Update log
Full Come Bye: A Sheepdog Simulator update
The complete published notes, normalized for clean reading and source attribution.
Repeated intro
Hey! This is the first development update I've posted for Come Bye — long overdue. The game has been on Steam for a while, but I've been heads-down building and haven't shared much publicly. Time to fix that.
Extracted changes
- Gameplay
- Performance
- UI and audio
How we got here
I started Come Bye back in 2020. The core idea: you're a shepherd, you whistle commands to your dog, and the dog herds the sheep. I got a working prototype pretty quickly — the dog moved, the sheep reacted, it felt like something.
But I hit a wall. The demo was fun to mess around with for a few minutes, but there was no game there. No reason to keep playing. I couldn't figure out how to make it replayable — how to deliver enough variety and structure to be worth publishing.
Then I was watching videos of shepherds on YouTube and started to think about what Shepherds actually do: move sheep from field to field.
Grass depletes as sheep graze, and they need to move flocks to fresh fields before the grass runs out, while new flocks keep arriving. Get them fed, drive them to market, sell them. It's part herding simulation, part sliding-tile puzzle — managing which sheep go where, when.
That design unlocked the whole game. But it also meant I needed a lot more sheep — hundreds, not dozens — and procedurally generated worlds with fields, gates, and roads. I rebuilt the project from scratch in Unity 6 with DOTS (their high-performance ECS framework) to handle the scale. The sheep simulation got deep — realistic flock dynamics, a dog that makes its own decisions about how to approach the sheep.
But as I pushed the flock sizes up and started building procedural world generation, I kept fighting the engine. Unity's overhead was eating my performance budget. I looked at alternatives and landed on Bevy — a Rust-based engine built around ECS from the ground up. A natural fit. The simulation math ports over directly; only the plumbing changes.
Where things stand
The Bevy rebuild has been moving fast:
🐑 Flocks of sheep that feel alive — they bunch when scared, spread when calm, and react to pressure like real sheep
🐕 A dog that thinks for itself — it makes its own decisions, sometimes loses track of things, and has to search. You command it, you don't remote-control it
😨 Fear that spreads through the flock like a wave
🔊 Audio that responds to the simulation — bleats ramp up with stress, the dog barks harder when it's working, whistles for every command
🎮 Built for Steam Deck — full controller support from day one (bevy's performance really shines here)
What's next?
Next up: procedural world generation (fields, gates, a country road), the grass/grazing system, and market mechanics. After that, playtesting and tuning until the dog-flock interaction feels right.
No release timeline yet — I'd rather get the feel right than rush it out. But things are moving, and I plan to post updates more regularly from here on.
— Trevor
Source