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Creating Herd: Case Study
Scoping a bloated concept down to one we could explain in one sentence
Context
What is the future of social gaming?
Founder and product manager at Game Night Studios. Our first answer was a Massively Multiplayer Online Game, friends exploring together in large groups, the ultimate online playground. But big studios were already building that same kind of "forever game" and losing the battle for attention. The real opening wasn't in big worlds, it was in smaller, cheaper experiences built for friends to play in short bursts, closer to an in-person game night. That thinking became HERD.
What was needed
A slow MMO prototype meant that we needed focus
What we needed wasn't more time, it was focus: one gameplay premise simple enough to say in a sentence, with cooperation built in instead of added on. We had one semester to prototype and a second to turn it into a demo for expos, and after two months, with half our runway gone, all we had was a prototype for our original MMO idea that had taken twice as long as planned. The reason: we hadn't picked a core experience to anchor the game. I was also the only engineer on the team, and I could feel the gap widening between what art and UI/UX could ship and what I could build. My producer brought up the scope problem before I was ready to admit it myself.
Work I did
Established a framework, cut it to one sentence, then rebuilt the mechanics that proved it
I quickly established a framework for testing ideas: define the core premise, build a cheap prototype that only supports that premise, then decide whether to move forward, revisit it, or cut it. Running our options through it, we landed on HERD: players herd a flock of sheep to safety across a changing world with their friends. I wrote it as one sentence on purpose. Not being able to do that with the MMO version was part of what had gone wrong. Herding as the core mechanic also solved for cooperation on its own: keeping a flock safe from hunger, threats, and bad terrain isn't something one person can do alone, so cooperation was built into the premise instead of bolted on later.
From there, the real work was building a system that supported communal herding. In our early testing, we noticed one player would take control of the flock while the rest felt disengaged and without a goal. I diagnosed this and designed the river method: the flock moves on its own, and any player can whistle to redirect it, so no one holds sole control and everyone has to coordinate to keep it on course. I built this myself as HERD's sole engineer, using AI (Claude) to move fast enough that the rebuild didn't eat into the rest of the schedule.
What Changed
First-hour disengagement dropped 75%
The rebuilt herding system was one of the biggest reasons first-hour player disengagement dropped 75%, across 12 structured playtesting sessions and interviews with 24 participants, since every player in a group could now actually contribute instead of just whoever held leadership. Players described it as feeling like a team instead of individuals. This granular level of testing was only possible because of the rescoping: instead of spreading effort across five different gameplay fantasies, all of it went into getting this one foundational system right.
What I Learned
What you cut matters as much as what you keep
If you can't articulate what your product is in a sentence, it isn't focused enough yet, especially in games. The MMO version couldn't pass that test, HERD could. Giving up the bigger idea is what freed up the time and engineering capacity to actually get our core gameplay system right instead of a collection of half-baked ones.
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