Rubber Duck, Save Me!

This game was originally started for the Taku's Mini Jam (May 2019) on the theme Rubber Duck. I thought interesting to use the concept of rubber duck debugging (reasoning by talking to oneself) in a point-and-click puzzle, while having an actual rubber duck in a bathroom.

Controls

If you have already played games made with Ren'Py, you already know the main controls: click or press Space to continue dialogues.

In this game, you can also interact with items between dialogues by clicking on them. However, unlike point-and-click adventures, all actions are completely contextual and do not require to select any verb or combination of items. For instance:

* click on item that can't be taken => Look at item

* click on item that can be taken => take item (there is no inventory, so the item remains in hand until you use it)

* with item in hand, click on another item for which the combination makes sense => use item in hand with other item

The mouse icon will change when hovering an item to show which kind of contextual action would be applied.

Scope

The game is pretty short, it only features a few puzzle steps and is a few minutes long.

Development

Engine

The game was made with Ren'Py. It's a Visual Novel engine, but I tweaked the core loop to make a point-and-click instead.

It is possible to export Ren'Py games as HTML games using RenPyWeb, but on my project it led to strong performance issues due to the way I handle the core loop. Because of this, I did not upload the web version, so you have to download one of the executables below to play.

Workflow

I worked on this project using top-down methodology:

* start with the introduction and ending, with only 1 puzzle step to finish the game

* insert intermediate puzzle steps gradually, while making sure that the game can be finished at any time of development

This proved efficient, as it allowed me to keep a playable version at any step, and decide to stop and release the game with minimal change when I decided that there was enough content.

License

The itch.io cover title uses the Purisa font, which is under GPL-2.0.

Other licenses are defined in the project metadata and in the source code repository.