Sheepish

Sheepish was a simple prototype for the theme of "nurturing", but it also very much experimented with indirect control (another "Senseless Prototype Monday" theme). In the prototype, you are a shepherd (the grey circle), and you are responsible for keeping the sheep safe and for leading them to grass for them to eat. Your overall goal is to get as many sheep fed as possible.
The behavior of the titular sheep is crazy simple. Essentially, they determine the "center of mass" of the herd (Center of Sheep?), and that average position, represented by the red circle becomes the locus for their wandering behavior. They try to generally avoid the player by wandering away from them, and they automatically eat the first grass they happen to wander over.
However, all you can do is influence their behavior indirectly by positioning yourself such that their natural avoidance of the player shifts the Center of Sheep Meat in the direction you want (towards more grass). It can be extremely slow and frustrating, but even in this simple implementation, it was oddly satisfying when you got everyone moving the right direction.
Meanwhile, there are a handful of wolves (the smaller light grey circle pairs). The wolves are also stupid simple. They wander aimlessly until they're within a certain range of a hapless sheep, at which point they run at the sheep and eat it. They run away from the shepherd quickly, but, they're invisible unless the shepherd is relatively close to them.
The combination of sheep/player/wolf behaviors resulted in a tense back and forth where the player has to juggle the weird Zen-like steering their herd and hopping back out into the void to entirely un-Zen-like chase coral wolves far enough away to buy time to do more herding.
While there ended up being no real direct line to a specific shipped feature, it did broaden our thinking around what indirect control could mean in The Sims as well as the forms that plate spinning could take beyond the traditional "overlapping timers" model underpinning much of The Sims. While it might be worth noting that none of that had much to do with nurturing, I actively choose not to note that.
The behavior of the titular sheep is crazy simple. Essentially, they determine the "center of mass" of the herd (Center of Sheep?), and that average position, represented by the red circle becomes the locus for their wandering behavior. They try to generally avoid the player by wandering away from them, and they automatically eat the first grass they happen to wander over.
However, all you can do is influence their behavior indirectly by positioning yourself such that their natural avoidance of the player shifts the Center of Sheep Meat in the direction you want (towards more grass). It can be extremely slow and frustrating, but even in this simple implementation, it was oddly satisfying when you got everyone moving the right direction.
Meanwhile, there are a handful of wolves (the smaller light grey circle pairs). The wolves are also stupid simple. They wander aimlessly until they're within a certain range of a hapless sheep, at which point they run at the sheep and eat it. They run away from the shepherd quickly, but, they're invisible unless the shepherd is relatively close to them.
The combination of sheep/player/wolf behaviors resulted in a tense back and forth where the player has to juggle the weird Zen-like steering their herd and hopping back out into the void to entirely un-Zen-like chase coral wolves far enough away to buy time to do more herding.
While there ended up being no real direct line to a specific shipped feature, it did broaden our thinking around what indirect control could mean in The Sims as well as the forms that plate spinning could take beyond the traditional "overlapping timers" model underpinning much of The Sims. While it might be worth noting that none of that had much to do with nurturing, I actively choose not to note that.