Chicken Impossible

Egg-cellent adventure! Chicken Impossible is a hilarious puzzle-strategy-party game for 1-4 players that’s all about guiding a flock of lovable chickens through a series of wacky, geometric obstacles.

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Inspiration

Inspired by the classic video game Lemmings, Chicken Impossible challenges players to work together to rescue a specified number of chickens in each level. With a limited number of interactive tools at their disposal, players must use their problem-solving skills to alter the landscape and the chickens’ behavior, all while navigating through increasingly complex puzzles.

But don’t worry, it’s not all egg-asperating! With a healthy dose of humor and a lighthearted atmosphere, Chicken Impossible is the perfect game for players ages 10+ who are looking for a fun, social experience. And with cross-platform play, you and 3 friends can team up in VR and mobile to hatch a plan and save the roost together!

No fowl play here*.* Just good old-fashioned teamwork and strategy. So gather your flock and join the clucking chaos!

What it does

Players start at the underground-train-station-turned-secret-operations-base. Here they can…

  • talk to previously rescued chickens
  • get mission briefings
  • strategize a plan for the next level
  • and learn about the lore behind this newfound chicken movement.

When ready, all Players need to do is head to the train platform, which takes them to their next mission! Each mission consists of an increasingly difficult puzzle. The goal is simple:

Using the available tools, get chickens from their floating roost, to the grain-silo evac. Sounds easy, right?

Well, just remember what they told you at base… no chicken left behind.

If you can get them rescued before time runs out, your mission is successful and you can head back to base to prepare for the next round. Fail, and your team will have to start over!

How we built it

The first week of the competition was spent ideating, designing, and learning. Knowing how short of time we were, it was crucial we gather and use materials that we knew worked. And, thankfully, the Meta Horizon Worlds Creator Program offered a number of pre-made tutorial Worlds for us to reference. Each day, we would create sketches, talk through design ideas, and then jump into tutorial lessons and try out tutorial Worlds.

This practice proved useful not just for learning, but also for our game! For example, early versions of the game used sheep instead of chickens. But, when we discovered the new NPCs and accompanying animations, we knew we had to pivot!

The NPC chicken set the tone for the entire project. We wanted to bring a cartoon-like charm to Horizon Worlds, creating a rounded cube design aesthetic influenced by children's toys. We’ve yet to see the drawn outline style in Horizon Worlds and wanted to give it a try despite the complications it added. We worked alone with marker and paper, blender, GIMP, and Substance Painter to build almost every single graphic or object in our world. In the end, we found some ways to make small textures do a lot of heavy lifting.

The narrative grew into an underground chicken rescue set in a colorful, ragtag hub inspired by post-war 60s/70s Eastern European design. There is a deliberate contrast in tone between the base and farm. The farm may be clean and colorful, but maybe it’s not as happy as it looks. The instructional graphics were inspired by Fallout, and WWII poster art. The chickens’ attempts at an “adult” operation feel intentionally crude and playful, with projectors, doodles, and a mission-planning game board.

Meta’s new tools have been transformative, stirring ideas for in-game tools, puzzles, and expansions to the train station base. So far, we’ve designed 3 interactive tools:

… the Cluck Cannon, which attracts chickens by making a rooster call…

… the Feed Flinger, which tricks the chickens into pecking through floor units, which destroys blocks and adds verticality by allowing chickens to fall down to the next grid…

… and, perhaps, silliest of all, the Growth Hormone Injector, which enlarges chickens turning them into needed barriers at the cost of their own movement.

Probably 95% of development was done using the Horizon Worlds Desktop Editor and writing Typescript on Visual Studio Code.

Challenges we ran into

Since puzzles can be designed in all 3 dimensions, we knew we’d need to create a “chicken brain” that felt intuitive, was easy to understand, but still felt slightly unpredictable. After all… these are chickens.

Early work with the built-in Nav Mesh system proved problematic as the baked nav mesh planes were just that… 2-dimensional planes. This meant that if a block of ground was “pecked” away, or unfenced, Chickens would walk over the newly created gap, instead of falling.

In the end, we opted to just use the NPCs for their available animations, and coded a movement system manually. Chickens walk forward, spin randomly at barriers, and stop to peck through the ground when eating.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Working within the constraints of Horizon World’s capacity limitations can be challenging. And, this often results in creators creating high-fidelity, one-time play puzzles. Good escape room puzzles are great examples of this. But, early-on in the competition, our team stumbled upon an idea…

What if we didn’t just make a great puzzle?

What if we made 100 great puzzles?

While this wasn’t realistic given the 1 month time-limit, the question became a tentpole for our team going forward. We no longer wanted to just make a World with one, short, looping puzzle. We were going to create a working platform that allowed us to generate new puzzles in real-time.

Our goal… could we develop a World where a new Puzzle Design could be added every single day?

Armed with this, we designed a looping game design that relied on the re-use of puzzle assets, then rearranged them according to Level Designer’s needs. Want more chickens in a Level? Editors just need to quickly type in a new number in the property field. Want a different environmental layout? Just rearrange the template objects accordingly!

Once the Game’s Architecture was coded, the first puzzle took about 8 hours to Design. And, we’re proud to say that, Level 2 and 3 took less than 30 minutes.

What we learned

  1. Not all guns have to be used as tools for violence.
  2. Not all chickens will be rescued.
  3. The more specific your art style (we opted for cartoon outlines) the more time it takes to build assets.
  4. There are a lot of chicken puns out there for the plucking.

What's next for Chicken Impossible

With just a few more days of development, we would incorporate Level 3, and introduce Players to the second tool mechanic… The Feed Flinger!

The Lobby will have some major upgrades in the near future. This includes the Level Selection Tool, which allows Players to jump back to their favorite puzzle and play it again, without having to iterate through Levels one-by-one. Chicken-themed hats and gear available at the commissary. And, faction-based gameplay would allow players to join teams like the Emerald Eggheads or Crimson Cluckers, contributing to monthly rescue totals and earning rewards.

We can’t wait to introduce the next generation of gamers to the joy of puzzles and strategy.

And we know Chicken Impossible will be the next great puzzle game for those seeking short, fun, non-repetitive puzzles.

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