When I was little and on the Internet in the late 90s/early 00s, I spent my time either being really into Digimon (and fan Digimon) or hunting for adoptables.
I didn't even have a proper site to display them on, I just liked looking for them...and my favourites were the random sort. These were mostly from fan weyr sites for Dragonriders of Pern, which sometimes had pages where you could adopt firelizards (small dragons that come in a handful of preset colours - check the Firelizards project for more details). They either had a button that would randomly pick a colour of firelizard for you, or - my favourite - had a page with eggs that linked to a page with the firelizard on it. (I will admit I always clicked every single egg to find the rares.) A live example can stilll be found at Lantessama Isle! My personal favourites (non-Pern) were the Xir dragons from The Silver Unicorn.
Fast forward some years - I'm now nostalgic for that egg-clicking dragon-hatching experience, but most of the old weyrs don't exist any more and/or have broken links. I'd like to bring that experience back!
I DID make firelizards for corow.net to scratch the itch, but it was more of a simpler proof-of-concept for the main project. Very few Internet weyrs still exist, so I'm...not sure if anyone visiting here now can relate to my experiences...??? So I wanted...want? to make a version of it that can is still enjoyable in the same way.
Or at least, in a similar way. The main thing about it is that the firelizards worked because there was a rarity system - you'd have certain expectations of what there would be in the eggs. If I were to detach from the Pern setting (which I do want to do) I would have nothing else to set up expectations with. I'm still mulling this over, thinking about how to make it relevant. This is mostly lore-related.
In the meantime, I'm pulling all the stops to do some interesting image generation. If I were to update all the images by hand, I would 1. run out of ideas in 2 weeks, 2. forget to update, 3. start avoiding everything forever so image generation is best - it's going to be very hit or miss, but I am trying. More details are on the Image Gen page!