Get Sort N Sheep now!
App Store (iOS)
Google Play (Android)
Sort N Sheep was built in Unreal Engine 5.6 in 12 weeks, evenings and weekends, by a 2-man team. Because we built in UE5.6, we were able to target iOS and Android simultaneously from the same project.
Design
The game was designed to be simple, pick up and put down. We looked at other mobile games and noticed most of them use swipe controls: up, right, left and down. We wanted to take that same familiar control scheme and put our own spin on it. We’d seen a TikTok of a farmer sorting his sheep and thought it could make for a fun mobile game. Swipe right for rams, left for ewes, and up to eject wolves before they get into your flock. If you let a wolf into your pen, it’s an instant game over and you lose any score you had in that pen.
Characters
Sort N Sheep features three character models: Ewe, Ram, & Wolf. All characters share the same skeleton, which saved us animation time.
Curved World
We used a curved world shader to add the curve to the environment. It offsets vertex positions based on distance from the camera, applied across all environment meshes through a single material function. This helps hide draw distance and pop-in, and adds character to the environment. With the curve done in the shader, we could quickly iterate on the design by tweaking a few parameters in a global parameter collection, affecting curve direction, falloff, and a few other properties.
Animation Performance
To keep performance high with lots of animals on screen, we used vertex animation textures (VAT) on the pen animals rather than skeletal animation. All instances share a single material on the Instanced Static Mesh, with per-instance custom data used to offset the animation, so every animal in a pen looks like it’s animating independently while still getting the draw call savings of ISM instancing.
Leaderboards
Sort N Sheep has an online leaderboard on both iOS and Android, using Apple Game Center and Google Play Games Services. This meant we didn’t have to build or manage our own accounts or authentication system.
Thanks for reading. We’re open to feedback, and if you find any bugs, let us know. This is our first time releasing a game, so we’ll have made mistakes, and we’re hoping to improve for the next one.