Quackling Rescue by Laywelin
In Quackling Rescue, lead your flock of various ducklings to safety, avoid distractions, surmount obstacles and don't forget any of them along the way! Remember, if your duckling lose focus you can honk to get their attention back.
UPDATE: A post-jam fix has been done, see patchnote below! - Fixed lights and shadows on rugs and doors - Fixed "ducklings" sometime glitching and refusing to follow daddy duck in an orderly fashion, messing with currently following counter! They are great kids now! - Fixed WebGL template & resolution, now text in final cutscene is properly displayed - If you want to play in fullscreen, you can go on the itch.io page!
Controls: - Move: WASD / Arrows / Left Stick on Controller - Honk: Space / A on Controller (A on Xbox, X on PSX)
The game was made in 72h for Ludum Dare 56 Theme was "Tiny Creatures"!
There is a cutscene at the end, with two different endings. Let us know if you've seen both! <3



Credits
- Florian "Laywelin" Baheux - Programmer
- Amanda "Mantelia" Casaretto - Lead Artist
- Nicolas "Zdieska" Casaretto - Level & Sound Designer
- Quentin "Kureil" Guerant - Level Designer
- Eric "Ouro" de La Celle - Prop artist
| Itch.Io | https://laywelin.itch.io/quackling-rescue |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/quackling-rescue |
Ratings
| Overall | 245th | 3.867⭐ | 100🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 295th | 3.689⭐ | 100🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 316th | 3.571⭐ | 100🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 140th | 4.173⭐ | 100🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 272th | 4.096⭐ | 101🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 292th | 3.615⭐ | 98🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 143th | 3.809⭐ | 99🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 268th | 3.861⭐ | 99🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 73🗳️ | 178🗨️ |
Good work mate!
Quack!
I may or may not have left the ducklings in front of the TV at times, while finding their siblings, but it seemed to lead to some weird behavior with the counter of how many ducklings I had, when I called them away again.
Also the revolving doors tended to push away the ducklings.
But all in all it was a really cute contribution and playing it felt pretty satisfying, well done :)
Good job everyone!
Anyhoo, really delightful game - great job.
Congrats again, guys ! Awesome job !
There is indeed a known bug that the duckling counter can go off, the best way to fix that is... to make sure all ducklings get on another target, then call them back.
Yes I'm saying everything gets smoother if you let the kids watch TV for a sec. Yes. I know.
@gudkova-ds Надеюсь, она будет хорошо переведена, поскольку я использую Google Translate — спасибо, что нашли время протестировать и прокомментировать нашу игру, спасибо! <3
Great-Ducking-Job/10
The sprites for the ducks were really nice too.
this game has a lot of good things! good job!
I discovered your game thanks to your review on mine. And I have to admit, this is the cutest game of the Ludum I've seen so far. It's so lovely how they follow you but always get distracted. Then you have to be a good dad-uck and bring them back with a good assertive quack ! I would love to see more levels with new mechanics that would bring more challenge, cause I feel there are a lot of things to do !
On the graphics part, it's a 5/5 for me. It's just so cool what you guys have done. The stickers style is just awesome and quite uncommon !
The controller is smooth and the feeling is great thanks to the see-through-walls shader and the animations. I would reduce a bit the head bobbing though, I found it a bit too much, but this is a detail.
Oh and I was about to forget ! The SFX are just perfect haha. Even though at the end you wanna volume it down a bit ^^
Really nice job to you guys !
Thanks for your comment it warms our hearts that the love we poured into making this style is appreciated!!
Is there a way to follow you on twitter/itch if you do more work by yourself? Would really love to keep up with what you're up to :D
On my first playthrough, I couldn't bring myself to leave the ducklings behind. The background sounds made me think they’d get eaten by the time I came back. Because of that, I noticed a small bug, when the chain of ducklings gets too long they start to glitch around, but it didn’t affect gameplay.
I'm personally fine not bringing all of the ducks to the ending, I assume that's a "bad end" I got for only bringing 10. The way I see it, it's survival of the fittest!
Jokes aside I enjoyed this game a lot, it has a lot of charm (Especially in the audio department). Cute art, and a unique gameplay concept.
Well done :)
Je n'ai hélas pas trouvé le dernier canard, mais je réessayerai sans doute !
En tout cas bravo à vous !!
Oh, French people too? Hi team! I'll take this opportunity to make you a feedback in both languages. I really like the gameplay, it's very accessible (great, the tutorials integrated into the environment!) and quite varied in terms of obstacles and environmental elements! Your little ducks are very cute, and you're perfectly in tune with the gamejam theme.
I wondered if there wasn't a counting bug (top right), because visually, my number of ducks didn't match the figure shown. Finally, although I found the sound design amusing, I think I would have liked some background music too.
Unfortunately, I couldn't find the last duck, but I'll definitely try again!
Anyway, well done folks!
Well done with the sticker 2D style in a 3D world. Managed to beat the game in one shot. Some little glitches and clunkiness here and there but overall there was enough challenge and some puzzle problem solving elements to the game. Loved the SFX haha
Short and sweet. Felicitations de Belgique!

Nice job and really cute art style ! :duck:
Really nice game ! It's funny to see how we had the same idea, but since you have more people and mostly more skills, your game looks better than ours xD
Also, I tried to pause the game by pressing Escape, and I couldn't move my Duck after that, so I suppose there's a tiny bug but nothing too worrysome !
Bien joué !
Hooray, hooray, the ducklings are saved!
Although the game has simple visuals and gameplay, it still gives a good and kind experience. If you have an extra free minute, make more elements of the environment and a couple more levels
Thanks for testing and reviewing our game ❤️ We will see if the game gets some traction to complete it with more story, duckling behaviors, silly quacks and environments ❤️
Thanks for the gaming experience! Good luck!
the ending was also super nice! it would be great to have some music for it, like a lullaby in the background. and i liked that the ending was an open one, looks like there can be part 2 :D
awesome entry!
The game itself is very cute. I like the labyrinth setting and the fact I can see "shadow" of my ducks when behind the wall. And it's pretty big for a jam, wow! Impressive. While also feeling comfortable and smooth to play!
I like designs of my "ducklings" as well. They look quite unique! x3
Overall - so adorable! <3
The graphics were charming even though they could have been even more adorable with additional animation and effects/feedbacks. The Image book theme you went with worked really well with your story !
The sound effect were great, too bad it was lacking music.
The gameplay was ok. Maybe adding another action other than quacking could spice it up ? Even though the scope feel very well managed which is a feat for a game jam entry !!
Bon ma plus grosse déception reste quand même qu'ils ne finissent pas en cassoulet a la fin, en tant que co-Toulousain... :stew:

Nice to see a game with controller support. Not a big issue as it was the first button anyone is going to realistically try but you didn't mention the quack button for pad. The quack cooldown was absolutely pointless. It served no purpose at all besides annoying the player by making them do some pointless waiting. All the distractions really too were just wasting time and not really acting as a real obstacle.
The art was super cute. Sadly the baby critters were so small though that you couldn't really appreciate the great artwork enough on the gameplay itself. Only saw them properly in the end really. The duck being a bit bigger worked much better in my opinion. But the hand drawn 3D-ish cutout look with some bouncy transform animations worked great. Annoyingly there was some sprite tearing/flickering.
The sound scape for rather simple but better than complete silence I guess. The volume level was very quiet too.
The gameplay itself would need something more. It was very much just a walking simulator with no real hurdles or challenges. The second level started showing some more interesting level design but there too only the sucker robot really did anything meaningful. And that too in the end (after giving a threatening look at the first glance) was just a distraction like everything else but it just moved.
Sure those water paths and spinning platforms gave some more interest to the levels but they served no purpose mechanics wise. Nothing would have changed if they weren't there. At first it seemed like they were introduced as a mechanic for upcoming puzzle but no, nothing. Having some light puzzles that reward you with then those babies instead of just randomly finding them would have improved the pacing a bit and obviously would have given the game some more, well, gaminess.
Anyways, good job! 👍
While I agree with some points, I also disagree on different aspects.
If you remove cooldown allowing permanent honk, players will spam honk and ducklings will always follow, never getting distracted. If you make them ignore it sometime, you convey a different message with your story.
The point, at least I believe, isn't always to challenge the player. For instance, the point of that threatening guardian was that ducks starts following it like it's their mother, like a child could end up doing in a supermarket, making it goofy and fun to witness those dork "ducklings" follow the wrong target. It was not here to be a threat!
Finally, we initially had 3 more levels in mind. However we thought telling that cute story of a duck chasing very low-focus kids in a dungeon, even if some are tiny creatures disguising as ducklings, was our priority. Water paths and spinning platforms are indeed here to show possibilities, but we knew people wouldn't spend too much time on each game in a jam so we decided to keep it short. I'm sorry if that disappointed you, as I understand you thought it was too easy and not challenging enough. However I gotta admit that it was never our intention ^.^"
We hope one day we'll be able to bring another version of this game with different levels and puzzles <3
Of course all games don't have challenge the players in any way. Pretty often they just do and that is mainly why I play games. Of course there are more story based games too and games that don't really challenge but offer some meaningful player choices. But if you strip away all challenge, choices and story, what really is there left?
I really like the game, the character and object sprites. I felt the level design was a little lacking in details but I was left hoping that there would be more content so it must have been good overall :thumbsup:
Also for people wondering about the ZQSD on the floor. I think the quality of the bagguette sprite is a hint. :flag_fr: :french_bread:
I would like to separately note the graphics - the characters are made in a style reminiscent of stickers, which makes the game especially unique. And, of course, the sound! The ducklings' quacks and funny effects create an indescribable atmosphere. 🐥
Great job! 👏
The gameplay was nice for the short length, there was a decent variety in the level design even if rather simple to beat. I got both endings, I like the way it was presented like a kids story, makes it more charming and cute
good entry!

All in all, good entry!