Ducky’s Day Dreams is a relaxing city builder where you explore different building styles while following funny and whimsical stories. Strategically place your pieces on the board to build up your points, unilock unique pieces, and create a beautiful piece of art. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and you’re here to have a great time.

This game is free to play on Itch.io .

Developpement

Ducky’s is my first full solo game that I worked on for more than a month. This game was made from December 2020 to August 2021. It was mostly an exercise of consistency, habit and discipline. I got tired of the game but kept going for the sake of having something to show for. I now have proof that I can work on a project for a long time. This project is a sort of jump of point for my next project.

This project was divided in 3 phases:

  1. Prototype: This part was made in a 72 hour game jam. The idea was fun enough to justify more developpement.
  2. Production: A 5 months divided into sprints of 2-3 weeks each. Each sprint has a playable version at the end.
  3. Polish: With all the features locked, I took 2 months to fix all the bugs and polish the corners.

Prototype Version

For Ludum Dare 2020, I made Layered Builder. I got good comments and I liked the idea, and scale. I was looking for a full game idea. I decided to make a bigger version based on that game jam.

Production Version

Progress of developpement of the game

A brave new world

Basic tilemap with animation.

As I wanted to allow dynamic road and terrain change, I had to implement a blob system.

A custom editor

A custom editor that created the game data scriptable object and links them. In the end, it took a bit more time than what it saved, but if I would have kept adding game assets, it would have been worth it.

Which tile can be placed on which. What are the required placed tiles to gain that tile?

Let there be narration!

A basic dialogue system with choices. I used Yarn to handle dialogues.

With a little more polish.

A Prettier world

Start of a color replacement shader with animation to have better grass and reduce tile count.

Some fun with shaders :).

End results!

Placing tiles

Some of the game menus

Basic buttons.

Shaders to make the buttons fancier. Overkill? Yes. Fun? Also Yes. Will animate menu buttons again? No.

An animated star background to make it a little bit more alive.

The audio tab of the option menu.

Other stuff

Placeble tiles have variations.

Some UI work, placing stuff adds points but also requires points.

Some juicy currency gain animation.

This is how sprites are rigged in Aseprite. I have some importation scripts that link those with Unity's SpriteRenderers.

My project management at some point of the developpement