Stuck? Get a Robot Duck.

Robot Ducky is the mascot I created for a gaming website in the mid to late 2000s.

This was when I was working at Reflexive Entertainment and we were developing a platform for web-based and try-before-you-buy downloadable games for PC and Mac, the sales of which would pay for site hosting and upkeep.

The site included quite a few games we created, but the bulk of the hosted games were from developers who wanted to sell their work online, as well as some who’d built their own game collection sand wanted to sub license on our platform.

I'd already set up and was running my own online gaming site, fnArcade.com, which offered several of our own and many more third-party games. Signing up as a Reflexive affiliate to dog food the platform was informative and helped me feed ideas and improvements back into the system.

For those unfamiliar, dogfooding is using your own stuff to ensure your actual clients are getting a quality experience.

The whole thing was working well and I was making a reasonable return on my time investment. The little extra cash on top of my Reflexive salary felt like cheating somehow, but I was learning plenty and feeding it back into my day job, so I pushed any guilt aside.

Monitoring user demographics was part of the whole testing, verification, and feedback deal, and while assessing those demographics I became concerned the “effin” part of the name might not be working for some potential uers.

Many of the online gamers enjoying our affiliate sites were from a slightly older cohort - instead of a steady stream of teens or twenty-somethings, we were seeing an influx of thirty- and forty-somethings. Digging into this, we learned the casual gamer market increasingly included middle age women, both downloading and playing online. This was a complete contradiction of the traditional assumptions about young males dominating the market.

So, I had a concern the fnArcade brand was a bit too on the edge, with a young-guy focus, to really appeal to the broader demographic from which future interest might actually flow.

I wanted to create a site that would appeal to a broader range of people. I wanted to build a new community of gamers, without that f'nHardEdge.

To be clear, the games themselves are ultimately why folks visit such a site. But I got to thinking about how many of the most popular games were built around interesting and/or cute characters. So, the idea of creating a new character, something people might expect to see *in* a game, and using it at the level of the site itself, as a sort of mascot, was a natural follow.

A character-branded site could be a great way to differentiate the site and create a following - the same way folks develop a following for a game series and characters like Mario Bros., Zelda, or Kirby.

After a lot of looking and thinking and contemplating the basis of this new character, I settled on the classic old rubber duck as the core of the new site identity and logo - who, at some point in their life, hasn't liked a rubber duck? It’s familiar, neutral, and approachable.

At the same time, I wasn’t trying to appeal to toddlers (who were not yet a significant target audience for web or downloadable games). I needed to add a touch of the gamer/tech edge. After all, digital downloads were still the wild west of gaming at the time and I wanted the logo to feel worthy of the people leading the way.

It’s hard to believe, considering how fast things have changed, but in the early aughts internet commerce was just getting started. YouTube launched in 2005 (only 15 years ago!) and Steam, the online game platform for Valve games, which initially launched in 2003 to distribute software updates to users, didn’t offer affiliate content until 2005.

Back to that universally appealing, yet edgy mascot...I arrived at the idea of turning a rubber duckie into a robot. Robot Chicken was already a thing and I was a huge fan.

So, I’m trying to think how to incorporate robots with a rubber duck. I tried to sketch a few ideas on paper, but could never come up with something I liked. I got a bit frustrated and stuck because drawing rubber ducks with robot bits always ended up sort of creepy.

I decided to quit trying to sketch something with my sad drawing skills and have a look at the real thing - I went out and bought some rubber ducks in various sizes with different looks.

I experimented on robot looks with a few different ducks and settled on a perky fellow with a sort of snooty, upturned beak. It looked happy and just a bit full of itself. Then I started working on how to combine this cute rubber duck with robot parts.

Aaaand, off to Toys ‘R’ Us for inspiration, robot accessories, and more experimentation.

I think we can all agree that a rubber ducky with articulated robot legs is the stuff of nightmares. It’s wrong on so many levels - the thing looked like it would slaughter us all with a chipper smile on its stupid duck face (though looking at this picture now just reminds me of BB8 driving a pair of AT-ST legs - the duck’s still creepy).

Some more experimentation and a few horrifying missteps later, I settled on using the tracks from this little toy tank I’d found.

I felt like just adding tank tracks to the cheeky duck wasn’t enough and I got to scrounging around the house for otherelements - an antenna and some sort of head gear to make the duck more robot-esque.

I ended up making the little duck a visor out of Sculpey clay and shoving an antenna I got off an ioBloc radio module (another past project I’ll have to write about some day) through a sport cap from a water bottle to make a hat. Funny enough, the short, monopole antenna I used as an accessory for my Robot Duck is also called a rubber duck antenna.

