flock.shepherd

The six yowes of Yowe Fen, and everything that happens to them.

Attached to the scene's Flock anchor. It builds the animals, drives them up the causeway ahead of the Lingster, scatters them when a hernsew is answered wrongly, and lets the tide take the ones that are caught by it.

The verb

The flock stands ahead of the Lingster, not behind. Walking at their backs pushes them on — that is what driving a flock is, and it is also the only arrangement the game's camera can see, since the shot looks up-fen over the player's shoulder.

Each animal holds a slot in a loose formation, keeps its distance from its neighbours, and gives way when the Lingster's body comes inside its personal space. A flock does not walk back to its shepherd: if the Lingster falls behind, the yowes drift and graze rather than trotting down the causeway to be near you.

What barred, frightened and drowned look like

• A gate — while a hernsew is unanswered its gate bars the way, and the flock crowds up against the rail, each animal stopping a slightly different distance short of it.
• A wrong answer — the flock bolts sideways off the causeway, into the marsh either side, and comes back over the next few seconds. There is a leash on it; nothing runs out of frame.
• The water — the marsh drops away fast at the causeway's edge, so a yowe that scattered is standing lower than one on the deck, and the tide reaches it first. Wading is slow. An animal whose footing has been under water long enough is taken: it goes down where it stands, YOWE_LOST is raised, and the count drops. Each has its own nerve, so the fen takes them one at a time rather than all on the same frame.

What it publishes

flock.state is the module the rest of the game reads it through — Flock.count(), Flock.leader(), Flock.members().

Fields worth knowing

Two methods: :scatter() panics the flock without an answer having been given, and :takeYowe(i) takes one for a scripted loss.

Sound

The yowes own their own noises. Three clips under /source/flock/audio, synthesised rather than recorded: an idle bleat, a frightened one, and the sound of the fen closing over an animal. They play spatially from the animal that makes them, so a bleat comes from a particular yowe standing in a particular place.