Something is hunting you in the sky now. An eagle stoops on birds that fly too straight for too long, and under the deep jungle canopy the bats come out. My son's first reaction was a shriek, then a hard bank, then a demand for more. That's the reaction I wanted. The hard part was making sure the shriek never turns into tears.
Here's the promise, and I can prove it: a kid who reacts always gets away.
Three seconds of warning, because bodies are slow. From the moment you lean to the moment the parrot's path actually bends is about half a second. Camera, body, bird. So a one-second warning would be undodgeable, a cruel joke. The eagle screams three seconds before impact. That leaves about two and a half seconds of useful turning, which is exactly the kind of turn the recordings show kids already making on their own.
The eagle commits. For the first part of the warning it re-aims at wherever you're heading. Then, a second and a half out, it locks onto a point and flies straight through it, whatever you do. Any turn you start before the lock wins. Its turn radius is wider than the parrot's, so it can't follow you round. And a tuck dive outruns it entirely: the difficulty ceiling is set precisely where the eagle's top speed meets the parrot's dive, so the dive always works.
I didn't tune this by feel. The eagle's brain is separate from its body, so a test can fly thousands of real attacks in a second against a recorded flight. Ignore the warning and the eagle hits about half the time. Bank away the ordinary way and it drops to about a quarter. Turn hard, or dive, and it never connects. Not rarely. Never.
Harder doesn't mean tighter. Difficulty goes up when you dodge and down when you're caught, per kid, so a nervous flyer gets a gentler eagle. But harder only makes it faster, not sharper. A harder eagle flies the same arc, only quicker, so the escape you learned keeps working.
The bats are the opposite. A bat doesn't hurt you; it discombobulates you. Steering reverses, the bird sinks and weaves, and the only cure is to flap. Five flaps clear it, each one a little less dizzy. The first version wore off on its own after three seconds and my son declared it "waaay too easy", so now it doesn't wear off. There's a ten-second ceiling anyway, so a kid who never flaps isn't stuck forever.
Two confessions. One: the day the eagle came out, it attacked seven times in a handful of frames, because after a miss it re-aimed from right on top of you and missed again instantly. The screen said "It is coming round again" four times at once. Now it has to climb well clear before it's allowed back. Two: the eagle is, for now, a parrot painted dark and scaled up, flying the real eagle paths. Nobody has noticed. Please don't tell the kids.