HERD
Game Director | Gameplay Programmer and Designer
Trailer
Description
HERD is a co-op adventure game about herding sheep. Play as a group of shepherds, surviving the natural elements and mapping out the best route to deliver them to villages. It’s about teamwork, friendship, and screaming because the sheep are literally on fire.
First Person Survival Gameplay
Shepherds in Herd have traditional first person gameplay, driven by networked physics. All actions are tied to player stamina, the maximum of which can change dynamically based off of status effects the player is under. Similarly, they have a health bar that functions the same way. Players also have an inventory, with 4 slots that they can fill with items discovered.
Character Movement and Actions
Status Effect Bar
Social Mechanics
Players are able to use proximity voice chat to communicate. Their mustaches move too.
Proximity voice chat example
Physics-based Sheep AI
The game revolves around caring for your sheep. The main modes of managing your sheep are whistling to them, causing them to follow you, and picking them up (upon doing so, you're allowed to throw them). All of the sheep are physics-based, allowing you to bonk them, throw them, catch them, and they'll struggle on challenging terrain realistically. Players can also bounce on them, opening up traversal opportunities.
Sheep Gameplay
Networked Multiplayer
Core to the experience: Collaboration! The game is network co-op. This project was instrumental in helping me understand networking paradigms and fundamental online multiplayer concepts.
Multiplayer Example (if the prev. weren't enough lol)
Environmental Tooling
I invested a lot of time into creating environmental art tools for Herd, in order to streamline the texturing of geometry and to speed up the production of weather effects. Firstly, I created adaptive shaders for surfaces that allowed them to procedurally texture themselves from a sampled texture. Secondly, I created an adapted skybox and effect system, that I could drive via easily editable states in the editor. Lastly, for detail-rich scenes, I created procedural propagation of assets like grass.
Procedural Texturing and Accent Propagation
Day-Night Cycle and Weather Tools