Return of the Sheep Game

Return of the Sheep Game? Maybe… as it approaches it’s 10th birthday what am I going to do?

The bulk of the code for the Sheep Game has been untouched since 2001, when I updated from Flash 4 to Flash 5. I’ve had a couple of attempts at rebuilding the game, but never quite managed it.

With the tests I’ve done in the last few years (playing with AS3.0 and Unity) I always thought it would be to make a 3D version of the game, but it’s never quite come together.

In the last week I’ve put together the following demo: http://www.david-lewis.com/test/SGJS/ when you look at it you might just think “erm, that looks like the old game except I can’t resize it”, and you’d be correct. I’d be happy if you thought that because that demo has been written from scratch using only HTML, JS and CSS. I think this is where the new version of the game will come from.

When it comes to producing a richer user experience, the combination of HTML, JS and CSS has always been the poor cousin of Flash + ActionScript. I’m starting to see that this situation will change as technology like HTML5 + CSS3 settle and we all continue to play with things like Raphael and jQuery

This demo has shown me that I can produce something that is Flash like in around 10 hours, that works on every modern browser (yes this demo even works in IE6), and it was great fun to produce.

From this I hope to use the SheepGame to deliver a professional looking game using the fundamental technologies of the WWW.