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Ducky Boids's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Execution | #30 | 3.214 | 3.214 |
| Overall | #37 | 2.955 | 2.955 |
| Game Design | #39 | 3.036 | 3.036 |
| Graphics | #40 | 3.071 | 3.071 |
| Audio | #44 | 2.500 | 2.500 |
Ranked from 28 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
Got 110! According to the leaderboard, that’s not that good, but still, I had fun :)
Great boids implementation! The duck’s movement has a fitting mix of being predictable and unpredictable at the same time. I found it very intuitive to play.
For me personally, sitting through an entire round was a bit stressful. Maybe it’s because I need to be aware of everything on the screen at once, maybe it’s because the ducks are so cute and I feel genuinely sad when they die. Having something like a temporary powerup that made ducks chase away the cats would help with that and shake things up. Or maybe sometimes a friendly dog comes along to protect you? Or every once in a while, you randomly breed an eeeevil duck that the cats run away from? Some ideas.
Overall, good job implementing something so fun while still feeling simple!
Am I right that the only effect of food is to direct the ducks? They seem frustratingly uninterested in food. I had to go look at the source code to make sure that food was even supposed to do anything at all, which isn't ideal.
I did have a bit of fun doing a bunch of clicking and watching the ducks reproduce. Although I wasn't really sure what was going on there for a bit. I thought that maybe I had fed a duck enough that it got an "extra life" powerup or something. Eventually I figured it out.
I could see this getting interesting if you expanded the types of things with different effects you could drop on the map. Maybe give the player a random thing to drop.
Even though I found the gameplay a little unsatisfying, I am tempted to get back in there for a better score, so the leaderboard seems like a great use of time.
Food is for directing ducks away from threats. However it's just a factor as part of their Boids based movement and doesn't fully direct them towards a specific position. So sometime you can get that kind of "orbiting" effect for example. Once you know how it works, you can make use of it and feel the effect. But I agree that food should probably have been balanced to have a stronger effect.
The exponential compounding over time was satisfying.
Yes, ducks movement is very hard to control ... I like the global leaderboard !
struggled to direct the ducks, didn't see a noticeable difference when i placed the food
Very cute, I had fun fidgeting with it for a while
I think it might be nice to have an indicator for the cat's vision range, same for the ducks too.
duck movement felt a bit frustrating.
Yeah I completely understand :D that's a consequence of me using a flocking algorithm called Boids. I wanted to try implementing that one so responsiveness of the duck movement was a sacrifice I was willing to make in favor of the simulation behavior. It can definitely feel like they don't respond well to the player (or directly to food though) so I understand the frustration. There is probably some more balancing that could be made to make it a bit more responsive to certain things as well
I felt like I was cheating by placing my food directly on the ducks. Other ducks circled some food forever without reaching it. Fun!
Just saw a married couple get obliterated in front of their newborn.
Great game
A beautifully designed game with a straightforward mission that evokes a sense of nostalgia.