The design clicked and Melissa and I had a great time photographing Robot Ducky at various angles and dramatic lighting schemes.

I felt like we struck a good balance between this very bright, childish toy and the robot elements - futuristic without the creepy.

Being a perfectionist, I was never happy with the quality of the visor - I just couldn’t get the Sculpey clay smooth as I would have liked. Now, I’d no doubt design the visor in SolidWorks and 3D print it to beautiful, form-fitting perfection, but that wasn’t a readily available option in 2008.

Not-entirely-smooth visor aside, Robot Ducky was ready to hit the screen.

Rolling On

Reflexive’s online platform was up and running and fnArcade was a nice side venture for a little while. At the time, I was heading Reflexive’s Self-Funded games division and my salary, as well as the salaries of my five team members, was entirely funded by the revenue from our online games and affiliate hosting fees. Then, after some setbacks with a patent troll and a large contract with a game publisher that fell through, decimating Reflexive’s publisher funded games division, company leadership decided to change tack.

Suddenly, I went from being the smaller division to doubling my team and becoming the focus of the company’s future plans. This seriously affected my ability to give time to my side hustle and I never got to finish creating the Robot Ducky site.

In addition to using Robot Ducky to dog food the Reflexive platform, and make some extra cash in my free time by hosting independent game designers, I wanted to create some sort of side-scrolling platformer type games featuring the Robot Ducky mascot as a character.

However, 12% percent monthly growth in Reflexive’s self funded games division was all consuming and I never found the time to finish designing and coding Robot Ducky.

After Reflexive was sold to Amazon, I was too busy launching myself as an independent game architect for Facebook’s emerging gaming platform to get Robot Ducky up and running. So, that was that - Robot Ducky was put away in my past projects bin.

Robot Ducky Rides Again

Then, a couple of years ago I ran across pictures of Robot Ducky while looking for something in my portfolio and decided it was too cool not to share. So, I had a custom T-shirt made and it’s still one of my favorites. Every once in a while, someone notices and comments. A few days ago someone did and got me thinking about Robot Ducky and how it came to be.

I’ve never talked about it or shared the origins here because I wasn’t sure there’d be much interest in the making of a robot rubber duck. Why would anyone care I was building an affiliate gaming site in 2008 with branding based around a robot ducky?

Then I realized, it’s not really about Robot Ducky or the site that wasn’t (though I still have some regrets there and I’d really like to make a fun Robot Ducky game), it’s about how you approach challenges, find solutions, spark creativity, and, most importantly, keep moving forward.

Trying to draw or design a robot rubber duck was a disaster, and I wasn’t having much luck coming up with a reasonable digital concept either. I was frustrated by my inability to draw a reasonable looking duck - I mean how hard is it? But, drawing on paper really isn’t my gift. I was, momentarily at least, stuck.

So, I headed for a toy store.

I was notorious at my division in Oculus for whipping out X-Acto knives and cardboard to create scale models of machines and parts to see if our concepts worked practically or spatially. It actually baffled me why more people didn’t reach for the crafting materials or raid the supply room to make analog models when they were questioning a design.

It actually took me a good bit of time to construct this silly Robot Duck and get it photo ready - and I could never get the ripples out of that Sculpey visor. The whole thing was sort of analog once I’d gotten all the parts stuck together, but it was a tangible thing I could hold and photograph and it inspired me to keep going and create more things.

Whatever it is you’re working on - you’re not stuck, you just need to find a way to think beyond your own limitations. Get past your perfectionism, get your hands in it, and change your approach.

Get out and go to the toy store, the office supply store, the hardware store, the craft store - spend a couple of hours wandering through the weird combo, mega, all-in-one store - whatever you have nearby - and hold things. Feel the heft and weight of a similar size object. Buy a few parts and cobble some models together. Use unexpected bits and see your whatever-it-is from a new perspective.

Remind yourself of what you know how to do and move forward.

Especially when you feel like you don’t have the skill to create something digitally, you need to get analog. I’ve seen so many renderings and 3D models that just don’t look quite right - the proportions are off, the colors aren’t realistic, or the shading is somehow wrong - so many things can put you right in the middle of the uncanny valley and it can be challenging to figure out exactly what went wrong. An analog model might show you exactly where your digital model has gone sideways.

Constructing an actual, physical thing, using what you scrounge from the junk bin or find on a craft store foray, can get you to where you needed to go. Then you can control the lighting and placement and get a few good pictures to get you back on track.

So, get going, move forward, go and do - you’ve got amazing ideas and cool stuff to make.

Rolling On

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