The Herd is a game project developed at the Super Gamedev Weekend in a single weekend (3 days).
You are a sheep and part of a herd together with 20 other equal sheep. However, it's a capitalist herd. Everybody has a certain amount of seed money, and your belongings are right in the middle of it (at the arithmetical average, to be precise).
Your immediate goal is to survive. At the left of the screen you have your life bar. If it's down to nothing, you're dead (and no, you don't have more than a single life. Nobody has.). You can gain life by trading with the other sheep in your herd. You give them $50 of your money, and in exchange you gain life (they don't lose any in the process).
The amount of life you get per trade is reduced over time (the food quality is displayed on the bottom left). When this counter reaches 0%, the game is done.
Your secondary goal is to get rich. The amount of money you have is displayed on the right. The easiest way to gain money is to get other sheep to trade with you. Depending on your standing in the herd, other ways might be available as well.
Your standing depends on your capital:
- below $50: Hobo
- above $1000: Banker
- above $3000: Part of the One Percent
As a hobo, you're desperate enough to attack others, stealing 10% of their money. However, you have to be careful: The attacked might strike back and reduce your life.
A banker can give loans to non-banker sheep: They transfer $100 of their money, and in exchange, the beneficiary gives 20% of all of their income to the banker. A sheep can only be indebted to a single banker, but this banker can give multiple loans, each increasing the interest by 20% (up to 5 loans at 100% interest).
Since indebted sheep are at a severe disadvantage, you (and everybody else) can repay one of their debts for $150 (which are transferred to the banker as a final payment).
A One Percent sheep has even more power: It can use force to police the other sheep. The victim's life is reduced, and nobody can do anything about it.
When the game is done (by reaching the 0% food quality mark), you have either lost or won. The only way to win the game is to be the richest sheep of the herd (and still alive). Your current rank is displayed on the bottom right.
Your sheep can be controlled via WASD or the arrow keys. To interact with other sheep, you have to click on them with the mouse pointer. As long as you hold down the mouse button, you get a menu to select your action (grey actions are currently not available due to your financial standing). Release the button to activate the action.
The herd's area is limited, the borders are shown by logs.
The Herd by Andreas Monitzer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Exceptions:
All assets (sounds and models, except the animations) are (c) copyright Blender Foundation | apricot.blender.org and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution license 3.0. Download the whole bundle as blender files at yofrankie.org.
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The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.