Back when I was still working at Amazon I decided to contribute to a DIY/Maker faire. I can’t remember the title of the event.  I thought it would be fun to make a game that could use the buttons I had made in a previous build (see: Jeopardy Controllers are Easy). I thought a memory game would be fun and fairly easy to make in a week. I call it Sheep It! If it isn’t obvious, this is a play on words (or a bad pun) for both the moniker for code reviews at Amazon that pass (Ship It!) and the idea that one might be called a sheep for following a leader (which is what this game is all about).

I enjoy using QT and thought that I would like to learn how QML works. The code located at https://github.com/jjveleber/SheepIt is the result. I am sure number of hacks in this code is large. My only excuse is that I had little time to finish and was just having fun trying different things out. I was able to add animations fairly easily. For instance when a player scores there are some particle effects as well as a slide and sizing animations that all run in sequence.

This was a fun project. Some people were really good at playing Sheep It! There was a kid that played for about 20 minutes. It was impressive. I don’t think I could come close to beating his score. Speaking of scoring, I added another aspect to the game. This was a bit a social sub-game. I told the folks watching people play Sheep It! that I would give them one of the 555 PWM Controller kits that I had brought for sale if they could tell me how the scoring worked. It was fun. People created little teams and tried to figure it out. They would stand there and record scores trying to find a pattern. A few people got close and said that the numbers were all primes. Only one person got the correct answer of twin primes.

I think if I make another game like this I will use something like Unity or some other game specific platform. I would like to get some experience in this area and nothing beat having a project and a deadline to get that experience.