Available online at and developed in 2019 by Julien Gheysens, Yvan Stroppa and the authors of this article at the startup MATHILDE, ChickenPods follows squarely in the footsteps of the hugely popular Agar.io (Matheus Valadares, 2015) and the board game Quoridor (Gigamic, 1997): its rules are simple—a single game is enough to grasp them!—while guaranteeing players plenty of scope to progress.
Each player has six minutes to make their chicken population thrive—and so much the better if it comes at the opponent's expense! In addition to the current 1v1 mode, an AI (a "play against the computer" mode) will soon be available. The main challenge in ChickenPods is that players do not control their chickens' movements, but can only alter their environment (this is known as a god game, or God game) using four powers: building and destroying barriers, adding food (seeds), and sending in a fox to decimate the opposing camp.
Generating random environments
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The game begins with a new environment shared by both players: seed-rich regions that are worth conquering as quickly as possible, and a maze of barriers that block access to them. To keep the game from becoming repetitive and to generate different environments—and therefore different games—the designers use randomness. But controlled randomness! The goal is to produce environments that are "original enough" not to bore players—that is what randomness is for—while still satisfying a set of constraints that make for an "interesting" game. In this sense, ChickenPods is a procedurally generated game.
