Sidenius

Slight delay in today's build (coming in 2 hours)

Hi!

Due to a sneaky issue we just found in the upcoming build that will be uploaded today, we have decided to postpone the release 2 hours to fix the issue before making it available for download. The build will be available 2 hours from now. Sorry for the inconvenience!

Dragon Creator (part 2)

Around two and a half months ago I wrote a post on the plans for the dragon creator, and this week that plan was set in motion. It has progressed much faster than I anticipated, things just kind of work...

Dragon change

Currently there are two dragons in the game, the placeholder that you fly around with in the early access and the new one that is being worked on for all upcoming dragon features like customization, physics and ground movement. Since the physics-based model works quite differently, a lot of thing...

EA build 1 preview 3 available now!

Hi!

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

In addition to some fixes, the world now features large forests, grass and rocky beaches. These have some impact on performance compared to the previous empty world, so let us know how it runs on y...

Dragon physics

With the switch to the new customizable dragon model, we're also taking the opportunity to explore making the dragon fully physics-based, something that both me and our engineer Georges (currently working on the battle system) have extensive experience with. So what's the difference between that ...

Team expansion

In the past few weeks, Dragontwin has gone from a primarily solo developed project to a real team effort with multiple people putting real hours into it. What has been seen so far in the early access is still mostly things made by me except for the music, but now there is a lot more progress goin...

EA build 1 preview 2 available now!

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

Apart from bug fixes and tweaks, it features a new experience customization menu where you can toggle the rider, change dragon color and dragonfire color, change time of day and adjust the weather.

Furthe...

Upcoming changes in the next version

Next week on Friday 16:00 CET (GMT+1) the first EA build will become available for tier 4 patrons, along with some fixes and additions.

The biggest addition to this version will be a customization menu where you can toggle the rider, change dragon and dragonfire color, adjust time of day, ...

Reflections on the first build

As promised, the first early access build was made available to tier 5 patrons this week! Even though the hours leading up to the launch were very hectic with lots of last minute tweaks and fixes, I managed to get it out at exactly 16:00 CET (UTC+1) on Friday without any major issues. It felt a b...

Early Access Build 1 is now available for tier 5!

The day and hour has come! It is now possible to play the first build for tier 5 supporters. As mentioned in previous posts and on the website, the build is rolled out with 2 week intervals per tier, starting with tier 5.

The first build features free flying in the first region as seen in ...

Update on upcoming build (part 2)

Now it is less than a week until the first early access build drops! As explained on the website and in previous posts, each new build (including the first) is rolled out to patrons biweekly in batches based on ti...

Update on upcoming build

It's now less than 2 weeks until the first early access build can be played and things are generally looking good. As seen in the latest sneak peek, the new landscape has now been added along with most of the music that is planned for this build. The settings menu is still WIP with some options a...

Key bindings

I was recently contacted by someone from France who asked if it will be possible to rebind keys in the upcoming early access build, because apparently they have a non-QWERTY keyboard layout. I wasn't planning on having it in the first build since it takes some time to implement, but this made me ...

Update on the first build

First Patreon update of 2025! This is a good opportunity to go over the progress towards the big thing this month, namely the first early access build. As previously mentioned, the first build is scheduled for end of January. If you haven't already, I highly recommend reading the info page on the...

Multiplayer

As you hopefully know, the plan for the game is to be a single player experience. There are many reasons for this, the most important one being that multiplayer complicates pretty much everything. It is sometimes said that making a game multiplayer triples the development time, ain't nobody got t...

Dragon Creator

One key feature of Dragontwin is being able to create your own dragon. The goal here is to make the best dragon creator in existence, which I'm pretty sure we'll succeed in (to be fair, there isn't a whole lot of competition to begin with). The system itself has been mostly worked out at this poi...

Epic battles

Gliding around peacefully among the clouds is all well and good, but what's the point of having a head mounted flamethrower on a flying oversized lizard if you can't use it to wreak some havoc? That's where the battle system comes to the rescue.

As you may have seen, the goal is to let the ...

Dismounted gameplay

While the main attraction in Dragontwin is the dragon gameplay, it's important to also give some love to the human element of the game and include the option to dismount the dragon and play on foot. However, this also introduces a lot of challenges as the game has to be designed for two different...

Update on the first build

In this week's post, I want to give an update on the progress towards the early access release (a.k.a the first build).

To recap, the initial plan was to have a kind of closed testing build available for tier 3+ patrons released before the end of the year. This would be a very barebones ve...

On playing as a dragon

I've observed that the fanbase for this game is divided into two camps that we can call the dragon survivalists and the Targaryen conquerors. The Targaryen conquerors generally love the current dragon riding concept inspired by GoT/HotD while the dragon survivalists would really rather just play ...

Gameplay & Progression

In this week's post I want to address the question of what you will actually do in the game, or rather what the goal is in terms of gameplay and progression. I've previously listed a bunch of features that I want to add, some inspirations, and the overall genres, but there hasn't really ...

Launcher and Patreon integration

As mentioned in this week's Discord update, I've decided to use a custom launcher to download/update the game and have a Patreon verification from within the game to grant access to it. I'll be talking some more about the implications of it in this post.

The way the launcher works is that ...

Back to the split region world

The original plan for the world was to have it split into many regions, each being its own large open world. Then the player would select and load into the desired region from the world map. The past few months I've been looking into how feasible it is to have everything as a single huge mega-wor...

Alternative build/demo plan

As the time for a first playable build draws near, I've been trying to come up with potential issues that can arise from the way its rolled out. To recap, the current plan since around the end of summer has been to make incomplete/buggy testing builds (referred to as playable builds) available fo...

Update on progress towards first build

As discussed previously, the first playable build is planned to be made available for tier 3+ patrons before the end of the year, under the condition of non-disclosure. A little over a month ago I made a post about what was left to do until it is ready, where the main points were the new landscap...

User Interface

There has barely been any UI in the game so far, just a small dot where the mouse is pointing and a highlighted area when breathing fire on the ground. In some older videos there was also a kind of rotating bar that showed the rotation of the dragon, but I removed it eventually until I had time t...

Alternate camera mode

Here's another example of an alternate camera mode zoomed out to the side for a kind of cinematic viewpoint. You can still control the dragon in all the same ways, but this mode may be more suitable when just flying and chilling.

Camera system

One compliment I often get on Dragontwin videos is that the camera is very immersive, almost like a movie. One guy even refused to believe that it was a game, not because of the animations (which is the usual suspect), but because of the camera. He said that game cameras don't move like that, or ...

Dragontwins Part 2

Last week I presented some preliminary lore around dragontwins, focusing on how they are created and what they look like. This week I'll continue down that path but instead focusing on sine of the effects of the bond. As I said in the first part, these are mainly ideas for now and not necessarily...

Dragontwins Part 1

I haven't talked much about the lore of the game before, mainly because it is still being worked out, but this week I wanted to share some ideas about the most important piece of lore in the game. Since there's a lot to unpack, I will only focus on how Dragontwins are made and what they look like...