Yesterday, I finally released the second public version of my solo puzzle board game Herd! You can download the PDF of the book and the 3d models of figurines here.

Still in early access, this version covers the whole first chapter and the start of the second chapter - I intend for the game to include only 2 chapters, so this is already more than half of the game completed and available for playing! It has been a long journey for Herd to come to this point, as I started the development in August last year. I'm really glad that I stuck to it; there were multiple moments when I felt that the game doesn't work and should be abandoned. Besides LOK Digital, which I'm thankfully developing in a team together with Raindrinker, Herd is the biggest game project that I ever took on. And there is still a long way to go.

The idea for Herd started when I was finishing my previously published puzzle game, Abdec. My puzzle games so far have been mostly puzzle books, so I felt that a natural progression of my modus operandi would be to include more physical pieces to accompany the book. This is how Herd figurines came to be - I imagined a book with chess-like grids and chess-like playing pieces.

The stacking mechanic came quickly. As I'm a fan of Sokoban games, I wanted to do my version of it, but felt that pushing boxes physically wouldn't make sense - you'd have to move two separate pieces with one action (and probably two hands), which would instantly make the player wonder why aren't they playing Herd digitally. Stacking a piece on another piece and moving them together however felt very cozy and tailor-made for the physical plane.

Avoiding making Herd a product that would work better as a digital game has been a battle from the start. But there was a moment in development, more precicely in October, when I implemented a mechanic that cemented Herd's status as a physical game - this is a spoiler for Chapter 2, so skip the rest of this paragraph if you want to see it for yourself. The mechanic is ... page traversal. Moving figurines from one page to another. Removing figurines to flip a page. Re-adding figurines based on which you already used to travel between pages. It's hard to explain all of the implications in a few sentences, but almost all aspects of this rich mechanic rely on having a physical book in front of you and a limited reserve of physical pieces. Page traversal actually isn't fully present in the current version - but it will be the crown jewel of the finished game, the culmination of everything that came before.

A big downside of Herd being physical, however, is its playtesting potential. There simply aren't many people out there prepared to print out the book, not to mention 3d print the figurines or at least assemble them from Lego or checkers pieces. At the time of writing this, there is a crude online prototype planned, but to experience Herd for what it truly is, it needs to be played "offline". I only hope there will be enough kind folks to go through the puzzles of this version and provide feedback, as I'm in the dark about the quality of the current state of the game.  

But this doesn't mean there hasn't been people that put in time and work to playtest the game and make it better in other ways already. I'm extremely grateful to all people that are part of my Discord community, as they offered feedback for version 1 and even more - a talented creator Vojta Karen has modeled the very playing pieces that are available to 3d print. Thanks Vojta! 

Another person that significantly helped in development was Jakup Ukrop. He made an application that finds optimal solutions of puzzles. This was crucial for the development for two reasons: one, each puzzle has a minimum number of moves to solve it listed besides it. Even though move counters are frowned upon in the puzzle community, I think this number is warranted for Herd - because the game is physical, it acts as a confirmer of understanding of the rules for tutorial puzzles, as well as a sort of Zachtronics-like challenge for advanced solvers. Before Jakup made the app, I thought I would have to spend multiple days and nights to extensively play through each puzzle and it probably still wouldn't be enough. The other thing that the application made possible was simply better puzzle design. It showed me some unexpected pathways for puzzles, which I then singled out and forced into the solution.

So yeah, I'm really proud of the puzzles in this latest version. Herd has proven to be a very hard game to produce interesting puzzles for, as they can quickly devolve into "slide stuff around until you meet your goal", but I think that each puzzle so far has a very distinct and interesting idea that defines it (although I sprinkled some "slide-fests" here and there simply because they feel good occasionally). You are very welcome to try the game out and let me know what you think!

Some links that might come handy:

Join Letibus Discord

Letibus Newsletter

Official Herd Site