Sheep Cats 

Sheep Cats is a game I designed and did character art for during a TalTech Game Jam along with some classmates - Akemi Hashimura (project management and coding), Zike Tang (coding), Aleksander Viks (level art and level design), and Nikita Dolgov (Music and coding).

The goal of the game is quite simple: get a cat to herd some sheep into a designated area. The catch? You control the cat by singing musical notes. What looks like a very simple game at it’s core is complicated greatly by your inability to control the cat easily (unless you’re very good at singing or you have an instrument to hand).

As this was a game jam game completed in about 48 hours, there are a lot of issues, but I’m very happy with how the final product turned out as an experimental piece of design.

If I were to revisit this design, these are the main design changes I would make:

• Less demanding precision for the notes

  • Without an instrument, it can be difficult for players to vocally maintain a note, especially if they do not have musical experience

• Diagonal movement

  • I considered basing this movement on a scale, but as there are only 7 notes, I opted to focus on the four cardinal directions

• A better tutorial which stressed singing instead of just “making sound”

• Removing keyboard movement entirely from the game

• Removing the echo (this was an issue we couldn’t get working during the game jam)

• If we had more time:

  • Add levels

  • Add animations

  • Design levels around songs (sing the song perfectly to clear the level with ease)

While this was not designed as a learning game, if I were to revisit this design for a full game, I think it would make an excellent voice trainer for vocalists or a note trainer for musicians who play instruments without discrete notes.