Jan 26, 2021

Day of Dragons - Bad Parrot

Hello again, everyone!

We hope you are all had a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! The first month of 2021 is almost over and we've been hard at work on the Genesis Update. We have some very exciting news to share with you as well as our thoughts on how our first Open Testing Event went.

Open Testing

Screenshot by the Gyldenfyre clan

Overall, our first Open Testing Event was a huge success. Thank you to everyone who came on and helped us figure out how many players our servers can withstand! We were able to reach around 165 players on the server before the lag became a big issue. We then rebooted with 100 player capacities and had zero issues with lag and stability. The servers are much much improved over the alpha servers and with all the new server configs, players will love hosting their own. Going forward, official servers will run at 100 players per instance which is what we recommend for all shared server instances, but the hard cap is set at 200 to allow dedicated private servers with the hardware and bandwidth to run double the normal capacity.

We enjoyed playing with you all and seeing everyone test out the new Acid Spitter model and map. A huge thank you to those who made online media content, such as youtube videos of the event, and to those who have shared their thoughts with us. It was fun and informative to hear everyone's opinions and feedback on the direction the game is going.

The open testing server is currently still available to those who own the Acid Spitter DLC or backed the kickstarter at a tier with Beta Testing. Once the Shadow Scale is in a playable state, the Open Testing Branch will be permanently open to everyone. If all continues to move smoothly, we expect this to happen in the next month or so.

We will continue to work hard and create a beawesome game. Thank you again!

New Animations

Our development staff took a much needed break during the holidays, but we are back to work and are very happy with the speed of development. Karly has been working very hard to bring our dragons to life.

Shadow Scale

idle

The Shadow Scale is now the focus when it comes to animation. As stated above, we hope to have the Shadow Scale in a playable state within the next month so we can permanently open our testing server to the public. Check out some of Shadow Scale's work-in-progress animations below!

Trot

Run

Glide

Flapping

Hover

Acid Spitter

The Acid Spitter is nearly 100% animated! There are just a handful of animations that need to be completed. Once they are, we will begin to polish those animations.

New Mechanics

We are also developing some new mechanics for phase four of closed testing. Once all major bugs have been worked out, they will join the Shadow Scale in the open testing branch.

Custom AI Coding

Some of you may have already spied our first custom AI creature to be joining the world of DoD during the Open Testing Event. Not only will Genesis feature custom AI models and animations, the code will also be custom. Like the nesting seen in Open Testing, Jao is creating an AI creature mechanic from scratch.

We are planning of having at least two AI species ready for the Genesis Update; the Thornbacked Crawler and the Bulbous Spined Scrab.

Thornbacked Crawler

Bulbous Spined Scrab

Crawler Walk

Crawler Idle

We will have more information on the behavior of the individual AI species as their development progresses.

Baby Carry and Struggle

Adult dragon players will now be able to pick up any appropriately sized hatchling even if they are not in their group. However, hatchlings will be able to fight back against unwanted attention or attacks using the struggle mechanic. Struggling will cause the holder to rapidly lose stamina and result in the baby being dropped once the holder's stamina has reached zero. The baby will then have a period of time to escape or without pursuit while the adult regains its stam.

Our DoD Family Grows

We have some exciting news to share with you. Our team is growing once again! We are happy to welcome our new VFX Artist as well as our new Environmental Asset Artist. Check out what each of them has been up to so far.

Custom VFX

Our VFX artist has started working on the Acid Spitter's signature spit attack. She will be making custom bile attacks for all the creatures along with other effect such as blood splatter and more.

Custom Nests

The first task of our Environmental Asset Artist is to create custom nests for the dragons. Each species will have their own unique nests that match their needs and bile type. The Acid Spitter's nest is made from river stones and just big enough to hold their clutch size of five eggs.

Dev Q&A Livestream

Our next Q&A livestream has not yet scheduled. Stay tuned and watch for updates to find out when the next one will be!

From the Community

Each blog post, we pick some of our favorite screenshots and artwork posted by the community to showcase here. Want a chance for your submission to be showcased on our next blog? Post it in the appropriate channels on our discord!

