Sidenius

Dragon creator progress update

Next week I'll be showing the latest progress on the dragon creator, featuring several new customization areas and the long awaited full body morphing, which lets you extend and shrink the neck, torso and tail to pretty extreme proportions while maintaining the same level of quality across all body compositions. I wasn't initially sure how far we could take it, but the latest iteration of the system has turned out incredibly flexible and can support pretty much any type of body in principle. ...

Upcoming tier changes

I've been meaning to rework the Patreon tier rewards for quite some time now to better reflect the current state of the project and what people value the most. The current rewards are largely unchanged from what they were at the very beginning over a year ago, long before the early access was even available. They were made for a different time and a different crowd, so a few slight adjustments are long overdue. Also, thank you to community member Harbinger for inspiring some of these changes!...

Battle system progress bonus

Here's a bonus battle set in a snowy environment with a blue/ice themed dragon instead

Battle system progress

This week you got to see the latest improvements to the battle system with some dragon ground fighting and physics mayhem. Even in this early state it's pretty fun to wade through heaps of units and throw fire at anyone in range, but there's still a lot left to do. The units can't actually attack dragons yet so there isn't much of a challenge even when you are surrounded, and there are no ranged units or anti-dragon weapons to watch out for. You don't have much control as a commander yet eith...

Dragonfire revisited

I recently started working on a new fire effect to replace the current one that you see in the EA, since it was made for flying and large fields but doesn't work as well in tight spaces and close ups. While making the old effect I tested a lot of different methods, one of which was to simulate the fire in real time, which is very rare in games. I couldn't make it look good enough without hogging the entire GPU though so I eventually gave up on that method, but this time around I gave it anoth...

Blood and gore

I sometimes get asked if there will be blood and gore in the game, and if so how much. In this matter, as with almost everything, I aim for what I call cinematic realism, meaning it's directed to look both plausible yet satisfying or visually interesting even if it doesn't necessarily fully match real life. With the recently shown experimental blood effect, I was trying to recreate the very fluidy looking blood seen in GoT/HotD when dragons are wounded by scorpion bolts or other projectiles. ...

Terrain system sneak peek

This week you got to see a bit of the new terrain system, which I started working on during the summer. It has progressed much faster than expected and could pretty much substitute the old region 1 map (the one in the current early access version) already, so it's possible it will be included in the next version. There are still some things left though before it's ready to be played in, including one issue that occurs when you go too far away from the world origin that might take time to solv...

Status update

It has been about a month since the last status update where I discussed the things that are currently being worked on, so let's see what progress has been made in this time. A lot of people have also been asking for more sneak peeks lately, so it's high time to start dropping some bangers. You can expect to see work-in-progress footage of these areas starting next week and continuing for as long as there are things left to show.

Dragon Creator
The main focus has be...

World & lore continued

In this post we'll continue exploring the game world and setting.

As explained previously, the world is laid out with the north pole at the center, and south radiating outwards to the edges. Right at the center is a pole in the magic field, which affects the surrounding area and has given rise to dragons that nest nearby. Similar to the magnetic field, the magic field shoots up from the pole into the stratosphere and then arcs back down near the edges of the world, creating three zones...

World map experiments

This week I came up with a lot of new ideas for the worldbuilding, plot and game design, but I'll be focusing on just one aspect in this post and save the rest for later. This one is about the size and shape of the entire game world, which is something I worked on during the week. It comes with a few images too!

I've previously talked about some of the challenges with having a huge game world and how the new terrain system solves most of the terrain related problems, so now th...

The land of dragons

Here's a small lore drop with some ideas that have been buzzing in my mind. This time it pertains to the two areas I've been focusing on recently - dragons and the world landscape.

I've had this idea that the magical currents of the world form a dipole similar to Earth's magnetic field, which results in concentrated energies at the north and south poles. These powerful magical energies have transformed the landscape and its inhabitants over the eons, resulting in an arctic volcanic env...

No grant

Unfortunately, we did not get the Epic MegaGrant that I applied for around 3 months ago. Since they get a lot of submissions they don't provide individual justifications, so one can only guess as to why this one didn't go through. I think it's either because the project isn't far enough along yet (they prefer to fund in the later stages of development), or because they don't approve of the particular use case for the funding, which was to buy the license for the new physics engine we've been ...

New terrain system

Three weeks ago I wrote about our experiments with having a single huge game world instead of splitting it into multiple regions and some of the challenges with expanding the world size far beyond what is normally possible. Last weekend I had some new ideas for that which I started exploring this week, and the results are very exciting. For some reason I was incredibly productive and made a new breakthrough almost every day, which eventually culminated in a completely new terrain system that ...

Status update

This week I'll just post a small recap of where we're at with the different areas that are currently being worked on:

Physics-based Dragon & Creator
Currently working on the system for creating different body shapes as explained last week, as well as some tools to streamline the creation of dragon creator assets.

World
We're exploring different ways to achieve a single huge seamless world without sacrificing too much quality.

...

Dragon spine editing

One of the things I worked on this week was a new way of handling dragon proportions in the dragon creator, specifically for the length of the three spine segments neck, torso and tail. When it's done, this new system will allow pretty extreme changes without breaking the quality or physics, unlike the previous version which got worse the further you pushed it.

The way it was handled before was pretty simple, the dragons were basically stretched or squeezed to edit the length of the sp...

Revisiting the world landscape

Last year we spent a lot of time exploring how to best create a world that is both large enough to house several kingdoms and world regions at reasonably realistic scale, yet detailed enough to where you can walk around on the ground without everything looking low-poly, and simultaneously not using a terabyte of storage just for the terrain data. Our desired world size was several orders of magnitude larger than the max size for the native landscape system in the game engine, so we had to get...

