Duckenomenon

A platformer designed for QuackBox, programmed with Pygames and complete with custom art. The story revolves around a duck trying to find a partner but who finds a new goal after exploring the land.

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Duckenomenon

Inspiration

Both of us have a love for simply making silly, stupid things. Because we decided to make a game for the Quackbox, we obviously had to make something duck themed. And then, for the sake of our own senses of humor, we made the duck buff in cutscenes, made the only available audio Fein, and so on. We spent an entire hour thinking of duck puns just to not even choose a pun for the title, but there are far too many puns behind the scenes.

What It Does

Duckenomenon is a simple story-centered platformer. Originally, our main duck is just trying to find love during the mating season, but as he is rejected again and again after doing fetch quests for his potential partners, he also slowly realizes something about the land he is exploring: the flowers are dying, the waters are polluted, and everything is far grayer than it should be. While we ended up without time to implement the story in all the stages that we wanted to, it is meant to end in our main duck realizing what he loves far more: the land he lives in. And his quest will become re-centered on finding a way to save it.

How We Built It

It was built purely in Python with Pygames, although the art was made with Procreate.

Challenges We Ran Into

The first thing we had to overcome was learning how to tone down our ambitions. We began with much grander ideas for the gameplay and story (once we actually settled on the category), but quickly realized we neither had the time for that nor necessarily the skill considering half of our team is utterly new. Jennie, being just in her second semester at RIT, frankly spent more time learning than executing. The controller, as well, was something we had to get used to, as we are both PC /keyboard gamers ourselves.

Accomplishments That We're Proud Of

Jennie learned a lot in this time, going to workshop after workshop and working together with a friend of higher years. It was a great experience for a first hackathon! And she is also proud of her art of buff duck. Zane coded the bulk of the project, staying up to refactor for hours. He is especially proud of successfully getting the game to work with the controller.

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