Some of our favorite screenshots from the Open Testing Event...

by Keller1500#3964

by Kezran#0001

by Gilded#2408

by Heidi#6281

by Darkida#0001

Some of our favorite artwork from the community...

by Ztarli#7786

by Jirvey#7996

by ProwlerPaws#1414

by Nihil#0404

by Thaigra#6281

Again, thank you all for your support.

~The Day of Dragons Development Team

Don't want to miss out on updates? Follow us on our social media accounts or become a patron to get updates before they are released!

Discord | Twitter | Youtube | Instagram

Dec 22, 2020

Day of Dragons Genesis Open Stress Test Event

Day of Dragons - Bad Parrot

Hello again everyone!

We hope you are as excited as we are for the upcoming Open Testing event to Stress Test the Genesis Servers. The test branch will be available for everyone to test on Dec 24th to Jan 1st. Before the servers open, we'd like to go over what to expect and what our goals are for the upcoming Stress Test.

But first, if you haven't grabbed your copy of Day of Dragons, now is your chance! Day of Dragons will be on sale during Steam's Winter Sale event from December 22nd to Jan 5th. This will last the entire Open Test and is a great chance to grab your copy and join in the fun.

In this first Open Test of the Genesis update, the Acid Spitter will be the only playable character and will be free for all players to try out. If you enjoy playing him and wish to be able to spawn in as him once Genesis is released, the DLC for the Acid Spitter Drake will be released during the Open Test on sale for only $5.59 USD!
Please note: Players without the DLC will be able to still play as the Acid Spitter in Genesis if nested in by other Spitters.

The Open Stress Test will take place in an early version of the Forgotten Forest. This map is 16x16 and will be a very diverse landscape containing lakes, forests, plains, snowy mountains, caves and more once it is finished. Players are encouraged to explore, but please remember the map is still a work in progress and not near completed.

The version of Genesis you are about to test is not the finished product and still has more work to be done before it is ready for release. Some animations are not yet in place/finalized and not all mechanics will be available to test. The features you will be able to test during this event will include: Clans/Groups, Nesting V1, Basic Survival, Basic Combat (bite), Dynamic Growth, and some others.

Please keep in mind that there will be bugs, some bigger than others. We encourage players to report these bugs at our official discord server in the channels provided. Again, this is an early version of the coming Genesis update and not a final product.

The main focus of this first Open Testing event is to test how many players the servers can handle at one time without having lag issues or crashing. There will be four servers running on the test branch with a capacity of 200 players each and we encourage players to try fill them. This test will help determine what player capacity the servers are set to when Genesis is released.

To join in the Open Test, you will need to switch your game over to the "Beta" branch. To do this, right click on Day of Dragons in your library. Then click "Properties" from the drop-down menu. This will bring up a popup and select the "Betas" tab. Then use the drop-down menu to select the "Beta" branch from the list. Click close and the game will automatically begin updating.

We can't wait to see you on during the Open Test and we hope you all enjoy our creation so far.

Happy testing!

Don't want to miss out on updates? Follow us on our social media accounts or become a patron to get updates before they are released!

Discord | Twitter | Youtube | Instagram

Nov 26, 2020

Day of Dragons Anniversary Livestream/Sale, Open Stress Test, & More!

Day of Dragons - Bad Parrot

Happy Thanksgiving!

We'd like to wish our American supporters a Happy Thanksgiving. We hope you are able to enjoy this holiday of giving thanks with your family & friends. On this Thanksgiving day, we'd like to give thanks for each and every one of you. That said, there will be no dev blog for November, but we still have some important news to share with you!

DoD's 1st Anniversary!

December 4th will be the one year anniversary (our first birthday) for the launch of our Day of Dragons Alpha version on steam. We are extremely thankful to all of our Kickstarter supporters and all the supporters who came after. Genesis is going to be an amazing update and we couldn't have made it without your help.

To celebrate our anniversary, we have some treats in store for you all.

Anniversary Sale

First, we'd like to announce our Anniversary Sale. This is our biggest sale yet. From November 26th (Thanksgiving Day) to December 5th, the game will be 44% off! If you haven't purchased the game yet, this will be a great time to add it to your collection or to pick up a second copy in case you want to nest your own dragons. Purchasing Day of Dragons now not only allows you access to the alpha version before the Genesis update is released, but it also allows you to play DoD Genesis during our upcoming Open Testing phases including our first open test starting on Christmas Eve. Once the Genesis update has been released live, the Alpha version will no longer be playable on Steam.

