Sheepdog Trials

I have been interested in chaos for a long time. I like swarms – they are chaotic. Each individual in a swarm has a very simple set of rules to follow but overall, the swarm seems to move in a coordinated fashion. As such, I wanted to provide a simple and visual explanation of swarm behaviour that was accessible for people to interact with – MIT’s Scratch seemed the ideal platform then.

So by not following what I preach (i.e. plan then code), I decided to mess about and produced a silly game in Scratch. Sadly, there is no swarm behaviour either! Here’s the game – let me know in the comments, if you were able to complete it in less than 70 moves.

Controls
You control the dog (green blob). Click somewhere on the stage to have the dog move there. It will repel sheep (purple) blobs. You can repel sheep more by clicking on the dog and have it bark. Each click counts as a move. The objective is to round all the sheep up into the pen (brown square) in as few moves as possible.