On October 16, 2025, Escape from Duckov, a single-player extraction shooter developed by Team Soda under Bilibili, launched on PC. Dubbed “Escape from Tarkov with ducks” by players, it quickly became a breakout hit. In its first week, the game sold more than one million copies worldwide, reached 250,000 concurrent players on Steam, and earned a 94% positive rating.
Set on the fantastical planet of Duckov, the game casts players as a brave duck who must shoot, scavenge, and build to survive a dangerous world and ultimately escape. It combines looting, combat, and construction mechanics, with more than 50 weapons, weapon customization, a skill-tree system, and over 50 hours of main-story content.
As PhD students in the AI & Game research group, we identified a creative bottleneck: although the game includes a character-customization system, most players find it difficult to create an appealing look quickly. We therefore developed an AI-assisted appearance mod that makes it easy for every player to create a distinctive duck character.
Using an AI agent for deep search, we curated dozens of high-quality appearance templates from Bilibili, Heybox, and other platforms. AI-assisted coding then enabled a team member with no prior game-development experience to complete the entire mod in just two days. We named it Better Appearance Preset. It launched on the Steam Workshop at 4:00 p.m. today—give it a try!