Anniversary Livestream

To celebrate our Anniversary, we are going to host a Livestream on our YouTube channel to share with you, our community, a sneak peek of what Genesis will be like. Join us to see our new and adorable baby Acid Spitter Animations, check out what we've been working on this month, and ask the developers your questions. We'll also have some Acid Spitter Drake DLC keys to give-away to a few lucky viewers!

The Developer Livestream will begin on December 4th at 4:00pm EST on our YouTube channel. We hope to see you there!

The Steam Awards

Earlier this year, we released the Day of Dragons Original Soundtrack that will be featured in the Genesis update. The soundtrack was beautifully composed by Rey Fernandez Jr. and recorded by the Budapest Scoring Orchestra. It features 15 original tracks that capture the emotions and feeling of the game to come.

We love the music and, if you do too, we would be honored if you would cast your nomination for Best Soundtrack of 2020 to the Day of Dragons Official Soundtrack in the 2020 Steam Awards. To vote for DoD's OST, just go to our store page and click the gold nominate link to help us win! We believe our soundtrack is the best OST of 2020 with its real instruments, emotional highs and lows, and unique score.

The Day of Dragons Official Soundtrack is available on our Steam store page (currently on sale) or can be listened to free on Spotify. A collectors edition CD with concept art booklet is available here on Amazon.

First Genesis Open Test Coming December 24th

We are thrilled to announce the official date of our first Open Testing phase for the Genesis update! Starting on Christmas Eve (Dec 24) and going through New Years (Jan 1), everyone who owns Day of Dragons will be able to download our test branch and play Day of Dragons Genesis on our Official Servers. This is technically a stress test where we see (with your help) just how many players we can get on our servers and still be stable (we're hoping for 200). Each server will have a 200 player capacity and with your help, we hope to fill each one!

During the Open Stress Test, the Acid Spitter Drake will be playable for everyone who owns Day of Dragons to test out and enjoy, even those who do not own the Acid Spitter DLC! If you like the Acid Spitter, you can purchase it on Steam as it will be hitting the Steam store on December 24th for $7.99 $5.59 (-30% OFF during the Open Stress Test week). This will be a great time to pick up your copy of the Acid Spitter DLC at a 30% discount. We know you are going to enjoy it!

The stress test will feature the Acid Spitter Drake along with full server persistence, clans, groups, eating, drinking, nesting, swimming, sounds, and limited combat. Admins will be on and notifying players of any test events or server restarts using the new admin toolsets. It's going to be awesome and we hope you will test it over the Christmas and New Years holidays.

We will have more information about how you can access and download the Open Test Branch later in December.

November 26 - December 5th: Day of Dragons Anniversary Sale event

December 4th @ 4:00pm EST: DoD's 1st Anniversary Livestream on YouTube

December 24th - January 1st: Day of Dragons Genesis Open Stress Test

December 24th - December 31st: Acid Spitter Drake DLC Launch Week Sale Event (30% OFF)

Thank you again for all of your support! It has been a long year and on this Thanksgiving Day, we are extremely thankful for all the support from our community and could not have done any of this without all of you amazing people. So write down these dates and prepare for a BEAWESOME month of December!

This is DoD, and we have DRAGONS!

~The Day of Dragons Development Team

Don't want to miss out on updates? Follow us on our social media accounts or become a patron to get updates before they are released!

Discord | Twitter | Youtube | Instagram

Oct 26, 2020

Dev Blog #8

Day of Dragons - Bad Parrot

BOO!

Welcome to a spooky edition of our Development Blogs (not really spooky). We hope you are enjoying yourselves and are going to have a safe Halloween, whatever that means during this pandemic. We've been hard at work adding new content and continuing to work towards our large "Genesis" update. Check out all the exciting and (not) spooky work we have done this month.

A Roadmap for the Future

Many of you have been asking, so we've updated our roadmap! This amazing roadmap, made by the talented Nicole Steinbacher and edited by our own Lead Dev Jao, shows our plans for the next round of large updates. We plan to add the dragons and creatures we already have concepts for before starting on the rest. We will keep updating this roadmap in our future dev blogs.

Click the thumbnail below to see the full size of the image.

