Sheep & Shepherd

Sheep & Shepherd is a browser-based Bible verse memorization game inspired by Snake and physics toys. It was built by me and Icebear during Jterm 2024 for Sr. Project at Taylor University. It was written in JavaScript using three.js, and is part of a collection of activities developed for an in-development memorization system.

In this game, your job is to help the shepherd find their lost sheep. Each sheep will have a word on its back, but some are actually wolves in disguise. The real sheep will have the next correct word of the verse on its back. Wolves will have distraction words from the surrounding text that roughly match the correct word’s part of speech.

Play Sheep & Shepherd

If you’d like to try the game yourself, you can use the link below to give it a go.

Tap the screen or click with your mouse to move the shepherd. Collect sheep by walking into them. Running into a wolf will scare away one sheep and lower your final score.

Your verse:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

— John 1:1 (ESV 2016)

Ad blockers

Ad blockers, (specifically uBlock Origin) appear to block the API calls used get the Bible verse for the game. If the “Loading…” button never turns into the “Play Game!” button, try disabling your ad blocker if you have one. (There are no ads on the page anyways.)

Future Work

1. Sheep & Shepherd was built to be a part of a larger memorization system. As such, there is no way to select a verse from within the game. It is assumed the larger system will tell us what verse to load. But it makes it harder to be a stand-alone game, like here.

2. We really wanted to get animations working. But we ran out of time trying to debug other issues with the game. We were able to animate the wolf, since there’s only one on screen at a time, and the shepherd should also be simple. But because the sheep are being instanced, we ran into issues trying to animate them.

3. The sheep following system could be smarter. With long verses, the collected sheep end up bunching together in the middle of the playspace.

4. Ad blockers (namely uBlock Origin) block the API calls used to get Bible verses. It’s unreasonable to ask users to disable their ad blockers, especially when the page has no ads on it. So instead we should find a way to bypass it (or self-host the data).

5. This is less of “Future Work” and more, “Wish We Did This Better”: Keep better track of our 3rd party sources. While writing this article, I was able to re-find a lot of them, but I haven’t found where many of the sound effects came from. (Honestly I’m kinda surprised I was able to track down the wolf model we used.)

Resources & Libraries

(This list is incomplete. We made sure to only use resources that were royalty free / open source / free to use, but we didn’t keep careful track of where everything came from. This list is what I could track down after the fact.)

• The music used in the game is Daisy by Sakura Girl

  Music : Sakura Girl - Daisy

  Link : https://hypeddit.com/sakuragirl/daisy

• Wolf model from manoeldarochadeoliveira. Retextured by us to make it more cartoonish.
• Game and UI logic written by us using three.js.
• Bible verses pulled from bolls.life/api
• Used Brill to get a word’s part(s) of speech. We used this info to choose believable distraction words.
• Sources for sound effects have been lost. :/
• The sheep, shepherd, fence, grass, clouds, and game/UI logic were made by Icebear and me.