Way long ago when I was about 10 years old, my friend Brandon and I where riding home from town in his mom’s Taurus. It had reverse facing seats in the very back, so we where able to watch the city receding into the distance as we left. As I watched it go with the sunset there was a sudden an empty feeling in the pit of my stomach, a few realizations came to me and I was hit with the saddest feeling I had ever felt. It was like the movie was over, and in a way everybody in it was gone forever. They where captured in time and we got to see them as they where for a little while, but then the bit of information we had left from the past ran out and they where gone. The town we visited that day, the people we met, even the people we where- they where all, in a sense, gone forever. One day everything else would go too.
It was the first time I can remember understanding that everything is temporary, that we’re not immortal and that our friends and family, our teachers, our neighbors, could all go away whenever. It wouldn’t be for some plan, to progress a plot point in the story of the universe or to even out some kind of energy. It would just happen at random. Like when a bird hits the window or a salamander gets all dried out in the sandbox. Nobody liked or disliked that salamander, and nothing made a conscious decision to sacrifice him for something more “important”. The universe plays dice, and that salamander was unlucky. Poor guy…
These melancholy realizations where mixed with a reserved but happy appreciation that we all got to go to town together, that the universe didn’t throw a deer or another car in front of us today. It was the first time I felt nostalgia.
I used to sit on the concrete floor in our basement and play through to the second level in Gadget Twins just so I could hear the Zeppelin Attack song, or load up the Lava Reef zone in Sonic & Knuckles and just lie on the floor listening to it until the timer ran out. My brother and I would play Toejam & Earl and let our dudes just sink into the quicksand while we listened to it’s funky beats. I’d play through the final boss in Sonic 3 solely to hear the special Michael Jackson version of the credits music that you could only hear without Sonic & Knuckles attached. The sound of FM synthesis almost makes me cry. That credits music reminds me of our drive home.
These feelings led me to try again and again, for years, to figure out how the heck to make a VST that made Sega Genesis sounds. I suck at math, like really seriously suck at it, but nostalgia had me learning C++, reading through technical documents and calculating frequencies. My only talents have always been naivety and persistence, I’m dumb enough to think I can and excited enough to go for it. Maybe that’s mankind in general. After years of experimentation I finally got a YM2612 plugin working, which lead to trying to make a game like James Pond 3, to a nostalgia for playing Toejam & Earl with my brother, to GENNY and then to Duck Game. And all just to recreate the past. To dig up lost times and bring those feelings forward because the thought of losing them is just too much.
Duck Game came out more than 10 years ago and hasn’t had an update since May of 2022. It’s original publisher, Adult Swim Games, is defunct. From it’s naive beginnings, a team full of passionate gamers who just wanted to publish cool games, to the confident momentum they where able to achieve once they had their bearings, and finally to drama and internal struggles before finally reaching the inevitable end that any honest company tends to reach before a decade is through. They weren’t printing money, so everyone was fired and they where shut down, that their umbrella companies might start over from scratch with some less passionate people and a more corporate strategy. They moved through childhood to old age, starting out with passion and a love for all things, slowly getting more cynical as life wore them down and people broke their trust, and finally died quietly at home once their cells lost the ability to regenerate. Why does everything take this course? Why is nothing immortal, even when not bound by any biological limits?
Westwood Games, Bullfrog, Maxis. Linkin Park, Radwimps, The Goo Goo Dolls. Spongebob, Adventure Time, The Simpsons. Apple, Google, Twitter. Tim Hortons. Everything gets death. Sometimes you get some peace underground, but if you where truly beloved they will string you up and dance you around. Your first puppet master watched the way you moved while you where still alive and they can do a pretty good imitation, but they too will die and each subsequent master will have less and less experience with what you where until finally they tie you to the flywheel on some machine because it’s cheaper and somehow less depressing to watch. As everybody comes to associate your flailing corpse with a deep sense of sadness, they turn away and hope never to see you again. The suits shake their head- they knew this would happen. The public has lost interest, trends must be changing. They liked your dance before but now they don’t. People are fucking fickle.