Enter the Elemental

A monster with the taste for dragon flesh, the first Elemental will be entering the world coming in DoD "Genesis". Players will have the chance to unlock these beasts to terrorize the local environment, consuming everything in their path. Only an alpha dragon has any hope against these monsters.

What do you need to do to unlock these beasts? Well.... we aren't going to tell you. It will be up to the community to find out.

Choose Your Faction

Once you have completed the requirements for unlocking it, you will be able to select the Elemental in the Character Select Screen by changing your Faction. Like the dragon species, your Elemental will be saved until you die, even if you switch to another saved creature. Once you die however, you will need to complete the unlocking requirements anew before you can play the Elemental again. Elementals are not just Alpha-class terrors, they also have their own end-game mechanics as well.

Bringing a Monster to Life

Speaking of Elementals, the Magma rig has been finished and is now being animated by Russel Chou, one of our new animators, who is tasked with bringing this creature to life. Russel is no stranger to animating beasts like this and has done so in many AAA movies.

Test Animations

To make sure the rig works before animations start, we had Karly make test animations. These are basic, unpolished animations to get the overall feel of the model's movement capabilities. Above is a fun little video of the Elemental's test walk animation. The true walk animation will be created by Russ.

By the way, did you enjoy the image at the end of the video? Jao made the pose and it was edited by several of our lovely testers. Here is a free copy of the image you can use as a background or such to show your hype for the upcoming update!

Click the thumbnail below to download the full sized image.

Phase 3: Survival and Nesting

We are late into the third phase of our progress for our "Genesis" update! This phase focuses on everything survival related, a core part of the game.

Survival a New Way

We've done hunger and thirst in a new way. The level of hunger and thirst will be shown in your Character Info panel as a red bar, ranging from 0-100%. As the bar increases, you will become hungrier/thirstier. As you consume water and food, these bars will decrease. You don't want these bars to reach 100%

Unlike other survival games, having 100% hunger or thirst does not slowly drain your health until you die. Instead, it will increase your torpor. If your torpor reaches 100%, your character will be forced to fall asleep and getting up before the torpor is drained will cause damage. You have a choice, get up to find food/water and take damage, or sleep your torpor off while remaining vulnerable to hungry predators.

Eating and Drinking

No more are the days of having difficulty eating due to small hit boxes on the corpses. DoD "Genesis" will include prompts to let you know when you are in the right position to eat or drink.

Characters will be able to drink from any water source on the map, but age also plays a factor. While a tiny puddle won't be worth the effort to an adult dragons, hatchlings may find these sources ideal and mothers may even want to choose their nest site near a puddle instead of a pond or river.

Death and Corpses

Instead of a sudden black screen upon death, players will now see a "death screen", where the camera zooms out and shows your body following to the ground. This will allow players to get an idea of what killed them and be a smoother transition.

Players will be able to carry corpses in the game. Corpses now have "ragdoll" effect, making them limp and interactive with the enviroment. The size of the corpse will dictate how fast the player can move while carrying the corpse, if they can carry it at all.

Corpses will also leave a blood stain where they died. So if you are wandering around and see a red stain on the forest floor, be wary; something was likely recently killed here and the killer may still be nearby.

Swimming

While swimming was already included in the alpha version, we have added some to it in the upcoming "Genesis" update.

Players can now dive underneath the water. This will allow them to hide from potential threats, wait for unsuspecting prey, or claim a corpse at the bottom of the ponds. Just make sure to keep an eye on how long you are submerge. Dragons can't hold their breath forever.

Still To Come..

The final addition in Phase Three with be a core feature in the game; nesting. Genetics and nesting play a huge role in the world of DoD and we are excited to make a unique and engaging system for you all to enjoy.

After nesting is completed, Phase Four will begin. Expect to see news regarding this phase in our upcoming Dev Blogs. Lots of new mechanics will be added and we guarantee Phase Four will leave you soaring ;)

Shadow Scale

OKAY!

We know, we know. We keep saying, "This will be Shadow Scale month." It's been a bumpy road getting here, but the Shadow Scale rig is complete! We've also finished the texturing its skin and are excited to watch it come to life.

First Steps

Karly has already made some AMAZING test animations. Like the elemental, these are not the final animations and are just used to test the rig before we send it to our new animator, Keira Kao who will be animating the Shadow Scale. Test animations or not, we think they still look pretty beawesome!

