, since every player in a group could now meaningfully contribute to the core loop instead of just the one holding leadership. Players consistently described feeling like a team instead of separate agents, and we saw them stop losing interest in the travel time between objectives, because that time was now filled with managing the consequences of how the group was steering the flock together. It became communal instead of incidental.
What I Learned
Moving with player habits, thinking bigger than one feature
Two things stuck with me from this, and both apply past games. Design around how people actually behave instead of trying to change it: players were going to spam the whistle no matter what we told them, so we built the system to reward that instinct instead of fighting it. And don't treat a problem like it has one fix: the leadership issue wasn't solved by a single change, it took cutting the leader role, simplifying the UI, and rebuilding the core mechanic together before it actually worked.
bottom of page