Sheepdog for Maemo

I’m very excited about this up and coming game, that is being build from the ground up, by a couple of Maemo.org community members.

How did it all start you may ask. Well if you head over the official thread you’ll find it’s pretty cool little story:

Lcuk and I came up with an idea for a simple acclerometer game on the bus to Barcelona Airport. Unfortunately we got to terminal 2 before we got to the coding..

The concept is simple. You have a field of sheep, with a few pens. You rock and tip the device to get the sheep into the pens. Then as you go through the levels, the game develops complications. You are the ‘sheepdog’ rounding up the sheep. Once a sheep has been penned, it becomes inert (and therefore cannot be bounced or scared out of its pen)

Level 1: Pup

Six sheep, two pens. You must get three sheep in each pen. Responsiveness relatively slow. If user takes too long, the sheep get a bit bored and occasionally stop to eat flowers: they can only be dislodged with a ‘bounce/flick’ of the device. This will also move any other unpenned sheep.

Level 2: Training dog

Twelve sheep, three pens. Four sheep in each pen (you can’t put more than 4 in any one pen). Medium responsiveness. If you are slow the sheep will stop and eat flowers, or lift their tails and poop. Bounce/flick to dislodge them. This will also move any unpenned sheep. Introduction of ‘wolf’ concept: wolf icon appears from one side of the screen and all unpenned sheep scatter in the opposite direction. Repeat if the game taks too long.

Level 3: Man’s best friend

Twenty sheep, four pens. Five sheep in each pen (and only five). Responsiveness maximum. Sheep occasionally stop to eat flowers and poop and need to be bounced. Wolves may enter from all sides and scatter the sheep. Wolf may move across the field, scattering unpenned sheep in all directions away from it.

When all sheep have been penned, game over screen shows a bone and “Well done, good dog!”

This is what we can expect to see in the future

The reason I love this story so much is that it truly highlights, the enthusiasm of the Maemo community and it also shows that anything is possible.

Now as the project has moved through the various phases of brainstorm to graphic requests to development etc, I’ve found myself following the thread and updates So I’m sure you can guess how excited I was when on the 4th Jan @Hopbeat posted the following comment:

Anyone care to gather some sounds together? I have basic baaah (or whatever the English sheep do) when they are penned. It would be nice to have some various quiet baahs that could play randomly in the background. mp3 preferred (any others formats I will simply convert).

So being the crazy geek that I am I took it upon myself to spend a week-end practising in the shower. Last night I final managed to record a few demo sheep sounds just to give the developers a taste of my vocal talents.

Before are a few examples: