Announcements

I've been busy getting the last few "nice to have but not crucial" features finished up in preparation of the big open day!

• POLLS. You can now create polls on your polls page (you can find the link under your username) and embed it anywhere with the syntax [poll=ID]. Someone help me come up with a "pollo"/"poll" pun
• Introducing the Bling and Washed Out filters (modelled by my local version of Anchicken):

• Most regular splicers have now been lowered to 150 eggs each! Check them out at the Eggschange.
• You can now buy new nest slots for 1000 -> 2000 -> 3000 -> 4000 eggs (Suggested by @neotheatre, thank you!)
• The USD egg packs are now 300 eggs for $2 and 1500 eggs for $10. After recent changes which make eggs easier to get on the site, I have scaled the egg pack value to make them worth what I feel they are worth.
• Dashboard now shows recent dev tracker items.
• Ownership logs are now available on the respective chickens' profiles! (You can only see it if you're the chicken's owner)

Launch should be going ahead with the 15 September date! This will be based on my time zone, so it could be opening slightly earlier for you. If everyone on the pinglist joins, we're going to fill 50 slots easily 😳 I may have to open more...once I'm sure that the site won't crash under the load!

Thanks for your patience around the site's brief downtime. This evening, I pushed out two pretty major changes: Added achievements, and added live previews of splicer and modulator effects in the "Use" panel (thanks @phytodragon for the suggestion!) Some achievements have been issued based on the current state of each user's coop, and more may be added later.

Quick explainer about the downtime: To make the achievements work, I had to completely rework how filters are stored in the backend (I know, it doesn't sound related, but it is). Migrating the database...did not go the way it did in my dev environment, and I had to fix a few entries in the DB by hand.

It should all run smoothly now; the back-end should structure all future database entries correctly. But if you're noticing anything weird with your chickens' filters (and very importantly, if any of your filters don't reappear in your inventory after you remove them from your chicken), please send a bug report and I will make sure you get the item back.

This change might have introduced new bugs, but it should be the last big thing I do before the open beta launch!

Hi all! So, I feel like we're basically almost there. These past few days, I've really only tweaked the styling and presentation of the website, and I think I'm ready to go into full debug mode. But before that...

We have updated our Terms of Service!

Please read them again, particularly the new sections labelled Content Filtering and Usage Rights. The site's profanity filter has been made stricter, and chicken names are now filtered for partial word matches. I am just keeping in mind the future potential userbase. Thanks for your understanding

ANYWAY...now that we're here...I have made a shareable introductory page for ChickenPet! Whenever the time comes to promo the site, I will be directing people here (if I'm not just pasting its exact text into a post).

Aside from that, some important recent changes:

• Added auto alt text generation for chicken sprites and emotes
• Chicken breeding menu now only shows chickens who are not on cooldown
• Turned off the over-informative error messages now that we will soon be opening the site up beyond the circle of trust.

A huge huge thank you to everyone on the site who's been trying things out and sending in bug reports. You've truly helped make it what it is today! Now I'll be focusing on clicking around and seeing if I can make any bugs happen—if you want to do the same, feel free to do so (if you find anything, send me a tickets/make a post in the bug reports thread/ping me in the server).

I've cleaned the dashboard to only have buttons with "daily relevance". Everything else can be accessed from the nav bar which appears on every page. I'm just testing things out, so if lots of people prefer the old layout, it can be changed back!

Also, behold: new banner

For a brief time yesterday, you could pick up Pullet Pool chicks for eggs. I was testing ways for people to buy chickens without trading in the forum. I quickly realised adding the egg-buy option defeated the intended purpose of the Pullet Pool (helping early players expand their gene pool).

Instead, I've added a marketplace feature—the Farmhouse! Anyone can list their chickens for purchase. Name your price, add an optional message, and see if anyone bites. I'm planning on automatically clearing listings that are >10 days old, but this has not been implemented yet.

Also, check out the brand new Search page. Look up chickens by genes, status, and ownership. Very proud of the layout work on it; it wasn't easy condensing that much info into one form! It's still being worked on, and I might add name search + ability to sort chickens by stats at a later time.

