bloomworks 2024-10-07 10:41
Top marks across the board! This was so much fun and so charming too!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD56 → Ducks on the Road
By designernap
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 100 | 3.72 | 37 | |
| Fun | 123 | 3.52 | 37 | |
| Innovation | 98 | 3.67 | 37 | |
| Theme | 87 | 3.90 | 37 | |
| Graphics | 97 | 3.84 | 37 | |
| Audio | 58 | 3.77 | 37 | |
| Humor | 32 | 3.86 | 36 | |
| Mood | 93 | 3.68 | 35 |
Top marks across the board! This was so much fun and so charming too!
Nothing prepared me for when a duck went on the road alone :fearful:. The pool ball ducks were a nice little touch. Just wish it was called 'Go Go Ducky'. Lovely jam as always!
This game is something different! Loved it! Great humor and mood and love the sounds.
Thanks @bloomworks @wisstopher and @martta ! Off to play yours today and tomorrow. Thank you for all the lovely comments.
I have so many questions. Why is an aircraft marshal herding ducks in his free time? Why is he guiding them onto the road, there must be something very special at the end of that tunnel! Who is the idiot on the council who keeps making drainage grates randomly in a roadside patch of grass?
Brilliant, 10/10, would duck again.
Hey. Very interesting game!
cute game lol
the only thing a do is to kill all duck and for who play with ZQSD this was so hard to move like i want
Very nice idea, took some time to figure this out and firstly I ofc tried was to help the ducks cross the road. The art fits together nicely and the sound is lovely (especially the sound when you close the game). One thing I don't understand is what are the pouches and what's the pouch score for.
Some stuff like entering or exiting menu could be triggered faster and not be allowed to trigger repeatedly.
I genuinely laughed whenever a duckling died in the most horrible way, since I ignored possible issues. I'm not a monster though. I still felt bad for them.
@sam-bigos Thanks Sam! honestly, I started at "Get the ducks on the road" and everything else fell into place to support that ;)
@sdcorpse Thank you!
@oldzombie14 Even with the death, its cute. I will take it! :D
@trioxxdreaper The instructions are on the page which explain how to play above, guess you missed those? - "Get all the ducks to the mummy duck and then ONTO THE ROAD! Look out for cars and drains!" Didn't have time to implement custom controls or different configs though. Maybe next time?
@griperis - Aaah thanks for persevering! The punches give you "duck food" which you can drop to attract the ducks away from Hazards
@jellyfishhunter haha! thank you! People seem to either scream OR laugh :D
I managed to get all the ducks on the road. Well, most of them. I got the most important ones anyway. Sometimes the duck mom will go berserk and lead her kids to swim, I guess not every duck is treated the same way in this family.
But jokes aside, I almost felt that the game became repetitive, but at that moment, the game ended, so I guess it's not a big issue. I noticed that there were golden bag that could be picked up, but there was no score in the end, so I'm not sure if I'm missing something.
Maybe a single new mechanic in the middle of the game would make it feel less repetitive? Like having two duck mothers of different color, each willing to take only her kids for a walk. And maybe they would need to go to different directions and use different road lanes? E.g. the family 1 goes to the right using the lane 2 (this is how it works right now) and family 2 goes to the left and uses lane 1.
I'm not sure how hard would it be to code that behavior inside the LD time constraints, maybe the code is not ready for this change as it's usually quite messy during the game jams. :D
As it is right now, it feels like maybe you had some more ideas, but you ran out of time. I remember your previous game btw, the one with a virtual device; it was really good (especially on the visual part).
Don't get me wrong, I'm trying to think hard what could make this game a tad better without adding too much stuff as it's probably why some of us are here, to share their thoughts.
P.S. - I tried wine to run the game on my Linux, but it didn't go well. Steam's Proton did the job though! So it's possible to run this Windows game on Linux, if anyone is interested.
A charming little game about duck traffic control. While the duck noises are very fun, they did end up getting old after level 4. That being said, the lil piano chimes were nice. The graphical style was very nice, though some idea as to how close I had to be to influence the ducks, and some better description as to what the bags were would've been nice. Overall, not bad at all!
Cute game. Felt bad every time I lost a duck.. I like that the ducks are numbered, as if to emphasize that they're being tracked. Nice seeing them gone from the list as they get to safety. The feed bags were a nice idea, but when I used them, the ducks would generally die when they reorganized.
I would think you would want to guide the ducks away from the road...but here we are. Great entry!
I love the sound effects and it's quite a fun concept. I got a scare as I was kind of half asleep and I lost my first duck
I actually chuckled when a duckling was flattened by a car. Which is horrible, of course, but still funny :) Well done!
@quasilyte Amazing structured feedback! Thank you for taking the time to write this, I really appreciate it.
The interesting thing for me to see here is what failed to come together. The answer to your questions and suggestions are actually inside the feedback itself! the sacks are duck food! and they were the "mid mechanic" introduced half way through that add a bit of gameplay texture. Looking back at it having recovered from my lack of sleep.. I think all I needed to do was add an "A" icon or "SPACE" under the sack UI to tell people it was something they could actually use rather than a score of some kind. I didn't tell players this anywhere!
The suggestion of two mumma ducks is a great idea. Also, naturally we have the "spots and stripes" approach on the ducks which gives a natural divide already! :) maybe a post jam version if I feel inclined...
Thanks again for the write up!
@wispeh Good shout on the duck distance! I did actually plan to have a directional indicator for when the momma duck tries to leave but comes back because there are ducks left, but a distance one would be useful too I think. Thanks for playing and for the feedback!
@pincushion honestly, I am just happy that you worked out how to use them! From the feedback above, very few people worked that out :D mind you, I didn't actually tell anyone in the game HOW to use them so...my bad!
