Goat Herder

About Goat Herder

Goat Herder is a single-finger alpine herding game built with Flutter. The player commands a border collie across a hand-painted mountain pasture by tracing routes directly on the screen. Every goat that enters the dog's herding aura drifts away from it, so the player must shape the path so the flock funnels toward a glowing pen at the bottom of the field while the clock ticks down.
The simulation runs on a custom force-based engine. Each goat has its own wandering rhythm, panic threshold, and avoidance behavior, which makes the flock feel like a living organism rather than scripted units. Wolves prowl the pasture and frighten any goat that strays into their scare radius — panicked goats accelerate harder and are far more likely to slip past the player toward the cliffs that scar the meadow. A single misstep into a chasm and the goat is lost for the round, so risk management matters as much as raw speed.
Between rounds the upgrade pasture lets the player spend earned clovers on two permanent boosts: Swift Paws, which raises the dog's chase speed, and Wide Aura, which expands the herding radius. Each upgrade tier reshapes the optimal path the player draws, so the game opens up new strategies the more the player invests in their dog.
The interface is built around a mountain-pasture palette of muted greens and stone grays, with two unique alpine backdrops that adapt to portrait phones, large tablets, and folding screens through fully responsive layouts. Splash and onboarding flows preload every asset so the actual match starts instantly, and the underlying simulation is decoupled from the widget tree to keep the frame rate steady on lower-end hardware.