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Shepherd's Symphony

A pastoral rhythm game where herding is the instrument.

Year
2025
Status
In development
Role
Design, code, systems
Stack
React, Canvas, TypeScript, Web Audio

Overview

Shepherd's Symphony started as an experiment about emergent movement: what happens when a flock reacts to sound instead of to a cursor. It grew into the project where I formalised most of my game architecture — state machines, entity handling, and the documentation practice I now reuse everywhere.

The idea

Herding is a negotiation, not a command. Every animal has its own inertia, fear radius and curiosity. The player conducts rather than controls, and the music is the readable state of the simulation.

What I learned

The documentation produced here — architecture conventions and the project bootstrap checklist — became my baseline for every new project. It lives in the vault and gets versioned like code.

Highlights

  • Flock simulation with per-entity behaviour
  • Audio-reactive feedback loop
  • Documentation set reused across projects

Writing