@paroxysmal It comes from a phrase that someone I work with says - "We need to get our ducks on the road" I took that concept and just ran with it and didn't question it :D Thanks for playing!
@kaiynest and @googoobachoo I have found that people either react with laughter or complete horror! :D I will take that as a success in evoking emotion. Thanks both for playing.
@designernap now I'm interested to try the duck food mechanic.
Cute and entertaining! At one point I think there was 12 ducks or something that I needed to collect... Little buggers got to the momma duck and started a conga line around her and right down the drain :joy:
aaah @wubbaduck !! Nooo! I hope with your username you felt some affinity for the plight of the ducks and their momma! :D Thanks for the feedback and glad you had fun!
Cool game, looks good too. My main point of concern is that when the ducks get attached to their mother in larger quantities they make quite an arch to try to follow her and fall the drains. Sorry for the spam, the publish button didn't work, until it did ...
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Very sad moment for me when little duck #3 went down the sewer drain :cry:
Really nice entry, love the graphics and audio, and it controls really well.
One bit of feedback though is that once I got the hang of the win condition it felt almost trivial to execute each level, and the abundance of food was like a cheatcode - get duck #3 out of danger, collect batches of ducks together with food drops, wheel in mom, see ya later!
I was picturing the videos where the mother duck leads her children to the grates the whole time after seeing the duck fall in the grate. Love the humor you added and the concept is super cute and filled with comedy. Congratulations!
@ellaris yes! I ended up liking that aspect in the end as it means that you have to be super careful towards the end with more drains etc, but glad you enjoyed playing :D
@fint very fair feedback and yes, totally right. I had no time to balance levels or layouts in the end so I was just glad it worked honestly :)
@greymouth AAAH AMAZING! that video was in my head the WHOLE TIME I was making this! :D glad it landed with humour!
Thanks everyone for the feedback and time playing.
This was a really cute entry. I loved the visuals and the sounds. By the last level it was pretty trivial to guide the ducklings to the mother, but I still had fun with it. Great job.
Oh man! I made a similar game ages ago. In my case there was an old man trying to scare away some ducks, so instead of following him, he had to chase them and make them go where he wanted, but the mechanic was quite similar :smile:
As someone else already suggested, it is totally unclear what the bags do. I thought it was just some kind of additional score so I never actually managed to use the food :stuck_out_tongue:
I would have cut the time it takes to get from the menu to the actual game. That feels unnecessary and just slows down the pace.
There is some potential. With some tutorial, more levels and some variations introduced along the way it would make a nice game, especially on mobile. Keep it up with the good work!
Thanks @bentglasstube ! yeah, it definitely needed a balance pass, but I am just glad it was functional at the end of the 48 hours! :D
@tanis yeah, the bags are a thing for sure :) As above, with the timing of transitions and the balance of the difficulty etc. i just didn't get to it. That's awesome that you made something similar too! ace feedback, thank you.
Oh no, this is bringing back sour memories of sheep herding minigames! Haha. The ducklings are certainly cute, and I like that I can either guide the parent duck to the ducklings or the ducklings to the parent. The line that they form is also very cute, but it's a danger too because they can fall into grates while lining up! It's very sad to lose ducklings, especially to cars. I also found the levels quite repetitive, it seemed like the only thing that changed was the number of ducklings. I feel that changing the layout—more roads, drain placement, duck placement, wider roads, different types of roads with corresponding traffic or types of cars—would have made a natural progression.
Haha this was actually super cute and funny. I love that you actually paid special attention to making the herding interesting - the fact that the mother's radius is different than the ducklings, that they have a turn rate, etc - actually makes for some interesting mechanics. Plus, because the ducks were largely the same each round, you could start to 'plan a route' - using the food and your movements to puzzle out an optimal solution. I lost a few ducks to the tail 'unwinding' as they speed up - which I don't actually mind, as it creates an interesting scenario where you have to 'clear their runway' when sending the mother off to the road, as the ducklings will 'fan out' a bit when running behind. The little quack and splash of them falling through the grate never got old, and the art and sounds were adorable. Loved every level!
2024-10-23 12_26_11-DucksOnTheRoad.jpg got all the ducks in the road. I was way off in my original idea as to as it looked as though we were to cross the road and the mom duck didn't want that to happen as she didn't want to get on the road.
Once i watched the howto it was like, oh. OH. i'm supposed to go there. Yeah i just jumped in and missed the howtos. haha
Aaah thanks all! @impiaaa I threw the level design together last minute in the closing hours, so yet, you are absolutely right, needs more thought :D @ugly-robot I ended up being quite a fan of the wind-up expanding arc as the ducks move as it lead to some fun unexpected moments :) Glad it resonated @commanderstitch YESSS!!!! Great work! I needed to do WAY more onboarding in the game, but honestly ran out of time. I didn't even include instructions on how to use the food which means most people missed that :) Thank you for persevering and getting to the end :D
Some ducks may or may not have decided to learn how to swim. Or to dive. And some chose the pancake life, I guess. I was devastated. Especially with mama duck just watching. Or leading them right to the sewer drain.
I suspect that many kids were stressing her out and she was just waiting for an opportunity 🤔🤔🤔
I'm on to you, mama duck!
No, but seriously, this was great! Could not get enough of those quack sounds and was just feeding them to hear them make some more noise haha. And I was quite happy that the cars would not try to flatten me, as well. They just had it out for the ducks (I suspect they may be in cahoots with mama duck).
I also really liked the look of the player character. Made this look like this was some serious official business haha.
I had a lot of fun! Great entry :D
@sockenpuppe what a lovely review! This has made my evening! Thank you so much for taking the time to play and respond. I really appreciate it