Shepherd For Hire

Here's my report and bug dump after spending a couple of days getting silver on all the levels.

Opinion / commentary:

• A rather amusing thing happened where I beat a level and then a ram pushed some sheep out and the victory jingle did a sad decrease in pitch.
• It’s a little awkward how the player just slides around completely unphased when they’re rammed. I understand the time constraint though. 
• I know adding key rebinds was on your to do list, but I'm not the biggest fan of the default inputs for keyboard. 
• It would be really nice to also be able to skip the screen panning parts of the cutscenes. 
• It would also be nice if there was a way to close out of the level select without having to press 'Esc' twice. 
• It’s a little sad to see that there’s nothing special for beating all the levels, but it makes sense that you just had to finish it.
• The difficulty is very unequal for the different level; on town #5 it took me over half an hour to get silver, but I got platinum on my first try for forest #3

Might not even be a bug:

• It looks like the sheep can only be fleeing from one thing at once, which makes it very very difficult to herd a herd if they’re too busy bullying the black sheep.
•  It's also slightly annoying how easy it is to get the player stuck on an object or unable to squeeze between sheep, but that might be my fault.
•  Sounds like barking or baaing keep playing after you complete a level, but I'm not sure if that's intentional or not.
•  I have a controller plugged into my computer, but I'm playing with my keyboard, and a couple of times it's shown me the controller controls before switching to keyboard once I start using it. That one's probably not even a bug and is just the way the input library handles having multiple options for some reason.
• Often if you unlock multiple levels on one stage between visiting it the notifications overlap.
• The notifications also overlap if ram is both fleeing and charging.
• I noticed when the screen moves at all there's a barely noticeable warp line thing going down that vaguely reminds me of a scan line
• The black sheep flees with the flee leader, even if they’re what the leader is fleeing from. This makes it incredibly difficult to stop such chasing loops. I think that was intentional, but the black sheep were easily the most annoying part of the game and I feel like complaining.
• It sort of looks like the blue sheep do actually herd with the white sheep.
• I haven’t seen a single ram stop ramming without successfully ramming, which is awful annoying.
• I don’t know if I’m crazy, but I thought I had 3 bones and I was grinding for a 4th to unlock a level, and when I finished it I had 6 bones. I only increased my score from copper to silver.

Inconsequential:

• I’m not sure if there are any foreground objects in the river level that you can see behind.
• It seems like the patch of swamp inside of the donut-like walkway in the swamp level is walkable for some reason.
•  On swamp #4 I did really poorly, and for some reason the time points and sheep alive points counted at the same time and ended up displaying 0 points on the in-level score counter, but luckily the outside counter correctly displayed my score of 20 ;_;. 
•  On many occasions I have spent the bones to unlock a level, but it didn't change until I scrolled away and then back. I think it may be related to when you have multiple levels unlocked but unplayed on the same stage and you leave straight into the level select for the stage.
•  Another weird thing similar to that happened, but I'm not 100% sure what. I think it was something about buying a level, but then I still couldn't play it, and I had 2 new levels available when I only thought I had one. I don't know how much of that is actually connected though.
• On one occasion some sheep ran from me during a cutscene while I couldn't do anything (I believe it was swamp #3). Upon further inspection, it looks like the sheep are always active during the beginning cutscenes, but you often just don’t start close enough to affect things.
•  It seems like sometimes some sounds can cut off others.
• 3 or 4 times, I've been able to move around a little on the level select between beating a level and a notification cutscene happening, which might cause problems if I’m fast enough to re-enter a level before it tries to come up.
• Less than ideal grammer on "you should considered lowering your bone wages" (should be consider).
•  Also, I don't think there should be a comma in "At least, the creatures lurking in the wood left", I'm not certain about that though. 
• The camera acts pretty weird on the overworld sometimes.
• A disguised wolf entered the ending area once, and it did the particle effects for a sheep entering and became passive.
• The red sheep have numbers above them. It seems like it might be a playtesting thing you forgot to turn off.

Annoying:

•  A wolf got stuck behind a fence once, and after a bit it just teleported through and ate one of my sheep before I could react.
•  It took me until swamp #4 to realize that 'space to skip' meant 'hold it down and you can skip the entire thing' and not 'tap it and you can skip one part of it'.
• I know you mentioned trying to fix it, but I've still had more than a few problems with the pathfinding getting stuck on corners.
•  I've noticed several times that a sheep would be fleeing and then it's ! would leave but it would still act like it's fleeing (I think it has something to do with crouching, but I'm not sure). 
• I also couldn't move after completing a level once, although restarting fixed it.
• Somehow some golden sheep got frightened?? It was during the same incident where a disguised wolf entered the goal.
• A wolf froze for no reason.
• Sometimes the bark or growl sounds and graphics don’t play.
• I was able to start a level while the cutscene was still going just by holding space as it starts.

Problematic:

• Several times, a sheep would get so preoccupied with returning to the herd that it just can’t get frightened at all.
•  Multiple times I had caught the disguised wolf and barked, but it just ignored it until it undisguised itself.
• The growl button quite often doesn't work. 
• Somehow, a sheep got stuck fleeing in one direction as a flee leader, so other sheep just stayed around it running into a corner. It happened again with the last sheep I had right just as I was about to complete the level. One time it happened but I was in the way, so it just pushed me into the corner and caused me to get stuck for several seconds; it’s ok though, I had to restart anyways.

All in all, most of the bugs or issues were of no impact, and a lot of the bigger things are just a result of your self imposed time limit. I do have an actual problem with not enjoying things, that being said, I'm rather surprised how fond I am of the game looking back, especially considering how frustrated I could get while I was playing it. I hope this feedback was helpful, and I wish the best of luck on your future endeavors.

Glad to see you released the game! great job keeping your scope in check and going through with the project!
I started following you around the time you set out to start this project. 

I really like the game!

One bug in the tutorial....
If you already have the herd split in two, when the npc tells you to try to split the heard in two, you cannot advance the tutorial and have to restart the level.

Edit: why not make an HTML build so people can play on Itch on the browser? it is not hard at all, you should give it a shot.

This game is really fun, the mechanics are polished and there is a lot of content (not to mention how cute the idea is) 10/10