In the soft, rolling hills of the Derbyshire dales the grass is clipped to just a few centimetres by gently bleating sheep. For game artist and designer Harry Nesbitt who grew up here, this countryside is in his blood. “There’s something there deep in my subconscious,” he says. “I always want to tell stories or depict worlds that are close to my heart.”
Nesbitt’s fondness for this terrain is visible the very first time you look at Summerhill, his forthcoming puzzle-adventure game that tasks the player with herding sheep through a bucolic landscape. You’re accompanied by a dog who provides key assistance; you’ll come across intriguing ruined structures, the remains of an ancient civilisation whose culture was centred on shepherding, through which you must guide your growing flock. Nesbitt says these ruins are designed in order to “contain, funnel, or sort” sheep in certain ways, causing the player to “rationalise” and “reconfigure” the space in order to progress.
“The analogy we give is the riddle of the man who is trying to cross a river on a boat who’s got a fox, chicken, and some grain,” says Nesbitt. “You want to keep all three things safe but you can’t carry all three at the same time. So there’s a bit of logical problem solving. I need to get from A to B, and I want to get my sheep from A to B, but we can’t all do it the same way.”
Beyond the satisfaction of solving such spatial head-scratchers, Nesbitt aims to evoke gentle mystery, and perhaps even a little awe, through such environments, referencing the approach taken by Fumito Ueda on Shadow of the Colossus and The Last Guardian. “They have such a distinct vibe and a very deliberate kind of world-building,” he says. “You can’t fully comprehend the space that you’re in or what its purpose is. Why is it uninhabited now, and what has taken place here through the aeons?”
For all the pensive stillness of Ueda’s games, they’re driven by the forceful, unpredictable, movement of the gigantic beasts that roam their lands. Summerhill employs a similar juxtaposition albeit on a more modest scale – set against the picturesque scenery, your woolly friends swell, contract, congregate, and dissipate as one droving motion, albeit with more than a few exuding a wily mind of their own.
For the sheep’s group behaviour, Nesbitt and his team sought inspiration in the aerial drone footage of shepherding – “hypnotic and mesmerising,” he says. After the best part of five years prototyping the game in the downtime during other projects, the interactive outcome is a “fun, kinaesthetic, toy-like mechanic … Something that’s very expressive, very fluid, something you can just play with and watch the patterns emerge.”
Nesbitt draws a direct line between Summerhill and his two previous titles: the hugely successful Alto’s Adventure and Alto’s Odyssey. Beyond the beautifully illustrative graphics, evocative colour palette, and reflective mood, he sees each of these titles as fundamentally about the “joy of movement, a kind of expressive motion”.
Specific to Summerhill, though, is the idea of connection, both to custom and land. “Shepherding goes back thousands and thousands of years and you find it in every culture, in any country on every continent,” he says. Summerhill, then, is about connecting players to the oldest of folk traditions while evoking the weighty relationships that underpin it. “We want to endear people to the dog and endear people to the sheep so they can feel a genuine sense of responsibility – the duty bestowed upon you,” he says. “We, as developers, can gently tug on the strings of those feelings.”