Notices

Wazd's pen and grass were top down. I was sure we had some top-down woolly blobs (which is what sheep look like from above!)

Is there a complicated reason why we can't use the angled on? It creates a smaller target for the pen opening, but otherwise the engine underneath should function in much the same way, shouldn't it? Or am I being exceptionally stupid here (probably!)

Great, thanks @andrewfblack

[edit] @RevdKathy, the whole thing gets a bit more complicated when you do that from the side. First of all: is it top as in further or top as in higher? If the former, we need to scale sheep. And we need more sides of the sheep to shown from behind, when they are moving there. Probably we could go with isometric view, but then the animation needed for sheep is more complex (oh, you actually need some animation, instead of turning them around). And working in such coordinates system to move sheep is not fun (at least it is more difficult than the plain view )

There is also more important problem (I think): our field shrinks drastically if we go with side view. We don't have too much real estates, I think that 'from above' should be suitable...

By the way, I have emailed a shepherd of special breed sheep in the hope she can record us some baas. If she can't I may nip out and visit her with an mp3 recorder.

Kathy, I know an open source sound site where I'm sure you could find plenty of BAAAAs. I think it's freesound.org-- I'll verify later.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2240466/Maem...20Overhead.svg

hahaha that topdown sheep makes me giggle!

thank you andrew

That works, Andrew, but I would soften it. That thin black outline won't show up well.

I would create simple fluffy balls of white with a blurred border of light grey, and a pink protrusion for a face. Nothing really elaborate for sure. Look at Wazd's grass though for the approach I think should be used consistently.

JMO though.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2240466/Maem...20Overhead.png

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2240466/Maem...20Overhead.svg

Ill fix the lines later

here my gamefield propose (to bein able to begin to think about proportions of the elements on the screen, the number of sheeps actually manageble, sprite animations and so on). if we keep the field size limited is possible to avoid the sheep resizing and trick the player eye with a bit of shadowing (keeping the same complexity level of the top down approach using the center of the shadow as a sheep position coord. Each sprite should have at least 8 different sprite position for each different direction. Let me know if someone want give a try to this approach and Ill see to make up the rest of the sheep animation



meanwhile something to play with:

Just quickly put some sheep to Hard Herder