Throw a Chicken

My son Obi is the Product Manager on this one. He’s seven. The full spec started as his idea, and every design decision — how far a chicken should glide, what the training loop feels like, whether the chickens look eager enough — got run past the person who commissioned it.

The pitch, in his words: train yourself, train your chicken, pick the angle, throw farther. Every chicken is an eager cartoon stunt performer. You lift at the gym to raise your Throwing Skill, you put chickens through a wind tunnel to raise their Flight Skill, you pick a launch angle, and you throw them across the map for distance.

It’s live

Published and playable on Roblox — place version 9 is live, hardened after the first kid playtest (verdict: “great”) with hover and placeholder fixes, and a deploy gate that runs luau-ast after v8 shipped a parse error. There’s a static landing page at throw-a-chicken.pages.dev, deployed to Cloudflare Pages.

All eight build milestones (M1–M8) shipped, plus a four-part enrichment cycle (E1–E4) on top:

• Throw prototype — angle, charge, flight physics, chase camera, distance readout, reset.
• Player gym training — rapid tapping builds Throwing Skill, which lengthens throws.
• Wind-tunnel training — builds the chicken’s Flight Skill; originally rapid tapping, replaced in the enrichment cycle by a flappy-style altitude-zone minigame (keep the chicken in a moving green band).
• A roster of collectible chickens — starter bird Ordinary Dave, then Flapjack, Nugget, Bocky Balboa and Amelia Eggheart, each with its own flight characteristics and sweet-spot launch angle.
• Economy and progression — Cluck Coins, hatchable pets that boost multipliers, and upgrades.
• World 2: Dusty Chicken Canyon — a portal-locked second map (2.5× rewards, canyon walls, a mid-course jump ramp) that unlocks at 15,000 coins.
• Enrichment polish — flight trails that turn gold on a personal best, PB flags on the course, named landmarks, a daily coop challenge, and a sticker book of achievements.

How it’s built

Luau with a proper toolchain rather than editing in-place: source lives in src/ and syncs into Studio via Rojo, so the game is version-controlled like real software. deploy.py builds the .rbxlx place file from that committed source with rojo build and publishes it through Roblox Open Cloud — the place file is a build artifact, not something hand-edited and checked in.

The point of building it with Obi rather than for him is the same principle behind SPARK: a kid who co-owns the thing engages with it completely differently than a kid handed a finished toy. He isn’t a playtester bolted on at the end. He’s the reason each knob exists — and the feel-tuning still waits on his sign-off.