Oh hey! I'm Shawn. Pleased to meet all of you. This is my second jam and my second game (I just finished the My First Game Jam 2021...check out my game, The Right Todd, if you're interested). 

It took me a bit to settle on a concept based on the theme, but I'm now moving forward full steam ahead. My game is (tentatively) titled Blank The Duck...you're given a blank text input ("_____ the duck") and you can try anything you want. That's the first use of the theme...stripping away most controls. Then I'm writing piles and piles of "reactions" to the input. It's a bit like that Sam Barlow game Aisle, except it's not really telling a story per se...it's just modifying your relationship with this duck in this moment. There's persistent art of the duck that gets modified as you go, but the responses mostly play out in text...so playing with the "less is more" in terms of what I'm showing too.

Not sure yet what I'm doing in terms of "gamification"...I have some ideas about keeping track of things like how many times you managed to kill the duck, or figure out some meta goals you can try to achieve by exploring dozens of inputs (a la Reign). So there's a chance this ends up being more of an interactive toy than anything, BUT I'm using it as an excuse to do more with Construct 3 and specifically working with JSON files and branching scripting. 

To start, I got some rough wires set up in Construct to make sure I could...y'know...make an input populate a response. Got that figured out today, so I'm moving into the part that (I personally) find more fun...the writing and design.

I have a spreadsheet going of the 700ish most common verbs in the English language, and then I'm culling the ones that don't make sense within the "____ the duck" sentence structure, so will probably end up with 350 or something from that. Then adding more words that aren't as common but could produce fun results. The goal here is to present something relatively simple but with tons and tons and tons of possible results, which is really only possible by keeping the UI as simple as I am.

Concurrently working on figuring out fonts, palette and general layout...I'm trying a sorta card-inspired thing, like this:

Art will probably come last...and I'm waffling between doing like a heavily-Photoshopped-actual-photo motif or fully illustrated. In theory, it's a serene duck floating on water with some subtle "quirk" animations to give it life, and then it has small mods depending on certain inputs. Like if you said "contain the duck," maybe a box appears around it...or "burp the duck" and it lets out a hic bubble or something. Not doing that for all of these (cause who has the time) but maybe can proof of concept a few and then expand upon it later if the game proves fun.

Anyhow! I used these little forum devlogs just to keep me honest on the last one, so might check in every once in awhile here too. Good luck to everyone on their projects?

Wow I actually really like this idea! I don't think you need to overthink it too much in terms of gamification, if it were me I'd just focus on making a variety of funny duck interactions that the player can try out. 

Can't wait to see how it turns out : ) 

I've got most of the display logic up and running at this point...I figured out a simple "mission" structure where I can give simple prompts like "get the duck to the moon" or "say hello" and you have to fill in a word that'll achieve the goal. Still not sure if it'll make the final cut of the thing, because it'll require some extra logic work.

First, and more importantly, I need to finish out scripting for the first few hundred responses, and then draw a couple more simple modifications to the duck image that can be used in response. I started with a full body image of a duck, but in the spirit of "less is more," I'm trying to keep animation needs to a minimum and let most of the reactions happen in the head. Also stripped some of the UI elements down a bit more...gonna focus on just adding more juice to the limited ones that remain instead of having cards flying in and out, etc.

So...all told, making progress? Praying for the next few days?

Here's a look at where it's at:

lol the duck is so cute!

Okay, hi! My v1 is submitted! Good to have another jam under my belt!

Here's the page, if you wanna give it a shot and submit a rating: https://itch.io/jam/blackthornprod-game-jam-3/rate/898015

In the end, I stripped a few more things out while chanting "less is more" in my head. 

The little thing, that I actually think improves the aesthetic as dumb as it sounds, was removing eyeballs from the duck. Making it just sort of an abstract duck shape ended up being more in sync with this pared down approach. 

I removed the missions/prompts to keep things more free form, and just kept the simple score mechanic for people who are trying to explore every nook and cranny. I'd originally had it displayed as like "0 / 300" but I don't imagine people sitting and trying to find all 300 things...so instead, I expose the total count only in the setup instructions and keep the score as a subtle general tally. I didn't want people to feel like it was an impossible task with that looming "out of" number visible at all times.

I'm calling this a v1 because there are things I still want to do that I didn't quite eke out in time...a few quality of life additions to make it playable on mobile, the ability to save score for people who want to return, and the ability to share specific screengrabs on social media if you find a good one. And, of course, continuing to add more verbs...300-ish is a good start, but there's a lot of ground still to cover and I want people to be able to try and push the boundaries and stump the thing and still be rewarded. Would love to hear what common words you may have tried that didn't get a response.

Best of luck to everyone else with submissions today, can't wait to play stuff!