Friendsheep

Hi Everyone!

In January this year i picked up unity and started on a game called Traveller. However that game didn't become a good game. So i took the parts i liked from that game and threw the rest in the bin, then combined it with some new features and graphics and that became a game called Friendsheep.

Friendsheep is a mobile game that will be released on the Android and iOS platform. The plot is about two sheep, who are friends, that needs to be fed clovers. And that is your objective. But it’s not as simple as it sounds…

This is a screenshot from the startscreen:


I just started beta-test it and it should be released some time early next year.

I will release this game under a new founded company called Honkbark Studios:

 

Hi There!
Hope everyone had a great holiday!

I've had time to do some updates on Friendsheep. The beta has generated 35 issues to handle before i can release it.
I also had the time to do some work on the Honkbark studios logo. What do you think?

 

Oh, and by the way, if anyone is interested in testing Friendsheep just enter your information in this sign up form: http://eepurl.com/bIA_Mj
And after that reply to me in this thread and i can add you.

 

Hmmm... here's a tip: you should invest an equal or greater amount of time in communicating / pitching your concept. I have no idea what the game entails (e.g., design, mechanics, ideal flow, gameplay videos or screenshots, etc.). I hate to see you posting updates without receiving any meaningful feedback. Add more content so we know what you are developing.

 

Thanks for the input @Tayer ! I will create some screenshots and videos and post them here!

 

Oki, here comes more information on the game.
Friendsheep is a mobile game to be released on iOS and Android platforms.

You play it as two sheeps. You steer one with your right thumb, and the second with your left thumb.
To make progress in the game you must collect scores, or clovers, or else they will die and fall of the screen.
By tapping on the screen you add force to the two sheeps and you must steer them in the direction of these scores.

If you miss any clovers the sheeps will die, if you collect a blue score with the red sheep they will die, and likewise with the blue sheep if it collects a red score.

The game takes the mission of collecting scores to another level since you have to collect two different scores at a time. So you have to become good at multitasking.

Here is a gameplay video from the beta1 version:

Here is a video on the games tutorial:

The game gets harder over time.

The first stage is to collect to single clovers.
Stage two is to collect three double clovers at the same time.
Stage three adds obstacles in the form of fences.
Stage four increases the speed of the game.
stage five makes the fences move up and down.
Stage six inverts the physics of the game, so you have to push the sheeps down instead of up.
stage seven increases the speed forever (til the player crashes)

Im looking to add two more stages so that i will have 9 of them, as sid meier explains here:

 

Your graphics look great, I am impressed! I am also working on an android game, may I ask what type of shader do you use? Do you bake your scenes? How did you get the shadows to actually work on android?

 

Thank you @Azmar !
I render the models in blender before importing it to unity. So it's only sprites.

 

Hello,
First of all I am not an expert and the things I say could be completely wrong, but I wanna give feedback anyway
Your graphics look really cool and the music got stuck in my head. Also the gameplay is a really cool idea and really thought of the level design of game(I mean the stages).

Than I was thinking of same bad things. The thing that got me worried is or the calming and nice music/art would be too different from the "gameplay". Because the "gameplay" is probably pretty difficult from what it seems to me. But the mucis and art make you very happy and makes feel like a pretty easy/relaxing game. But you play it and maybe find it like flappy bird. so the art/music and the "gameplay" are totaly different from each other which makes than not really fitting. But you can also see this as a good thing because the art/music probably makes the player feel really calm and than you play the game and get frustrated. Which than balances each other.

Maybe you have already thought about this if not, maybe take a second to think about it but I think it will be a good game.
I hope I gave some useful feedback but as I mentioned earlier I'm not an expert

Have a nice day,

Fearleas

 

Hi @Fearleas !
Thanks for your feedback.
I choose the music because i thought it fitted the farm theme of the game, but i didn't put a lot of thought into if it would fit the gameplay though. I will think about the choice of music for the next beta release.

 

Your game looks very well designed. Love the visuals you're going for. The only thing (besides the music as mentioned earlier) that my attention is being brought to, is that the background is not moving at all. Even though the sheep are flying for all of their lives. The clouds help a bit, but I think it would feel a lot nicer if you made a longer landscape background that could rotate in a much slower pace than the clouds.

If you need any help with music and/or sound fx, just send me a message.
Hilsen fra nabolandet!

 

Very nice. The game play is a nice simple concept, but I can imagine it getting very hard to actually play!

Love the graphics, although I agree with Thomas90 - it feels like the background should scroll a bit - possibly another layer with some parallax

I didnt mind the music, but thats the way of game design, ask 10 people and you can get 10 different answers!

Love the title too - Friendsheep is a cute name, and gives a bit of reasoning to having the two sheep. Good luck with the rest of the development, I think you have a great little game on your hands

 

Thank you for the feedback!
You are completely right, i should make the background move as well, maybe not as fast as the sheeps, obstacles and clovers.

Hoppas allt är bra där borta i Norge

Thank you, @czampese !
Yeah, I should add some parallax thingies as well. I'm thinking about a silhouette of mountains, that would probably fit in good.

 

I finally got around to release the site for Honkbark Studios.
Friendsheep will be released under that company name

Let me know if you find any bugs

 

I've uploaded a new video of the game. This one shows the parallax scrolling background that has been added. It also shows that the ground is moving.

 

Oki, so since last time i've been working on a few things. But one of the bigger things is to optimize the game performance. I've documented them here so that others can make use of what i found to work good on a 2D mobile game.

Anyone got more optimization tips?

 

Nice write up thanks - some good tips that I will look at for my own game. For me (and this is a really obvious one I am sure!) switching from the standard shader back to mobile/diffuse on my materials made a huge difference. I am working in 3D though, so not sure if the same applies for 2D

 

Thanks! will look into it!

 

Have 1 texture atlas for your sprites, use a much less complicated shader that is designed for mobile, don't use unity skybox on mobile, reduce poly count, reduce vert count, move code out of update function, don't use foreach, reduce garbage collection, fix quality settings, refactor your code, simplify logic (not that you are done and know what the result is ), don't use shadows, don't use realtime lighting, heck don't even use lighting on mobile if you really want great performance.

And I am sure there are many more tips to add in there.

 

Thanks for the tips. Sprite atlasing sounds like something i could use. (The other stuff as well but that one caught my attention)

When you say reduce garbage collection, do you have a good source that explains this so i can try it?

 

Memory leaks (garbage collecting) is really based on your project, as no guide will know where yours are. You will have to use profiler and check the memory allocations and leaks during runtime to see where its being caused to figure out what the memory leak is and after google how to fix that leak. 95% of the unity garbage collecting guides say the exact same thing, which is fix foreach, do pooling, blah blah. So any guide you google will be the same really. If you really want to bring it down to 0, good luck on finding guides beyond what everyone writes, that's mostly knowledge gained from working with lower level languages.

 

Fellow game developers, i’m looking for constructive feedback of the game. Would you like to help me test it? This time it’s an open beta.

To install the game, open this link on your android phone: https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.honkbarkstudios.friendsheep

If you find anything you like, or something i could change just drop a comment here.

 

I've decided to release Friendsheep on Friday
It is time to release the first version and update it with new versions while its live instead. I found myself wanting to add new things all the time, but then i'll never reach a point where i'll get to release it!

 

Congrats on your upcoming release! I did exactly the same with CataPoultry...just got to the point where I wanted it published. Mobile is a good platform for that because it is so easy (and accepted by players) to push out future updates.

 

Thanks!
Sounds good that player accepts future updates!