Other than that:

• All Splicers now have thumbnails (satisfying.)
• Pullet pool now regenerates one chick at 1am daily, if there are fewer than 5 currently in the pool
• Tiny Eggspedition changes: Walking onto a tile next to another chicken costs 0 steps. And, you can't walk onto tiles that already have a chicken.
• Some site-wide styling changes.

At this point, the dashboard is starting to feel a bit cluttered to me. Do you also think so? And do you think that any of the buttons could be named better? Let me know in the site discussion forum!

I'm happy to present three features that have been requested a lot:

• You can now add image backgrounds to chicken cards. The upload button can be found on the chicken's profile.
• Dressing room: Now you can preview cosmetic items (filters and accessories) on chickens before buying them. Hopefully this averts some buyer's regret.
• Chick Peek: Preview the offspring possibilities of two chickens before committing to a nest! You can also use it on chickens you don't own, just in case you were thinking of buying one...

Under the hood there have been lots of changes with chicken thumbnail generation, the behaviour should remain the same, so if you notice anything being weird with chickens' images, that's probably because of those changes.

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

(before the announcement proper...heads up that I made a bug where everyone was getting new eggs every 5 minutes...it's been fixed but please keep the eggs as a token of appreciation, lmao)

I've just rolled out email verification! The main reason for this is to ensure you can't make heaps of alts to game the site's daily features. You can still use most features as per normal; the only parts you can't access while unverified are ones where you can gain items (games, dailies, shop, breeding, trade). Any time you try to visit a page that requires verification, you'll get a notice instead. Simply click the "Send verification" button to receive the email. If you don't see it in your inbox, check your spam folder.

Under the hood, I've migrated the mail server to the chicken.pet domain (setting up a mail server from scratch is, uh, not easy!) I'm aiming to make this as seamless as possible. Do let me know if you notice issues with receiving your verification email and thanks for your understanding!

This update adds a couple of features that I've been looking forward to implementing for a while.

Complex gene relations

Chickens can now have chicks whose patterns are not the same as their parents. This is based on real-world recessive genes, co-dominance and incomplete dominance! Love me some fun genetics (there's more detailed info at the linked info page).

As part of inaugurating gene relations, we now have three brand new pattern genes that can be obtained only by breeding: double-lace, half-lace, and neck-speckle.

Accessories

Check out Mum's fine new selection of chicken hats and shoes at the Eggschange! The catalogue will be expanded at a later time.

Dark mode

You can toggle dark and light mode by clicking the sun/moon in the top right corner of the page. I'm still ironing out the dark mode presentation of emotes and icons, so those might change over time.

Lots of recent changes!

• Added chicken search game (thanks to Neotheatre for the idea) and looking to add at least one more game before release. Earn a few egg-xtra eggs every day!
• All profile comments now allow text and emojis. I've implemented a sanitization filter, but the "bad words" list wasn't created by me, so do let me know if it's censoring things overzealously.
• Blocking users should be fully functional now. The blocked/blocking users should appear nonexistent to each other by default. Toggle how users who blocked you appear in your settings.
• New Modulator splicers - change a colour gene once in the chicken's life.
• The ticketing system got spruced up; it now has more features (and hopefully no more bugs).

I feel like the site is getting very close to ready for open beta. Once all core features are in, I'd like to give it a couple of weeks in a stable (not-being-actively-updated) state so that we can catch any remaining bugs. Once I'm sure it's ship-shape...it's time for open beta! Everyone who's currently on the site will get a special reward for helping me out with debugging and to make up for anything you may have lost due to bugs.

Coop sorter - Yes, you can arrange your coop in a custom order now.

Pullet pool - A pool of free chickens that other people released, wow! Pick them up for the price of one chicket (you get one per week) and expand your gene pool. To inaugurate the feature (and as a token of appreciation), everyone has received one free chicket.

Forums Please let me know if you run into any bugs, as it's still in its early stages.

The trade feature is now live! Check it out at Trades.

I've created a dev tracker for planned features. You can vote on the ones that you really want below.