Thoughts of Testers

You know we think the upcoming "Genesis" update is going to be BEAWESOME, but we thought you might like to hear some other opinions as well.

We've asked our Closed Testers to give us their thoughts on what they think of the progress we've made up to Phase 3. Check out what they say and find out for yourself before the release of "Genesis" by applying to become a Closed Tester by filling out this form!

~

Hi, tester here, been playing around for a few weeks in the upcoming Genesis update. So far, the game feels much better, movement glitches out less and I don't get stuck all the time like I used to in the alpha. Picking up corpses and interacting with the world is now much easier (all done with one key!), and seeing Jao push updates and bugfixes every few days (and sometimes hours) is very satisfying and encouraging. I'm really excited about nesting and the way hydration and hunger will work - it'll be more realistic and refreshing, compared to how most survival games do it. It's also amazing to see how much the devs listen to our input and suggestions, and how responsive they are when something needs fixing. I've also had a LOT of debates with testers over these past weeks, and it's been fun to brainstorm how mechanics could be changed or improved. See you all in Genesis!

~

The closed beta is an absolute beacon of hope for Day of Dragons. Every mechanic from the Alpha has been fine-tuned to a much more enjoyable state. Movement feels so much better, picking up the corpses and interacting with food/water is smooth, and the biting and hitbox is incredibly accurate. The clan and new social panels make such a difference as well as compared to the Alpha, your gameplay isn't dominated by worrying about group members and things. Even the little things like interactive foliage make a huge difference. Us testers give both positive and negative feedback as well as bug reports and everyone involved is doing their best to make the game great with very open communication. The streams in discord really don't do it justice-- you'll all have to play it yourself to feel just how much more responsive and user-friendly it all is once testing goes public. I really look forward to it

~

I’m gonna be honest, my faith in this game has not always been the greatest. After the situation when the Kickstarter ended I thought the game would lose its momentum and eventually fade into nothing. Let me tell you right now I was completely dead wrong in thinking this game would ever lose its momentum. The devs are constantly hard at work getting out new stuff for us to test. The game ALREADY feels ten times better than the game you know movement wise and the quality is more than just the streams show. All of the testers here are hard at work finding everything we can, and giving as much feedback as we can when not online bug testing to make this game the best that it can be. From what I’ve seen so far, I’ll say that when genesis hits the live branch you will have a dragon survival game unlike any other I’ve seen.

As always, thank you for reading and for your support. Without our supporters and fans, we never could have done any of this. A special shout out to our beawesome Closed Testers for helping supply images and feedback for this month's blog! We look forward to sharing more behind the scenes details with you in our next dev blog.

Dev Q&A Livestream

Our next Q&A livestream has not yet scheduled. Stay tuned and watch for updates to find out when the next one will be! It will surely blow fans away with all the progress reveals so keep an eye out.

And now for a word from our Lead Developer, Jonathan Slabaugh.

From the Lead Developer

It's that time again, another month has gone by and we've made a lot of progress. Day of Dragons Genesis is getting very close, we're in the final two weeks of Phase 3 closed testing before we move on to Phase 4 where we will be adding in Sound FX, AI, Magma, and the Shadow Scale and other items on our focus list. Then when Phase 4 is done, we will move on to our final phase of closed testing, Phase 5 where closed testers will test v1 of the Mega Map with the Forgotten Forests and Lava Lands biomes. Once Phase 5 is finished, we'll move to Open Testing where all players will have the opportunity to test DoD Genesis 1.0 before it goes live, which it will once it is polished and the Flame Stalker and Inferno Ravager have been added.

Both biomes in Genesis were made by myself using Gaea and the Unreal Engine with Environmental Assets created by Willie Hammes of Mawi United who has been doing fantastic work for over 25 years. The mega map will include caves, spawn locations, explorable areas, and nesting sites. The Shadow Scale, & Acid Spitter will both spawn in the Forgotten Forests, while the Flame Stalker and Inferno Ravager will both spawn in the Lava Lands, home of Magma, the Fire Elemental. The other two biomes will come later in future updates to the game as seen on our new Roadmap.

