Duck Line
Lead the ducklings home. The longer the line, the harder it steers.
How to Play Duck Line
- Drag to steer the mother duck up the pond. Ducklings you swim over join the line behind you.
- Beach balls knock ducklings loose. If one hits the tail, everything behind that point is gone.
- The line drags: a long line turns slowly, so a duckling parked next to a ball may not be worth it.
Controls
| Keyboard | Arrow keys or A/D to swim |
|---|---|
| Touch | Drag anywhere to swim |
Tips
- The tail cuts the inside of every turn. Swerving tightly around a ball is exactly how the line clips it.
- Arriving with eight is better than losing nine. Some ducklings are placed where taking them is a mistake.
About Duck Line
Swim the pond collecting ducklings. Each one makes you slower to turn, and the tail cuts the corner — so the ball you just dodged can still take half your line. It runs directly in your browser with no download or sign-up, on desktop and mobile alike.
Design notes: how Duck Line was built
The ducklings do not retrace your path. An earlier version recorded the mother’s positions and replayed them down the line, which made the tail effectively invincible — an automated test cleared the whole pond without losing a single duckling, because the tail only ever went where the head had already safely been. They now lag-chase the duckling in front (c.cx += (leadX - c.cx) * min(1, 5.5 * dt)), which means the line swings wide across the inside of every turn and can clip something the mother just dodged.
Steering gets worse as you succeed. The drag factor is max(0.55, 1 - line * 0.035), so a full line of twelve turns at just over half the responsiveness of an empty one. This is the only difficulty curve in the game and the player builds it themselves by playing well, which is a more interesting shape than a timer.
Roughly one duckling in three is deliberately placed next to a ball. Every third index is snapped near a toy position at generation time, so a meaningful fraction of the pond is a genuine question rather than free score: taking that duckling costs steering you may need in ten seconds. Arriving with eight is frequently better than losing nine. The ducks themselves are drawn with canvas bezier paths rather than the shared pixel sprite system, because a 13×11 sprite has nowhere to put an eye, a bill curve and a blush.
More of these in the dev notes.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did I lose ducklings without touching anything?
The tail did. Ducklings follow the duck in front rather than retracing your exact path, so they swing wide across the inside of a turn.
Does collecting every duckling always win?
No. Each one you pick up makes the line slower to steer, and some are placed right beside a ball where taking them costs more than they are worth.
What happens if a ball hits me with an empty line?
The run ends there and you arrive alone. With ducklings behind you it only knocks the last two loose, so an empty line is the real danger.
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