Known issues and declined suggestions

Eggs losing their parents at random

• This has been an elusive one; I have yet to figure out why this is happening. 6/11/2024: I've updated the back-end to log eggs better, and will continue monitoring.

404 error when hatching an egg, but the chick has spawned

• This usually happens because you double-clicked the egg (which no longer exists after the first click)—typically on mobile, because the click guard has not been fully tested for mobile yet. Will refine the click guard sometime.

Unusual dragging behaviour on mobile for sortable UIs

• The SortableJS library is far from perfect, and sometimes has issues when you drag items to the edge of a container, or when you’re dragging on a touchscreen (especially on iOS). Currently I am aware that tapping on interactive items inside a draggable element (e.g. a form field or a dropdown) will sometimes cause the item to get dragged instead, and am still fixing them around the site.
• Update: I've been told that some older versions of iOS may not support the same dragging events that are used by SortableJS. See if updating your OS fixes this issue.

Suggestions that are not likely to be implemented

My opinions may change and this may not be accurate indefinitely.

Modulators that let the user select any target colour

• Colours are the only aspect of the chicken that's not easily changed with eggs. Adding the ability to pay to select colours would potentially defeat the point of breeding, and make customising chickens massively easier for those who are able to pay for eggs with USD. Therefore this is not likely to be implemented.

User-uploaded chicken petting sounds:

• This is a huge moderation load as profanity filters and sanitisation cannot be applied automatically. It would be hard to verify that every single custom sound meets the ToS.

New user feed

• A new user feed risks being a privacy intrusion. Users should have a choice as to when they become visible to the site (usually by creating their first chickens). This allows them to update privacy settings and block any users they want to first.

Accessory, filter, and gene suggestion guidelines

I do follow some design principles based on the site design ethos. This is meant to help people suggest new ones that are more likely to be implemented.

General:

• Generally, any cosmetics should not get in the way of seeing important information that helps with identifying that chicken as unique from others. This means I likely won't implement any accessories that cover the whole body or filters that blur or distort the image in a way that makes features hard to distinguish.
• For genes, I generally draw inspiration from real-world chickens. This means that if a suggested feature is seen in real chickens, it's more likely to be implemented, and fantastical ones will not be, although realistic features might be stylised to look better onscreen. (Colours are, of course, the exception to this.)
• For accessories, I strongly favour any design that will look good on as wide a range of chickens as possible with just one image file. For example, anything that interacts with the tail is less likely to be implemented, as it means having to draw different versions for every tail, and anything that sits near the head needs to either fully cover the comb or interact well with all combs.
• Filters must be easily applied equally on every single chicken, and should not differentially affect different traits.
• For filters, Forever 2.1 is the only filter that changes the whole image that I am likely to implement. I cannot do filters that change poses, for similar reasons to the accessory guidelines - they may impact the transferability of existing accessories.