DOS Ducklings: "Are You Working on Your Boring Duck Game?"

my first game collab with Zizi

Jul 31, 2026

My first collaboration with Zizi: DOS Ducklings!

It’s a simple game where a mama duck and ducklings try to navigate the waters of … somewhere with crocs … Crocville? And the ducklings have a superpower: diving!

Give it a play here.

It should work on desktop or mobile. For mobile you can tap to move, on desktop I suggest using the arrow keys. That’s the most fun way to play.

“That baby duck just disappeared under the water!”

Emily and I spent the last two months in Europe, half of it in Copenhagen.

In one of the blur of days we took the train down to Ishøj to visit the ARKEN museum, a spot I went to last July with Abraham.

Last time there was an exhibit with a huge wall full of Frederik Næblerød’s drawings and it inspired me to make a similar mural wall at home. I thought I could do it in a weekend which was a huge miscalculation — it ended up taking me 3 months.

mid-mural building (now the whole wall is covered)

So… isn’t this about Ducklings or something?

Yeah yeah yeah I’ll get to it.

Spending a month in a place is so different from a week or two; I started descending out of vacation mode into feeling more like I existed there.

Sitting in the ARKEN cafe, hitting hard on that mid-afternoon tired, we leaned on each other and looked out at the pond.

“Oh look,” I said, “ducklings!”

^{(vid courtesy of}^emily⁾

We watched them in a kind of curious stupor and at some point noticed they were going under the water and popping back up. I had no context for this. Were they cormorants … cormlings? But they looked liked ducks. Probably quacked like ducks too so I looked them up and they were diving ducks!

I joked we should make a website where an adult duck is followed around by ducklings all yelling MAMA mama mama mama because Zizi nonstop was saying MAMA mama mama and we noticed basically all kids do this. Is that built in, kind of like how these lil ducks knew how to hold their breath and explore under water?

Designing the Ducks

When I got home I fired up Claude Code to start playing with the design. I wanted something with a DOS-type feel, sort of like King’s Quest or Commander Keen. I asked Claude to give me 5 designs to start with giving that direction:

These were all way too big for what I was imagining, so I guided a redesign to be small and cute with 5 different styles to choose from (I really like asking for 5-10 different variations, usually 1 or 2 that I ask for very specifically, and then asking for new ideas for the rest).

Organizing the Versions

At this point I knew I wanted to keep all of this organized so I could look back or reference past versions so I started archiving each version into an /archive folder and made each one self-contained so we can load it later (I built this into each major change):

Duckling Movements

Then the hard part … how to make these ducklings move around. I started with the idea of the ducklings following the mama duck, except one or two dawdle and get lost then rush back.

I also created a tight convoy (too easy for a game) and a vee formation (too hard) but it was good to get a feel for different methods and play with it in an interactive temp file:

At this point there was a lot of back and forth on these modes… this is the boring part where we fixed a bunch of edge cases and then cleaned up everything but the final method.

I added a menu for funs and made the keybindings and arrow keys work (”?” brings it up)

Making the Ducklings Dive

I wanted the ducks to dive, because that was kind of the whole thing that started all of this.

I also wasn’t sure I could pull it off; but Anthropic’s Fable 5 had just come out and I wanted to see how far I could push it.

I created 5 different animations and ended up mixing a few to get this really nice bob up/down with a shadow:

Enter Zizi the Project Manager

It was around this time where Zizi started asking me every day:

“SOOooOOO ARE YOU WORKING ON YOUR BORING DUCK GAME?”
“DID YOU ADD THE CROCS?”
“…ADD THEM. DO IT. GO AHEAD.”

So I said “let’s do it together” … and the first result was… very bad.

Everyone knows that creeping despondency when you cross the limit of the current models (or if you’re lucky, your context window) and alas we had just crossed it with poor Fable.

Take a look at these crocs, none would work:

this was especially bad but it did give me the idea to have logs

you know in retrospect i kinda like this shadow one

But with a little encouragement / scolding / direction we got there:

At least I liked it, and I was the one pressing buttons.

“How are you making this?” Zizi asked.

She’s 6 and isn’t quite what I would call literate but I can see how motivating it is for her to want to read to crack the code for what her mom and I do and what all these words are on our screens.

This was a good opportunity to show her how to actually build using AI. So I started using voice-to-text (using a local NVIDIA Parakeet V3 model using VoiceInk which honestly is so good and much better than Claude’s current built-in voice-to-text model)