Step right up!
Aim for the middle and test your mettle against a volley of tricky targets, diabolical ducks, and bewitched bombs as they float tauntingly across your playdate. Use PowerUps to your advantage to reach the top of the high score leaderboard. Set a high score and then hand the playdate to a friend to see if they can beat it.
"incredibly high polish on the concept" - LedBetter Games
Inspiration
From the day it was first announced I knew I wanted to make a game for the yellow Playdate console and immediately pre-ordered one.
Having never written a single line of Lua, I went from designing and building to self-publishing and releasing my first indie game on itch.io.
"I like the duck game" – My kids
Gameplay Mechanics
Time Bonus
- Adds seconds to the clock to extend your current game.
Phantom Ammo
- Shoot to stop at a random number and that amount of phantom ammo will be added without a reloading or resetting your hit streak.
Reloading will be prevented until all phantom rounds are spent.
Point Bombs
- Shoot one and a bomb card will appear in your hit streak. Clear the card before the reload counter reaches 0 and receive the points. Otherwise those points will be removed from your current score.
Shiny Targets
- Shiny targets will 2X the score for the first three hits, being worth 2, 4, 6, 8 or 10 depending on your accuracy.
Development Challenges
Getting the duck's movment just right was pretty challening early on while I was still figuring out the SDK. I had a general idea of how I wanted the movement to be but most importantly it had to feel mechanical — as if driven by gears. The SDK has built in support for making arcs but getting the random movement took some math to get just right.
Here's a small diagram I made to help me figure out where to place the next arc based on a random radius and the duck's current X position.
Nerdy Stats
For source control I set up a local Gittea instance on my home Network Attached Storage (NAS).