Maps, glasses, buyable eggs, and...release plans?!

Hi all, thank you for joining me on chicken.pet's closed beta! It's been a great opportunity to catch major bugs and see how the site runs with a bigger group than myself and 2 alt accounts.

Recent updates

• Glasses and socks. Yeah. You can now make your chickens wear socks and sandals.

• Eggspedition, a map exploration game. Wander around, meet other chickens, and pick up rewards! I just added villages to the map—these tiles feed hungry chickens and cost 0 steps to walk through.
  • I may continue to balance the maps or add new geographical features to make them more interesting and varied, but the focus right now is debugging this (somewhat complex) system.
  • It remains to be seen how well it will hold up with more than 5 concurrent players. I'm always happy to improve it as demands change.
• Pay to win?! This was requested, so I have added a way to buy eggs for real money. I am committed to not locking any site features behind a paywall, so eggs are probably the only purchasable I'll add—the contributions will help me keep the site online. This feature has been tested more than anything else on this site
• Added information pages about time in this game and Eggspedition
• On the back-end, I've moved all privacy/access validation to one central place, so it's now much easier for me to apply blanket rules about who can access what pages on the site. This could be buggy (more likely to be applied too much rather than too little), so if you find yourself unable to access pages that you used to be able to, that is probably a bug—please let me know in a ticket.
• I also overhauled moderation tools. I don't currently have any site mods other than myself, but it doesn't hurt to have the system in place for if I ever need to get other admins onboard.

Roadplan

The major features are almost all done, but before opening to public beta testers, I'd like to spend a couple of weeks focusing on debugging. Once we start opening up to more people, I'll have to remove the detailed error messages, so I'd like to catch all major problems before then. If you run into any big bugs (particularly the kind that pull up the stack trace page with lines of code), please send me a ticket or ping me on the ChickenPet beta testing Discord server (feel free to join this if there's room in your server list)!

I'm aiming for a limited public beta release on 15 September 2024. This will involve opening up 30 more slots (so 40 users in total). I want to do this in stages so that I can catch any server load issues as early as possible, and possibly look at upgrading if needed.

If things aren't feeling ready by then, I have no issues delaying the open beta. Everyone who's currently on the site will get a Beta Tester role, which comes with a special icon beside your name, and some free gifts. Thanks again for joining in on this passion project—it's been a real joy seeing what y'all have done with it