Mama Duck Hero

Entry for LD59.  https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/mama-duck-hero

The four kids and I are back with another HERO game! I really didn’t want to do "no text in game" theme at all. But it actually did inspire me to have my youngest do some “voice acting.” So the idea here for signal is the mama duck is signaling her babies with her quack.

WASD to move (or arrow keys). Space to quack. Mouse scroll to zoom in/out.

I’ve not tested the windows build.

Spent a lot of time figuring out the grass, only to not add more or have it do too much other than visual obstruction. Originally I had a shader grass system but it slowed down the web too much. Although I was pretty happy with how the grass looks now vs. performance. The other time sink was navigation meshes. So I understand them better - but things are not perfect. One thing I need to do is prevent you from going off the edge… but you should be able to avoid.

Goal of the game is to have your baby ducks survive to grow to adulthood. They need to eat (the yellow cubes) to keep them going.

We had started on a second level, but didn’t get that in. The kids also modeled a crow, frog, fish, maybe some other things… but we didn’t get that stuff in.

As always, the balance of things is a bit up in the air, we’ve been playing it for an hour or so and tweaking things. Ideally I should add a threshold for “winning” – I guess in the wild 2 to 4 ducks surviving to adulthood is typical. So if you get more than 4 to survive, consider that a win. With the balance as of initial release about 1.5 hours before the end, we’ve got as many as 6 to live.

There are places on the map with more food, but more dangerous to get to.

I have an aspiration to publish a game on Steam (I’ll not say goal). I should be having some more time in the next months for development. Not sure if this is the one to try, or one of the other games I’m more excited about when I thought the theme was going to be split.