Cross The Road (Remixable)

Inspiration

The idea for Chicken Walk was inspired by the timeless joke, ‘Why did the chicken cross the road?’ with a playful nod to the classic arcade game Frogger. But we wanted more than just a punchline. We reimagined it as a fun, chaotic, and hilarious adventure filled with speeding cars, honking trucks, and outrageous obstacles. By blending humor, action, and strategy, we turned the chaos of road crossings into a fast-paced, laugh-out-loud experience—complete with daring solo challenges and team-based antics like building bridges or stopping traffic. Players can look forward to Egg-straordinary levels. Last November submitted Chicken Walk for Horizon’s Short Loop Mobile competition and to our surprise, it went on to win the Most Technically Impressive award! We decided to turn that award-winning game into a free template designed specifically with beginner creators in mind. We’ve published over 50 games in Horizon Worlds since joining the platform nearly four years ago. It’s been a wonderful (though sometimes challenging) journey. When designing this template, we thought about what we would have loved to use when we first started building. We’re thrilled to share this contribution with the Horizon creator community.

What it does

This isn’t just a copy of our game—it’s a carefully crafted, easy-to-use toolkit that lets you remix, restyle, and make your own side-scrolling chaos without needing to write a single line of code. • Swap and style with ease. Change the environment, redesign the chickens, or restyle the cars and eggs. The core mechanics—like the wobbly chicken walk and the endless stream of traffic—are already built in, so you can focus on creativity. • Organized for beginners. Everything is neatly labeled and grouped: chickens, cars, timers, eggs, even the animated trees. No digging through messy folders. • Simple instructions included. The README is right there, and the variables come with clear, step-by-step directions. You won’t get lost. • Fully functional out of the box. Drop it into your world and you already have a working game—then customize as much or as little as you like.

And if you do know TypeScript? The template includes a “mysterious box” packed with the full game architecture—cleanly structured and ready for you to expand. From player management to session tracking, the systems are there for you to build on.

Whether you’re brand new to Horizon Worlds or just looking for a fun, no-stress way to start, this template makes creating your own side-scroller simple, fast, and fun.

How we built it

The game was built with Blender, Adobe Substance Painter, Procreate, Meta Horizon Desktop Editor, and 100% Typescript code. The use of Typescript with the Camera API was essential for this project. We were excited to take advantage of the Camera API and make the game more dynamic by changing the camera distance with every game level. Typescript is also driving the Mobile UI in this game. Mobile players are exposed to a robust UI which uses chicken icons for remaining lives, as well as several chicken and egg icons for in-game messages. Eagle-eyed players will notice that the mobile UI changes depending on the chicken that the player picked. VR players use a more subtle, unobtrusive HUD, and important game notifications are sent via popups. Our team consisted of: 
 Metacrafters (project lead, art, 3d modeling, texturing)
 voytek.lorenc (Typescript, sound design, character rigging and animation)
 RandomGamesUniverse (game concept, concept for level design, testing)

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge in Chicken Walk was to learn how to bifurcate mechanics based on the player’s device type and how to utilize the Typescript Camera API to bring variety to how the chicken characters appear on the screen. Another challenge had to do with efficiently spawning assets across many game levels. To address this, many level elements such as trees, flowers, eggs and even mountains are reused and spawned when the player arrives at the new level. Instead of hiding this technique, we opted to lean into it and present players with fun animations of the world being build right in front of them.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

It was fun making a Horizon game where the player assumes a form of an animated pixelated chicken. It took a while to get this right. We experimented with various chicken sizes, creative ways to hide the real player avatar legs, and avatar speed. We experimented with character rigging and animating the movement of chicken feet and head. At the end we feel that we managed to create a game where playing as a pixelated chick feels quite organic.

What we learned

Learning the Typescript Camera API was very rewarding. We are looking forward to making more Mobile/VR experiences in Horizon Worlds. We feel much more comfortable building experiences with bifurcated mechanics that appeal to both Mobile and VR players.

What's next for Cross The Road (Remixable)

We have many plans for the future of this game. First of all, we’ll be testing difficulty levels to find the best challenge/fun balance in order to increase time spent and retention. Later we’ll be working on themed and seasonal Levels (whimsical environments like space highways with UFOs or jungle paths with stampeding animals instead of cars and Festive Holidays levels). We’ll make unique Traffic Patterns, Power-Ups (Protective Eggshell: Absorb one hit from a vehicle, etc). Eventually we’d love to release a Build-a-Road Mode where players can design their own chaotic road maps and share them with the friends.

Built With

• desktopeditor
• horizon
• horizonworlds
• typescript