Announcements

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.