Drunken Ducklings

Drunken Ducklings is a drinking game I made in early 2021. It is the first Unity project I made using my new PC, and initially started because I just kinda wanted to try it out.

I didn't really meant it as such, but it can be seen as a follow up / sequel / better version of Nutshotters: It's another drinking game featuring yellow ducklings. About half the cards in Drunken Ducklings are also copied from Nutshotters. The main difference between the two is that Nutshotters was meant more to sharpen my skills (Both programming as well as game design), and was useful to get some stuff out of my system. Drunken Ducklings is way more matured, with proper programming and far better game design.

Gameplay

In Drunken Ducklings, each player plays as a little yellow duckling and throws dice to progress over a board. The board has different tiles that determine the category of the card you'll get, should you land on them.

These categories can be excluded to tailor the game to a specific context. E.g. if you're not comfortable with stripping clothes, you can exclude the 'Sexy' category.

Some cards give the player an option to choose between a task or drinking a certain amount. Each time the board is cycled, the first player gets to choose if they want to "Up the odds". Doing so will increase the amount a player has to drink to get out of doing a task. Ideally, this means that the players will get more drunk and more willing to do the tasks, which are designed to be fun.

The game does not have a natural ending, and the board can be cycled for as long as you want.

A short gameplay demo using only 2 players, emulated in Unity. Note that some things will still change in the actual app. E.g. right now the donate and rate the app links are inactive, but those will be activated in the actuall app.

Artwork

Drunken Ducklings is the first game ever for which I did all the artwork myself. I choose for a pixel art style, because of a number of reasons:

Nostalgia & Inspiration
Pixel art initially originated from technical limitations, which is why many older games use pixel art. For me, pixel art is nostalgic and reminds me of those older games. However, I'm also inspired by recent games like Blasphemous and Hyper Light Drifter, both of which feature beautiful pixel art.
Performance
Pixel art is far less demanding than other styles, which is why older games designed for older hardware often use it.
Workload
As stated earlier, I did all of the artwork myself, which is quite a lot. For example: The player needs to be able to walk in every direction, jump in every direction, stand in every direction and get squished in every direction. This results in a single player requiring about 26 sprites (and also why there's only one player character). Making these sprites in a 32x32 or 64x64 resolution is far less work than making them in a 1024x1024 resolution.

I used PiskelAp for my artwork, which is an amazing, free, online pixel art editor that had all the features I needed.

As diehard pixel art fans will tell you, there's a lot to designing pixel art. You have to take into account so many things (e.g. lighting, shadows, detail, etc.). Since this is a project just for fun, I went with my own interpretation of these rules and created my own art style.

For example: I like to outline everything with a solid line, that fully connects, where according to the general rules, you'd just have to make a line where each block is one step to the side and one step to the top or bottom of the previous.

I'm very happy with the way that it turned out. It has the right level of detail using default settings (I like giving players a lot of freedom, so you could potentially make the board very large and zoom out a lot) and looks very playful and cartoon-y.

Have a look at the demo video above to see more of the artwork.

Randomness

Drunken Ducklings is a game of chance. Chance which is fueled by randomness. Everything in this game is random. From the overall selection of the cards (each card has a number, e.g. 1.7. This means that the card will be in the stack once, and has a 70% chance to be in the stack twice) to the category assigned to each tile (every category at least once, then weighted probabilities; categories with more cards have a higher chance of spawning). From the generation of the coastline along the pond to the placement of the grass around it. Everything is random.

Although RNG is generally not very well received by gamers, I believe that in a casual game such as this one, it only adds suspense and enhances replayability.

Publishing

Unlike Nutshotters, I actually published Drunken Ducklings to the Play Store. The experience with publishing I gained from the Boerenkerkhof AR project was definitely of great help here. I do not intent to ever publish to IOS, however.

I made the game free to play, and free of ads. I did this for a number of reasons: First off, I don't expect to make a lot of money from this game either way, but more importantly, I think most mobile games, especially the free to play ones, are awful and an insult to game designers and developers everywhere. They are purposefully addictive and either spam ads or exploit a small, vulnerable group of people for their money using microtransactions. Making the game free to play and free of ads was a little statement against these types of games. That being said, you can still support this project by donating, should you see fit to do so.

Overall, this was a very fun project and I hope many people enjoy playing my game.