Duck Game, The Forsaken

It’s been a decade since Duck Game came out on the OUYA, which means this year was Duck Game’s 10th anniversary, though you might not know it if you where expecting me to tell you… Short of any events or celebration related to it, Warner threatened to remove it and all the other Adult Swim Games titles from storefronts and I continued working on our new game instead.

Some incredible news, is that a few heroes over at Warner took the reins and did the work to transfer all the titles back to their owners. Coordinating this seemed like it was an especially daunting task for console versions, and the Duck Game transfer only just reached completion this week, but- it’s done! Duck Game now belongs to Corptron Games Corp!

Some crappy news (well, it’s not really news…), is that Duck Game hasn’t been updated in well over two years.

It’s depressing, and I’m ashamed. What happened? It’s no coincidence that we’ve been working on Flatlanders for two and a half years. We’ve been trying to sort out a publisher for a while, and I’ve spent the last year flipping between trying to sort my life out and frantically trying to jam as much code into the game as possible before we’re on a schedule. We’ve finally just signed with a publisher, which I’m very very excited about, and I’ll make a post about that when I can. Figuring that out has relieved some pressure and allowed me get my mind off the new game just long enough to realize with full force that I’ve forsaken Duck Game.

It’s been hard to get away from the new project. As of January we’ve brought a programmer on board, who is a close friend of mine. We grew up playing Timesplitters/Smash Bros at lunch hour, and making Game Maker games. His games where cooler than mine and after we hung out I would always go home and try to figure out how he made them. We also have a funny producer-type guy who helps keep meetings in check and provides us with jokes. Since I brought everyone on board, it makes me the defacto lead when it comes to meetings and delegating work. I want everyone on the project to play the game and mess around with the editors so we all work as testers and designers too, which means everyone on the team is finding bugs and working around missing features. Since I’m the main programmer and the only one who understands the engine and editor code, a lot of movement depends on me fixing broken stuff. When I’m not actively on the project it leaves everyone hanging and the guilt comes, which makes me feel like I’m doing the wrong thing whenever I’m not working on Flatlanders.

Duck Game is way overdue for an update. It’s extremely out of date on Switch. The PS4/5 version has some arcade bugs that have never been addressed and the PC version has been having random issues. In particular, newer graphics cards (the Nvidia 40 series specifically, as far as I’m aware) have introduced an incompatibility with the original XNA framework that Duck Game still runs on. This causes random crashes (System.InvalidOperationException
at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Graphics.GraphicsDevice.DrawUserIndexedPrimitives) and the only real solution will be to switch the game over to FNA or MonoGame. Phasing out the XNA dependencies is going to be a bit of work, the hardest part will be making the change without completely breaking mods. The thing that always takes the longest, though, is dealing with console versions of the game.

I’m still not familiar with Switch/Playstation APIs and when problems arise in those systems it can take serious time and energy to figure out the cause. This along with a fairly complicated patching/submission pipeline and a particularly tedious C++ transpiling stage for the Switch version makes the whole process heavy on brain pain for the terminally oblivious (me). I’ve worked with porting teams in the past on the original PS4 release and the Switch release, with mixed results. I ended up re-writing the PS4 port from scratch in 2022, since the old version had a ton of issues and was running on an extremely out of date Unity codebase that couldn’t really be updated. A team out of London did the original port, and though they where an excellent team they didn’t have much experience with online stuff and I think in particular Duck Game’s demented network code ended up being too hieroglyphic, delaying the project and ultimately leading to a release that wasn’t all there. For the Switch port, I got the game booting up to the title screen then passed that code off to Armature Studios, who did the hard parts of the port such as dealing with cert considerations and implementing platform specific API stuff. They did an extremely good job, working with them was a very harmonious experience and I met lots of great people who I really hope to meet again someday, somehow.

For both ports I worked alongside the teams helping them un-contort my twisted systems while creating new content for the game. I’d really like to work in a similar way again, and with the new game having a schedule and publisher finally figured out I hope to split my time between Flatlanders and Duck Game in 2025. The dream is to find a porting team and finally get the game to where it should have been years ago, the same on all platforms and with some long missing features. I’d work with them to add a bunch of new stuff and to finish a bunch of old stuff that never quite got done, releasing a big update on all platforms simultaneously and in the best case scenario releasing an XBOX version too. Localization and cross play would be things I’d want to look into as well, though if we did do cross play it might end up being between console versions only as there are some reasons why including PC would complicate things. Making the PC version harder to update is a major one, while PCs making cheating easy and fun is another. But at it’s heart Duck Game is designed to be played with friends rather than strangers, so anything that helps friends connect to each other (even if one of those friends turns out to be a filthy cheater) seems like a win.

I can’t give a timeline for this as it’s all pretty unknown, but I plan to start working on new Duck Game stuff in January. I’m sorry for taking so long and for keeping everyone hanging. I appreciate all your support, your kindness and most of all your patience as always. Some friends and even some avid players have told me that I don’t need to keep updating the game for the rest of my life. It’s nice of them to say that and the idea brings comfort at a time when I’ve left the game alone for a quarter of a decade, but it doesn’t sit well with me. One person tweeted that I’m “like an absent father” and that’s closer to how I feel. Duck Game is my kid and it’s only 10 years old… It’ll be another 8 years at least before it’s old enough to move out and until then I’m gonna try to be a better parent.

Now the old man sits and tells of days when time stood still,

the hours always seem to fade but the memory never will.

All the love that you gave me, all the dreams in the night

and I just want to thank you while the day is still light.

-The Man Who Would Be Santa, Vertical Horizon