How herding became drawing
Sheepdogs is a multiplayer game in your browser. There's a field of sheep with a round patch of straw in the middle, called the fold, and everyone tries to bring sheep into it. Your cursor used to be a sheepdog. Over a few days it became a hand, and herding became drawing. The scenes on this page are live: move your pointer over one to control the hand.
Sheepdogs design diary · 3 November 2026 · Play it at sheepdogs.io
Watch the hand move a few sheep, pick one up and hold it until it falls asleep, set it down, and toss another. Press on a sheep to pick it up yourself.
A hand under your cursor
In the first version your cursor was a dog. You pointed, the dog ran there, and the sheep walked away from it. But the dog was always a little behind your pointer, and I wanted the thing you play with to go exactly where you point. So I made the cursor a hand, like the hand in Black & White, a game where your cursor is a big hand that picks things up. It can pick a sheep up, carry it, toss it, or hold it until it falls asleep.
Herding, three times
Moving sheep with the hand took the longest to get right. I built it three times, and timed each version with an automatic player.
The palm as a dog
At first, pressing on the grass made the sheep walk away from your palm, the way they walked away from the dog. It felt idle and boring: the palm still moved at a dog's pace, so most of the time you were waiting.
Sweep and flow
The second hand worked like a broom: sheep in front of a moving palm are carried along, sheep beside it step aside, and sheep behind it are left alone. I also made the flock stay close together, because chasing sheep that drifted apart only made me anxious. It was much faster, but it felt like work, because your hand had to stay with the sheep all the way home.
Draw the way
For the third, I wanted to give a bunch of sheep somewhere to go and let them go there by themselves. You draw a circle round some sheep and they gather inside it, in a ring of your paint. Then you draw a line out of the ring, and they trot along it while you go and circle the next bunch. Each stroke holds enough paint to circle five or six sheep, and a tap on the grass calls loose sheep into a bunch you can circle. This was much more fun and satisfying than sweeping.
In the pen: 0 of 14
Pick a version above. Left alone, each one plays itself and brings fourteen sheep into the pen: in about 31 seconds with the palm as a dog, 13 with sweep and flow, and 11 by drawing. To play, move over the field. In the first two, press on the grass and drag to push the sheep. In the third, draw a circle round some sheep, then press inside the circle and draw their way to the pen.
With other people
Drawing worked well alone, but with other players one long line could send a flock from anywhere straight home, before anyone had a chance to take it. So I made lines short. A flock far from the fold now needs a few lines to get home, and while you bring one flock in, other players can take the ones you left waiting in their rings.
Taking a flock works with paint, so you can see it happening and stop it. You go round someone's ring with your finger, and every part you pass turns your colour. When the whole ring is yours, so is the flock. If you stop before you've gone all the way round, your paint dries back to the owner's colour within two seconds. While two players paint the same ring, it stays two colours and the sheep stand still, and if both keep painting for three seconds, the sheep walk out and anyone can circle them.
Hands push each other aside when they touch, and a hand that arrives fast slaps the other one away, which lifts its finger off the grass and stops its painting. Near the fold nobody can take a flock, so the fights happen out in the field.
You are the red hand, and the other three are bots: Woad only herds, Weld takes flocks whose owners are busy elsewhere, and Madder sometimes takes them too. When one of your rings flashes, someone is painting over it. Move your hand fast into theirs to slap it away, or go round your ring to paint it back.
The game now
I built this as a separate game with rooms of eight players, to test drawing with other people. It's been the game at sheepdogs.io since 1 November, and the version with dogs is still at sheepdogs.io/legacy. Bots fill the empty places, and they try to play like people: they react a little late, and their circles wobble and sometimes don't close.
Playing it over the next two days, I changed three things. The sheep didn't go far enough along a line, so lines hold more paint now, though a flock far out still needs more than one. I added an arrowhead at the end of every line, so you can see where each flock is going. And I couldn't tell when I had scored, so now sheep that reach the straw jump once and disappear in a puff of wool, while your points count up in large numbers in the middle of the fold. How it plays with a full room of people is the next thing to test.
The game on 1 November: flocks in rings of each player's colour, hands in knitted cuffs, and the fold in the middle.
More from this diary: tossing a sheep, and flowers from a zigzag.