Duck Trucks

You're a duck with a truck. Build a pond in the woods, and friends will come.

An iOS game for kids 2 to 8.

In development. Private beta first, then the App Store.

I made Duck Trucks because I wanted a game my own toddler would actually have fun with, and one I wouldn't have to pry out of their hands when it was time to stop.

In the private beta? The playtest guide says what the build is, what feedback helps most, and how to skip to the next day.

$0.99, onceThe whole price.
No adsNot now, not ever.
No in-app purchasesNothing to buy.
Nothing collectedNo accounts, no tracking.
Works offlineNo internet needed.
Designed to endEvery play day ends at sunset.
No notificationsIt never calls your kid back.
No reading requiredPictures and sounds do the work.

What the game is

Your kid is a little duckling with three trucks: a small bulldozer, a dump truck and a digger. Over a few play days they clear a path through the woods, haul rocks, logs and dirt, dig out a basin, and one rainy afternoon the pond fills up. Along the way animal friends move in. A rabbit, a turtle, a frog, a songbird, a beaver, and at the very end a baby duckling.

There's no way to lose. No timers, no fail states, nothing gets taken away. A two year old can ignore every objective and just honk the horn, flatten bushes with the bulldozer, dump rocks into a giant pile and splash in puddles. An eight year old can follow the daily checklist and build the whole pond.

A low-poly yellow dump truck with a small yellow duck sitting in the open cab, on a sage green background — The dump truck and its driver. An early concept before the finished art, but this is the direction.

What it costs

Duck Trucks is $0.99 on the App Store.

Any family with an iPad should be able to play this without worrying about the price. For the same reason we are optimizing the game to run well on older iPads, because a hand-me-down is the iPad most kids get.

Every update is free, and every new hat, paint job and sticker is earned by playing, never bought.

How fast bigger updates come depends on how many families are playing. Buying the game and telling other parents is what funds the next one.

Designed to end

Most kids' games are built to keep a kid playing. Duck Trucks is built to stop. A play day in the game lasts about thirty minutes. As it goes on the light turns golden, the woods quiet down, and the duck yawns, waddles to its nest and goes to sleep. Then the pond rests until the next real calendar day. Open it again that evening and you see the sleeping pond and nothing else. No countdown, no nagging, no reward for coming back.

Nothing is lost when play stops. The game saves constantly, and anything unfinished carries over to tomorrow.

In the grown-ups corner you can set the day to 15, 20, 25 or 30 minutes and turn on a soft chime a few minutes before sunset so the ending isn't a surprise. If you want a hard stop, iOS Screen Time works too.

What your child is learning

The learning is baked into the play. No quiz, no worksheet, no "educational mode".

Counting to 10. Every load is counted out loud as it lands.
Sorting and order. Rocks in the rock bin, logs in the log rack, dirt in the mud pit.
Cause and effect. The pond fills because of what they did.
Calm endings. The day winds down with a sunset and a bedtime.
Working together. The duck hauls and the friends build.
Kindness to animals. A tap is a hello, never a chase.

The grown-ups corner

Hold the "grown-ups" button in the bottom right corner for one second, then answer a simple sum. Behind it: volume, day length, the sunset chime, the learning list, the privacy statement, and an erase button that takes a six-second hold so a small hand can't hit it by accident. There are no links out of the game, not even to this page.

Privacy

Data collection is just weird.

Duck Trucks collects nothing. No accounts, no ads, no purchases, no tracking, and no internet needed. Everything stays on the device.

That's the statement inside the game. The full privacy policy is on its own page, in plain language, and it's the same one I give Apple.