Draconic powers

I've been thinking about what kind of powers the dragon soul provides for the character and how it ties into the gameplay and progression. The simplest answer would be superhuman stats like strength and agility, but I also want something more iconic and impactful, like how the Dragonborn character in Skyrim can learn dragon shouts for example.

The idea I'm exploring is a kind of unique draconic magic based on dragonfire, where the human part can magically siphon fire from the dragon an...

Dragon saddle

It hasn't been shown yet, but we've been working on a dragon saddle behind the scenes for a while now. The design has changed quite a bit over time but is finally coming together into something that looks cool and makes sense. In terms of inspirations we've borrowed some ideas from the amazing saddle designs in House of the Dragon, while also adding some original additions that you'll see eventually.

One big design dilemma was whether to include reigns or not for steering the dragon. O...

Update on progress towards next version

This week I want to talk about the progress towards the next version of the early access. As explained in previous posts, there are four main big areas being worked on right now (new physics-based dragon, dragon creator, battles and destruction) as well as some additional 3D assets, like the new dragon saddle and armour. Let's go through the four areas.

For the physics-based dragon, the focus so far has been on creating a so called physics-based character controller for it. This is bas...

Armour customisation

While the dragon creator will be the flagship creative feature in the game, customisation in general is something we plan to include for several aspects of the game, including the human character and their armour. The new armour model is now at a stage where we need to consider how this should be done, so I spent part of this week working out the armour customisation system.

There are many aspects to take into consideration, such as making it deep but not too complicated, realistic but...

Dragon customisation and gameplay

Fans sometimes ask if there will be more dragon body types than the two shown so far (sometimes labelled "wyvern" and "western dragon"). We've now made some changes to the dragon creator system that would make it possible to remove the back legs too, which allows for two more body types (front legs / no back legs, and no legs at all). It hasn't yet been fully implemented but it's now supported by the system. The implementation might be pushed for later though to focus on the two body types we...

The Plan™

This week I want to talk about the high-level plan for how we will realize the vision for the game, or at least get as close as we can with the support we can muster. There are basically 3 major phases that the project will go through in terms of funding, team size and the kinds of things worked on. Right now we are still in phase 1 where we are building the unique core features (dragons, battles, destruction, the things shown so far mostly) that require a lot of experimentation and free reig...

Update on the next build

In a previous post, I outlined some plans for the next build and a rough time frame for when we expect to have it ready. In short, the goal was to ship the new physics-based dragon, a few customization options and possibly some simple battles and destruction before summer.

We've now decided to push this until after we have bought (or not bought) the license for the new physics engine we are currently evaluating, for several reasons. First, we are not allowed to actually ship a build th...

One year of progress

It has now been just a little over a year since I started working on Dragontwin. I posted the first videos on various social media platforms last week a year ago. I vividly remember showing them to my brother and his girlfriend over Easter when they were starting to gain traction. It feels a bit surreal to think that it was just a year ago, not knowing the journey that would follow.

This time I have another video to show. It gives a little backstory and presents what we have accomplish...

Changing physics engine

Earlier this week, me and Georges had a meeting with representatives of Havok to discuss licensing their physics engine for Dragontwin. Georges has worked with Havok in the past during his time at Ubisoft since it was used in Assassin's Creed, so he still had a contact there and got us a fast track to evaluation. We're getting access to it next week and have 3 months to test it out before deciding if it's worth it or not.

But wait, don't we already have a physics engine for all the phy...

The next build

Now that the first build can be played by all tiers, there will be a longer period without any updates where we work on everything that will be included in the next build. We'll also work on some more game design aspects, documentation, project organisation and the like to better scope the project timeline and make sure the machinery runs efficiently. Furthermore, we'll be applying for a grant from Epic Games in two weeks and need to prepare the application for that. These non-dev workloads t...

EA build 1 final version available now!

Hello!

The final version of the first early access build is now available for all Patreon tiers!

This version mainly contains some more fixes and improvements to the foliage along with shuffled goats for the goat hunting challenge. This is the last version until the next major build drops, more info on that in the weekly update on Sunday!

The new version can be downloaded on Itch (upgrading from the previous version requires downloading it again too):

2025-03-28 15:05:56 +0000 UTC View Post

Dragon types

Fans sometime ask if there will be other types of dragons than the one with two legs seen so far (often referred to as a "wyvern" but I prefer not to use that distinction because they usually have other characteristics that set them apart from dragons too). Well, now you've seen a version with four legs, so the answer is yes. You can stop with the Wyverntwin jokes now guys!

But that begs the question, will there be even more types? Maybe one with wings but no legs (often called an amph...

Customization options

This is a continuation on the post from last week about dragon customization with more details on what will be possible since I get a lot of questions about that.

Apart from what was shown last week (adding horns/spikes/fins/plates to different areas, changing tail end, head morphing, editing body proportions and customizing colors), this week I've made preparations that will allow for editing the wing membrane attachment so you can have it go all the way out on the tail (for example l...

EA build 1 preview 4 available now!

Hi!

The first early access build preview 4 is now available to tier 2, 3, 4 and 5 patrons!

This version contains mostly bug fixes and reshuffled goats (3 as last time) since we had to revert the foliage improvements that caused random micro stutters when flying. Hopefully we'll include it in the next version, or possibly a hotfix before that since it was meant for this update. The goal for the next update is to iron out any remaining issues and possibly add some more QoL things an...