Sheepies | Devpost

Inspiration

We wanted to combine our twin loves of sheep herding and programming. We used this hackathon to learn two skills we have always wanted to approach; boids artificial life algorithm, and low latency networking. Sheepies was the ideal way to do both of these, along with other favourites such as 2D rendering.

Unity

Our project represents the unity of the flock of sheep and how they stick together as well as how players unite together in strategy to conquer the game.

What it does

Sheepies lets you and your friends steer a sheep dog around with the mouse, while herding sheep into highlighted areas of the level. Fun for all the family!

How we built it

We connected a node.js backend server to a pixi.js frontend renderer, with WebSockets for client-server communication, and used the boids artificial life algorithm to simulate the flocking like movement of a group of sheep being herded by a sheep dog.

Challenges we ran into

Streaming large amounts of real-time data over WebSockets
Sleep deprivation

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Programming from scratch our first working real-time network.
Coming up with our own boids algorithm without any pieces of reference code to copy from. It was all entirely made by us! From the vector maths to the object classes, we planned out and wrote it all.