At the end of last month there was a poll about switching over to a monthly devlog-style update post, and now the time has come for the first one. So without further ado, let's get to it!This month we have continued working on the two current focus areas, the dragon creator and the movement/controlling of the custom dragons:Dragon CreatorThe dragon creator received two updates and reached the end of the tier rollout schedule, with all paid Patreon tiers now having access to it. In these updates we added new neck spikes, jaw spikes, a skin pattern option, fins for the whole body and tail end, skin properties control with options for metallic scales, shinier scales, color blend and more, 5 new head sections replacing the crown to allow assembling unique head decorations, per-feature unique colors, jaw posing, new presets, material improvements, QoL additions and various fixes (another update with fixes to recently reported bugs coming next week).
Behind the scenes there have also been numerous updates to the suite of tools made to support the dragon creator pipeline, as well as work on future additions in the form of new talon-inspired feet/leg options, new jaw fins and parts of a saddle harness.
Dragon MovementThere has been a lot of progress lately on making the custom physics-based dragons fully playable both on the ground and in the air. One major milestone this month was starting development of the ground locomotion, which is a pretty complicated topic because the dragons in Dragontwin are not animated by conventional means. All the motion is dynamically generated in the moment based on a myriad of factors, so rather than for example manually posing each frame of a run cycle, you need to invent algorithms that encode the principles behind the motion so that it can be generated on demand. Here's an early test of a gait generation algorithm with the goal of producing the stepping positions and cadence of quadruped motion based on the creature's body and speed, combined with a kind of spine energy propagation that produces the wave-like spine motion (note: all footage shown is heavily WIP).
Additional progress towards making the motion adapt to the terrain:
Another thing that was worked on this month was improvements to the flight system with the goal of simplifying the control scheme and making it easier to go where you intend, without losing the sense of realism or potential for more advanced flight manoeuvres. While there should be some skill required for difficult ring races or such, we want basic flight to feel intuitive and relatively effortless, which was not really the case in the first EA build. In this clip you see 3 improvements towards this goal:
A different flight model where the dragon follows a simulated target instead of being driven by forces on the wings directly, which makes the flight more controllable and predictable, in turn enabling:
A predicted flight trajectory from the current input (the thin red line). You can see that it only changes when the input (mouse or flapping) changes, which makes it much easier to understand how to control the dragon so that you end up where you want to go. The idea is that this trajectory can be turned on as a flight guide for the player.
Automatic wing alignment based on the desired trajectory. Instead of manually tapping A/D to roll the body over so you can turn, the dragon now automatically figures out how the body and wings should be angled so that it leans into the direction the mouse points. This entire clip uses just the mouse for controlling the flight path and space for flapping. The A/D rolling will still be available so that you can for example spin in place or do other advanced manoeuvres, but you no longer need surgeon-level tapping precision to just turn in flight.