The Chicken Office

A 2D multiplayer co-op browser game. Every friend joins the same room as a different chicken type, and the team has to feed and cheer each other through an 8-hour real-time office shift — nobody makes it to clock-out alone.

Play it live View the code

The Chicken Office game screen: four player chickens (Turbo, Zen, Tank, Social) and a red boss chicken in a top-down office, with a shift timer bar across the top

The idea

Some of my closest friends work long office shifts together and I can't be there with them. So I built the next best thing: an office you survive as a team, where the whole point is looking out for each other. It started as a personal learning project — an excuse to really get my hands dirty with Canvas and real-time sync — and turned into something they actually play.

How it plays

One key does everything. Walk up to a coworker, a desk or the wardrobe and a hint tells you what E will do right now.
Help each other. Feeding or cheering a coworker gives +20 health, or +40 to revive someone who has passed out.
Work a desk. Hold E for about 4 seconds for +15 health. Each desk then needs to recharge.
Brain breaks. A quick logic question appears 5 minutes into the shift, then every 20 minutes — answer within 60 seconds for +10 health. All 24 questions are scheduled off the room's shared clock, so every room gets the same question at the same minute.
Passing out. Health at 0 means you're down, and the team has 15 minutes to get you back up before you're out for the shift.
Extras. Emoji reactions float as speech bubbles, there's a room chat with shared history, and a wardrobe of cosmetic outfits.

Chicken types

Each room allows one player per type, so the team naturally ends up mixed.

🐔 Turbo

Runs much faster around the office — but health drops sooner.

🐔 Zen

Health drains much more slowly. Cool under pressure.

🐔 Tank

Can go a long time without help, at the cost of moving slowly.

🐔 Social

Bigger range to help coworkers, and heals a little while helping.

Under the hood

No framework. Plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript, split into small files — constants, utils, render, game state.
HTML5 Canvas draws the office floor, the desks, the boss chicken and every player each frame.
Firebase Realtime Database syncs players, chat and the shift clock across browsers, with anonymous sign-in so there's no login screen.
Forward-compatible saves. Every player is just a JSON object; a migratePlayer() step fills in missing fields with defaults as records load, so adding a new stat never breaks older saves.
Safe rendering. Player names go into the roster through textContent, never innerHTML, and the database rules require auth and validate record shape.

What I took away from it

This was my first time syncing real-time state between strangers' browsers, and the lessons stuck: keep the shared clock as the single source of truth, give every new field a default, and assume any text a player types is hostile until proven otherwise. It also reminded me why I started coding — making something that makes people feel a little less far apart.

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