Quack House at Three Thing Game

At 3:00pm this afternoon we shipped “Quack House”. It kind of works. You can even have a go yourself here. It supports loads of players (we were surprised to find) and the goal is to attract ducklings and steer them to your badly drawn duck house. There are some gameplay issues. The ducklings are attracted to ducks and will follow you although they are very determined followers and an unwary duck can end up pinned to the side of the game environment by ducklings.

We are all quite proud of it. I did the graphics, the sound and the music in a style that I am calling “placeholder”. David and David (which made for confusing team conversations) did most of the code, but I did just enough to be able to convince myself that I contributed something.

The other teams had produced some really splendid stuff. One of the things that struck me was that they were all focused on making a game with a beginning, middle and end rather than just a tech demo. There was a nice mix of technologies and some of the teams had dedicated artists for sound and graphics which added a huge amount to the quality of the finished products. The games will all be placed on itch.io once the teams have finished tidying them up. I’ll post the links here when they are available.

As usual, I learned a ton from the experience. Not least that phaser is a splendid framework and that creating server based games is nothing like the challenge you might think it is. And also that the flame of Three Thing Game is alive and well and still burning brightly. Thanks to David for inviting me and letting me see what the students are up to these days.