Duck City
The Duck City website was great fun to build. Alan Snow, illustrator &
author of the PC game and Sam & Lucien at publishers BMGi gave us full
licence to commit aggravated silliness.
Which we did. In spades. (well, in Python, actually).
The screenshot to the left is of "Duck City Central", main silliness choice point. We re-used the out-of-focus background presentation to gain a sense of depth appropriate to a cityscape.
Every 15mins the background image was changed, progressing through dawn, day, dusk and night (it was dawn in Duck City when I took the screenshot, dawn is usually a good time to take photos).
Duck City Central provided access to "Find the Slug",
"Pond Life", "Madame Ida", "Formation Flying", "Identiduck" and other diversions.
Unarguably, "IdentiDuck" was the most successful of the Duck City Central features. The server's ability to generate graphics programmatically allowed us to present a "pick'n'mix" interface, whereby a user "creates" a duck by choosing one from each of four sets of variations of apparel/physical characteristic (beak, glasses, hat, clothing).
As each choice is made, the server stores the selected value in the URL and a "submit" triggers a redraw of the graphic reflecting the current choices.
When satisfied with the end result, a user may pick, from corresponding drop-down menus of randomly-selected names, a first and last name for their duck. Again the values are stored and a submit causes the selection to be stored in a database, ready to drive a demand-led regeneration of the graphic.
Duck City Central provided access to "Find the Slug",
"Pond Life", "Madame Ida", "Formation Flying", "Identiduck" and other diversions.
Ducks stored in the database were termed to constitute the population of Duck City and so would be available for review-stand duty in "Formation Flying".
In the "Formation Flying" feature, an image of a set of review stands was cycled every minute.
Over a 15-minute period, more and more duck images were pasted into the stand image to give the impression of a crowd assembling. The review stand was a large image map and each duck member of the crowd was clickable producing that duck's "home page".
As well as being automatically included in the welcome page to give a personal greeting whenever the user revisited, ducks in Duck City were also available to be Help Duck of the Day: the duck used on the greeting page whenever a non-duck-owning user arrived and who fronted all the help content.