April Fools event

Happy April Fools Day, everyone! There's an interesting new contraption over in the town square that you might want to investigate...

The April Fools event will run for two weeks. All of the event-exclusive items from the event will be returning every year.

This also means that the March 2025 beta registration window is officially over, but I'm not going to disable signups until end of day on the 2nd, just in case anyone else wants to join at the last minute. The next registration window will probably be in June.

Also, one last announcement: to welcome in all of the new users and get some playtest feedback, there will be a Q&A stream on EpiglottalAxolotl's Twitch channel from 8:00 PM to 12:00 AM Eastern time on thursday, April 17th. Stop by if you have any questions or comments about the site!

Signup bug

It has come to our attention that newly-created accounts were unable to load any pages, which is not quite the experience I was hoping for! The error was caused by a problem with site theme settings: the site has to determine whether users have light mode or dark mode enabled, but newly-created accounts did not have either theme preference recorded, so the scripts crashed when they tried to access that nonexistent setting.

My apologies to all affected users! The bug has now been fixed.

Furniture update & public beta

Today is a momentous occasion for two reasons. First of all: furniture! It's now possible to decorate your pet's room with a wide variety of cute little decorations. Most of these are summoned or can be bought at the general store, but there's a few hidden ones here and there that come from other sources. Every pet room has a ceiling slot, a floor slot, two wall slots, and five shelf slots, and there are over 30 different furniture items available.

And the second reason: public beta! Dopcom Creechers had a private soft-launch in october of 2024, but the site is in a state now where I want to get playtest feedback from a wider audience. So, for all of you coming from Pixel Cat's End or any of the other sites I posted the signup link, welcome in! Dopcom is pretty slow-paced so far, but I have huge plans for it going forward. Be sure to check the getting started guide if you haven't alredy.

Besides furniture, this update comes with a lot of small improvements and quality-of-life fixes. Some of these include:

• Many items didn't have sprites yet. Those have now been drawn!
• There's a dark mode now! It can be toggled using a button in the header on any page.
• The random pet button is now guaranteed to give you a pet you can socialize with if possible.
• The general store now shows item descriptions and has a better UI overall, and the summoning circle now shows how much of each essence is in your inventory.
• Some foods that boost affinities can now grow rarely from normal fruit and vegetable seeds, in order to make it easier to get affinity to certain aspects that had historically been more difficult. These items have also been made tier-4 cooking ingredients, although no recipes use them yet.
• You can now continue feeding pets that are fully-grown to give them affinities, although they won't gain any additional power
• Fluff balls were too weak before, so now they give power on social rather than growth. The previous Lightning Ball item that used to give power on social has been replaced with a new Tuning Fork item that increases the chances of obtaining gleaming essence.
• Passwords can now be changed by clicking "Account Settings" in the header.
• There have also been minor tweaks and rebalances to the growth of certain pets, and various other small quality-of-life changes.

With all of this completed, the next thing to think about is a certain holiday coming up in a couple of weeks...

The other big changes coming up will be:

• Adding direct trades (a feature I've wanted to add but haven't had time for since the site's inception)
• Three new species of pet that can come from summoning
• A Curio Shop in the town square, where you can exchange furniture items
• More cooking recipes

So, thank you to all my alpha testers, and welcome in to all my new beta players!

Economy update, part 1

Hello everyone, and happy new year! I was horribly busy with my classes for most of november and december, but I have a little bit of free time now and I'm hoping that the next couple of updates will happen faster.

This update marks the first step in overhauling the trades system. Previously, it was only possible to sell items in a storeroom, but it's now possible to set up offers to buy and trade them as well. Additionally, to make things easier, items in storerooms now stack! No more having to click the "add item to room" button a hundred times in order to sell all your bricks. I've also cleaned up and reorganized some of the site's navigation. Hopefully this is more convenient and easier to use!

Meanwhile, I've also added a few new items here and there. Summoning can now produce Tea Sets and Beady Eyes, and Beady Eyes can be used to craft Plush Friends and Clarity Charms. The Clarity Charm is an important new item that will allow you to see an estimate of your pet's current affinity levels to all the various aspects, something people have been asking for, and Tea Sets will allow players to get more socials per day. There are a handful of new recipes available at the Town Kitchens as well, although I'll wait and let people figure those out.

So what's next? Well, part of the planned Economy Update involved being able to offer direct trades to another user, with an interface similar to putting items in a room, and this is still in the works! I'd also like to add even more new cooking recipes. But I think that the primary focus of the next big update is going to be adding new species! I don't know exactly how many I want to add, but the plan is that within the next three months there will be new types of eggs that can only be obtained by summoning using specific aspects, and I've already got concepts for a couple new pets I think will work well. And after that, it will be time to start getting ready for April Fools!

Hopefully everything still works after the update, so have fun with it!

End of halloween

Tonight at midnight, the halloween event will be ending. The site will return to its normal color palette and halloween candies will stop appearing everywhere. (Technically, the blue color palette is the normal one, even though at this point the site has had the halloween colors for longer!)

So what's next for Dopcom Creechers? Well, at this point my first priority is to finish up all the art assets that I didn't have time to draw before launch. There's still lots of items represented by that default purple cube or, worse yet, a broken link. There's quite a bit of numerical rebalancing to do as well, to make sure pets aren't growing up too fast or too slow and are producing an appropriate amount of essence when released, and maybe I'll add a few more items here and there.

The next big features I want to work on are adding more flexibility to trading. In addition to setting up sell offers in a room, like what exists now, I want it to be possible to set up a buy offer, where a visitor can put an item into a room in exchange for money; and I also want to implement direct trades between users.

As always, thank you for being here, for helping me playtest this, and for having fun with your creechers!