Flowers from a zigzag
Sheepdogs is a multiplayer game in your browser, where your cursor is a hand and you herd sheep by drawing circles and lines on the grass. I want players to be able to draw things into the world, and flowers are the first: draw a zigzag on the grass and a patch of flowers comes up along it. The hard part is that drawing on the grass already means herding.
Sheepdogs design diary · 3 November 2026 · Play it at sheepdogs.io
Five ways to draw a flower
Pick a way with the buttons, and the text under the field says how to draw it. Herding works on the same field, so you can also draw a circle round some sheep and feel how close each flower gesture is to it. Move your pointer off the field and the hand shows the chosen way by itself.
Each way has to be easy to tell apart from a circle round sheep, for the game and for you. A little curl round a sheep looks like a small circle, and petals are small loops, so they look like curls. I thought a zigzag would be easy to tell apart, because it turns back on itself and a circle doesn't. Later I found that correcting a circle can make a small Z.
Rubbing became a zigzag
My favourite at first was rubbing the grass back and forth, with flowers coming up while you rubbed. But the game kept deciding I had stopped rubbing while my hand was still moving, and I kept feeling anxious that the flowers would stop. So I changed rubbing into a zigzag with a clear start and end. Each run back or forth is a stroke. The first two strokes leave an ordinary line of paint, the same as the start of a circle. At the third stroke, if the game reads a zigzag, the whole line turns into a green row of seeds, so you can see it has been read. When you let go, the seeds come up as flowers in the order you drew them.
A patch
Each zigzag grows a patch of flowers in one colour, white, yellow, pink or blue, thicker where your strokes ran close together. A zigzag that touches a patch adds flowers to it in the same colour. I liked this, but sometimes yellow flowers came up in a white patch, because the game chose the colour from the spot where I started drawing. Now it uses the colour of the first patch the line touches.
A patch starts thinning out from its edges 20 seconds after anyone last added to it. In a field shared by many players, flowers that stayed would soon cover the grass.
In the game
In the game, everyone sees everyone's flowers, and each player can have three patches at once; drawing a fourth makes your oldest one fade.
Flowers in the game: a blue patch and a yellow one, a flock in its ring with a line out of it, and other hands at work near the fold of straw.
Then some rough circles I drew round sheep stopped working. Correcting a circle can make a small Z, and the game took that Z for the start of a zigzag, so the line stopped counting as a circle and the sheep weren't herded. Now the game only counts a zigzag when its strokes are about the same length, and if the third stroke runs on much further than the first two, it treats the line as a circle again.
I tested this with 591 rough circles round sheep: wobbly, stretched, with corners, and with corrections. Before the fix, 179 of them were read as zigzags. After it, none were, and 570 herded their sheep. I also tested 400 rough zigzags, and 341 grew flowers.
Drawing more things
I want a few gestures that make different things depending on where you draw them. Okami, a game where you paint with a brush, does this: a circle round a dead tree makes it bloom, and a circle on water makes a lily pad. Here, a zigzag on grass makes flowers, and on water it could make lily pads. And the game should show what it has read before you let go, the way the line turns into seeds.
Next, I want to try flowers that sheep walk over to eat. Then you could draw a patch next to a sheep that has wandered off, and it would walk over to the flowers.
More from this diary: how herding became drawing, and tossing a sheep.