Divide By Sheep is a fantastic math-based puzzle game, focusing on problem solving in mathy ways rather than number drills. It's bright and colorful, but with a dark underbelly: fling sheep through a wall of lasers and you'll end up with twice as many half-sheep, complete with blood splatters and exposed (but clean) bone cross sections.
I previewed it in May and don't really have much to add to that. The PC (Windows and Mac) version is pretty much identical to the iOS version, but the mobile-friendly interface works just as well on the PC as it does on touchscreen devices. It doesn't feel like a crappy port; both versions are of equally good quality.
I was really hoping they'd go the extra mile to help parents who wanted to let their kids play this wonderful mathy game but didn't want blood splatters ensure that kids couldn't turn the gore back on, but they have not. The press release came with a fairly long story about how the game became the adorable but dark experience that it is, though, and after reading it I think that perhaps my hopes were in vain from the get-go. It's an interesting story, written by Alex Nichiporchik of tinyBuild Games and posted in full after the break.
The game is available on the Apple app store as a universal app and comes out on Steam later today.
It's 5pm in a crowded game expo hall in Minsk, Belarus during DevGAMM October 2014. I'm a bit drunk at this point. I just had a long conversation with Mike Rose about indie games, where they're going, and how it's amazing to see all these creative devs on the expo floor.
Loud cursing can be heard from within a crowd surrounding a small table. "No, I KNOW HOW TO SOLVE THIS, [censored], I designed the [censored] level!". The conversations are in Russian. I need another beer to handle the crowds. Making my way through the crowd, I see a little game. It has these tiles that you need to fingle sheep back and forth on. I realize it's a sort of math puzzle, with levels designed as equations. It's the designer and the artist trying to solve their own puzzle. A fellow indie developer comes up, quickly solves that equation, drops the mic and goes away. Everyone is in awe. I like this game.
It was called "Let Islands Jump", and was a prototype quickly hacked together by the newly formed half-Ukrainian/half-Russian team. Denis is the artist, and Victor is the designer. The duo worked on dozens of flash games before. The concept, the design, and the artwork of the game are brilliant.
The dev team just wanted to release it and see how it goes. I spent an hour sneakily watching other people play, and that smile on their faces when they solved a level -- that's priceless.
We started talking. About where the game might go, and how to make people interested in it. It was that same moment I had with SpeedRunners a couple of years ago -- when I realized the game's core mechanic is absolutely phenomenal, and that the team behind the game is very talented. All that's missing is a proper "Wrapper" around everything. Why is this happening? What makes this game recognizable? How to make people talk about it? I've had at least 3 of these "Steve Jobs" moments in life so far. The first was when I found No Time To Explain, the original flash game on Kongregate -- and that formed our company, tinyBuild. The second was with SpeedRunners. And this is the third one. That rush going down my spine, a spike of adrenaline, seeing how all the little pieces can fall into place to make a great game.
"Guys, let's make this big. Let us finance you for 6-9 months, so you can take it somewhere special, and we'll release it for you on Steam and iOS, and I'll be your producer".
A couple of weeks later we started working full-force on the game. The main problem was the context of what's happening. Why is this going on? We decided to make the world grounded by thinking through the motivations here. This is where the idea of the Grim Reaper came up. Why not make it a story about friendship? The Grim Reaper is lonely, and wants to make some friends. Only problem is that he can only befriend the dead.
With the fiction set, everything started falling into place. The sheep drowning mechanic became very relevant, as in some levels (in the Dark World) you'd have to drown sheep to get them to Grim's raft.
"But what if you divide one in half?" -- Victor asked me on a skype call when we were discussing mechanics.
"You get two halves", said Denis, and quickly went onto sketch how that'd look.
At this point we instantly came up with the name "Divide By Sheep", which implies a lot of sheep slaughter and math. This is when the game took its final, dark shape - mechanics of feeding sheep to wolves, the Grim Reaper's pet being a Kraken, and other things I won't spoil in this weird little press release.
The main problem with the game's development was keeping people interested. We spent an insane amount of time testing it and its different versions at conventions. Our initial run at PAX South proved that we should introduce silly sheep slaughter with lasers early on. This way people get interested. Reactions are universally positive when people start realizing the game's deceptively cute. Seeing people trying to contain bursting into laughter at the sight of blood splatters and duct taped sheep, that is priceless.
We had to ditch traditional balancing of levels in favor of keeping things fresh, albeit sometimes on an uneven difficulty curve. We also had to give the critters more personality. Yes, the wolves do eat the sheep, and it's disturbing. But it's ok because they're happy when they're fed. It's just the natural order of life.
With the sliced halves of sheep though, we had to come up with a solution that makes it OK. Ours is that they get taped back together on the raft.
I don't have an excuse yet for the part where you feed everyone to the Kraken. This is when Denis got carried away, and it looks amazing.
The other part that brings the game to life is the music. It goes from incredibly cheerful to dark in seconds, and transitions very well between the different tracks - going darker and darker with each world. If you pay attention, you'll hear the transition in the trailer.
As with all gamedev projects, the scope kept on growing and we're now at month 8 when the game's done. The initial 4 worlds were done about a month ago, and that's when we submitted to Apple QA and passed. We will do a free update with World 5 that wraps up the story and ups the stakes (spoilers: that world includes ritual sacrifices).
Thank you so much for reading through this wall of text, and I hope you enjoy playing Divide By Sheep as much as we've enjoyed working on it.
Happy slicing!
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