Where is Duck Game on this path? Where am I on this path? Are we still young, is there still more left to do? The world makes me tired. I’m tired of watching it crush things between it’s fingers and then wonder why those things died. I’m tired of getting used to seeing it, tired of the apathy and desensitization it brings. The things that used to make me angry only make me sad, because anger is an emotion that demands action. Action requires energy. I’m out of that.
I said I would start working on Duck Game again in January, motivated by nostalgia and sad thoughts of how incredibly long everyone has been waiting. I’m learning that I only have so much energy. Our new game, Flatlanders, has been in development for more than 2 years now and it’s half done. As of January we have a publisher, and I forgot how stressful deadlines are- a team of people are relying on me for critical features that I have to finish before they can do stuff. This, combined with what feels to me like an all out war on love and understanding in the states, fueled by nostalgia for a time when civilization was a candle burning at both ends, when we where able to do whatever we wanted without caring about tomorrow because a lack of experience allowed us to be ignorant of the fact that we where on a path to destruction.
I don’t want to make games as anything but a Canadian. Or do anything else, for that matter. God. This country has done everything for me, it’s a part of my identity. I don’t know what makes a country better or worse, all I know is that I feel completely different here than I feel when I’m in America, I feel intensely like this is my home. I don’t know what will happen, but all I can hope is that if the worst happens the shock of it will stop my heart, because that’s the only way my mind could bear the betrayal of it all.
And I’m in the dumps again, sorry. I started with the desire to say something happy, I’ve tried to do this half a dozen times now and I always end up in the shit pit. I wanted to write a post about Duck Game, about what’s up with it, because those of you who have been waiting patiently for an update deserve to know what’s going on. I wanted to maybe reminisce about the past again, about good times playing Duck Game, meeting people, talking to everyone on Discord. To thank everyone for everything they’ve given me, thank them for the sheer positivity and happiness they’ve blessed me with over the years. Seriously, thank you.
I can’t say what Duck Game is to other people, but I know what it is to me. It’s a collection of feelings from my past, a way to share jokes with my friends, a place to store happy thoughts for safe keeping when I worry that those feelings wont last forever. It is a yearning for the love expressed in all the games that came before it. As a kid, I imagined somebody sitting in front of a computer making those games, having that same feeling of excitement and wonder they gave me. We need to have that energy when we do things, or those things wont give any energy back. I’m trying to have that energy, and I’m trying to share it with everything else that wears on my mind right now.
I’m trying to work on Duck Game, but it really hasn’t been going well this year. I’m sorry. I feel like saying that I would be back on it in January was a betrayal, like it suggested that I’d be able to work on it full time, full of energy and ideas. That isn’t what happened. I won’t stop working on it, but I don’t know when things will happen.
I’ve always wanted Duck Game to remain a pure expression of things that I love, something that can still bring tears of nostalgia and that can remain untainted from any signs of a worldly desire for fortune. I don’t want to dance it around. The emotion is stronger than a want- I really can’t bear to see more things danced around. But I don’t want it to die… I know there is still love in this world, more good will be done, and a very special few things will sail off into the sunset leaving behind only sadness at the necessity of their departure, and a feeling of nostalgia. And in the silence afterwards, an intense happiness. The warmth of knowing that something good happened, that it was only there for the love of things, that the attention and care it represents is timeless. It was somebody’s reason to live.
Welcome to the edge of the earth. (Art by Dayton)
General mood in the Corptron offices.
Gameplay consists entirely of placing cards and moving them around. 
Some units move and attack differently, and setting up combos is important for getting the most out of your deck. 
Promotions are a limited resource that lets you boost a card and move it again.
Sneaky units cannot be seen by your opponent until they’re revealed, and will stun the opponent’s card if they attack while hidden.
Traits allow cards to share certain behaviors. The Sea Lion for example is a “Swimming Psycho Beast”- Swimming means they can move through water without slowing down, Psycho means they can attack friendly cards, and Beast means that they don’t require a citizen to build.
A typical deck. 
Voilà! 
Your quest to be the best.
