Early feedback on the Beta

Many thanks for the feedback we have already received. While we address all the reported niggles, we thought it worth highlighting some of the more important ones, and how they are solved:

• Q: How do you Pause/Restart a level?
  A: Pressing escape will pause the game, and then allow you to either go back to it, restart it, or go back to the main menu.
• Q: The sheep keep getting caught against a wall; how do I get them off?
  A: Tell the dog to move round the sheep in a circle, by pressing one of the circle buttons. Then increase his speed (by repeatedly clicking the circle button), until he is fast enough to get in behind them. You probably need to be ready to press the stop button once he has moved them off the wall.
  FYI: We are thinking of making the sheep have a tendency to not get too close to the wall so that this aspect of the game is easier.
• Q: The window is very small on my PC, and it's hard to see the game.
  A: The size of the window is the same size as the iPhone screen. However, we are thinking of making it possible to have the window bigger on your PC. Obviously if you make it too big it will get a bit pixelly, but it will be easier to see. We think this won't be a problem on the phone, as people are used to holding the phone at bit closer to their eyes.
• Q: On the "Flock Exchange" level, I get the sheep in the circle, but the level doesn't end?
  A: Have you got all the blue sheep in the blue circle, and all the red sheep in the red circle, simultaneously?

Please continue to pass on the word, and get more of your friends playing the game...

Beta 1 Release Imminent - but why is it for Windows?

Beta 1 for Extreme Sheepdog Trials is about to wing it's way to our eagerly awaiting Beta testers. However you may ask - why is the Beta a Windows .exe and not an iPhone app?

There are two main reasons:

1. By default an iPhone user cannot install an app from a 'random' web site. There are some good reasons why you might not want to do this as a user, however it makes the Beta process more complex for a developer. To get early feedback prior to Apple approvals (or our planned Betathon) we have released on Windows.
2. We have from the start of the project ensured we can always build on two platforms, iPhone and Windows. The reason for this is to ensure our portability code is working when we carry out the (what should be) fairly simple port to Android using the Android SDK and NDK. Hence given this - it seems logical to get some early feedback on this platform.

The Beta is probably available now - and if you click the Blog title you can try it and download it for yourself. All feedback welcome.

Which dog should we use in our logo? Please tell us

After all the feedback about the poor sheep being scary - we've decided to:

1. Use a dog - after all the dog is the star of the show in a sheepdog game
2. Draw two different dogs (a bit fluffier and cartoon like) and let people pick

The first image shows the dogs on their own:

The second shows how the current game logo might look with a dog instead of the (now scary) sheep:

Please comment on Facebook or against this post and let us know which you prefer.

Is the Sheepdog icon/logo too scary?

We have received feedback that the sheep pictured in our logo is scary. Believe it or not, the logo comes from a real sheep, here he is:

So is the poor fella scary? Should we change logo to a cuddly cartoon dog?

Please post comments below indicating what you think, and whether or not we should look into changing it?

Should it now be free?

The development of the game continues a pace and Beta tests are about to start and hence about time we had a blog. With all that is going on it was good to see some news relevant to us on TechCrunch today:

1. Apple have announced that they will allow in app purchases for free applications. This may cause us to the change our release and charging strategy.We were unsure about a lite version, but approving one app which can then turn into the fully fledged game through a (relatively) simple purchase is appealing. It will be interesting to see how this develops.
2. Eric Schmidt was telling the world how Android is about to explode. From the start we've tried to approach the business of writing games in a portable manner in order to take advantage of multiple markets, without a rewrite. It will be interesting to see if (a) we got it right development wise (b) whether it was worth it.