The Roadmap will give you an idea of what major features to expect in each update. We're confident version 1.0 "Genesis" will release in Q1 2021, with the other updates following just as soon as we can pump them out. We don't know what quarter of 2021 each will release it, only that they will release as soon as they are finished. Other dragons and elementals will come after v1.4 starting with the Bioluminescent Dragon, the Behemoth Ice Drake, the Micro Feathered Dragon, & the Behemoth Fire Dragon along with more AI creatures, the Lightning Elemental, the Ice Elemental, more skins, a Singleplayer feature mode, Localization for some non-English languages, and much, much more!

I have a lot planned for this game and as I said back in Kickstarter, I'll keep updating it and expanding on it as long as you, the fans, keep playing and supporting it. This is the dragon game we've always dreamed of playing, where you get to be the dragon and survive in a dangerous world, make friends and enemies, explore, learn to fight and fly, and even become part of a clan.

This is DoD, and we have DRAGONS.

A special thank you to Parrot for putting this devblog together, our developers because I couldn't do this without you, our closed testers for making the game better, and our beawesome fans for believing in us. As we get closer to Thanksgiving here in the US, I want you all to know that I thank God for each and every one of you. You are BEAWESOME and we will talk to you again in the next Devblog!

From the Community

Some of our favorite recent screenshots...

by |JD| Tt#2554

by Death Wing#1646

by Breezy_Wheezy#0001

Some of our favorite artwork from the community...

by mickeyrose97#3400

by Milo#3392

by Kezran#0001

~The Day of Dragons Development Team

Don't want to miss out on updates? Follow us on our social media accounts or become a patron to get updates before they are released! Tier 3 Patrons will receive the exclusive Red Dragon Skin seen in this Devblog which can be applied to any Dragon at spawn.

Discord | Twitter | Youtube | Instagram | Patreon

Sep 19, 2020

Dev Blog #7

Day of Dragons - Bad Parrot

Hello again!

We've been hard at work on the Genesis update and we are excited to share with you what we've been up to and we have a couple big announcements to make.

Day of Dragon's Official Soundtrack Now Available on Steam!

It's here! The official soundtrack to Day of Dragons is available now on Steam (digital copy) and Amazon (hard copy with concept art booklet).

If you are one of our lovely Kickstarter backers, you can visit our Kickstarter page or official discord for directions on how to get your FREE digital copy of the soundtrack!

A HUGE thank you to Rey Fernández Jr., Norman Ludwin, and the Budapest Scoring Orchestra for their amazing job on making the original and beautiful songs that bring our game to life. We appreciate your hard work and are in awe by the end result.

We hope you enjoy the music which will play in the upcoming Genesis update, planned for late fall this year.

New UI Panels Make Dragon Life Easier

While it might seem like a simple idea, coding the UI takes quite some time and a lot of work is put into making it as user-friendly as possible. We've added some more helpful panels to make the player's life a little easier.

Character Panel

The Character Panel is where you will find all the information about your dragon character and its environment. Here you can edit your skill tree and see the quality of your dragon's bloodline and genetics. Genetics will play a large part in how well adapted your dragon is to surviving in that world of DoD and will determine the quality of your offspring.

Social Panel

Here is where you will manage your interactions with your group, clans, and egg invitations. To prevent being spammed with invites, you can only have one at a time and won't be able to accept another until you've responded to the previous request.

On top of that, you will also be able to appear "offline" to avoid being send any invites at all.

Groups are a temporary grouping system for migrations, hunting parties, and more single session activities. Groups have no leaders and are not persistent, meaning once you log off you will leave the group. There is no player limit for groups.

Clans allow players to form permanent grouping systems that allow you to always see when your friends are on and offline. Clans are created and maintained by a single "Chief" who can promote up to six trusted clan-mates to the title of "Thunder Chief" to help manage the clan. Clans are persistent and, as long as a clan has more than five members, will last even through server restarts.

Clans and groups will be an important part of successfully surviving and growing in DoD, as clan-mates and group-mates can help care for eggs and young hatchlings.

Closed Testing Has Begun

Thank you to all the amazing people who have signed up for our closed testing. We have begun the first phase of testing and will be adding more more testers in waves as needed. If you were not selected for the first wave, don't fret! You may be selected for an upcoming phase in the near future.

Models, Animations and Animators

As we've said before, we started our animation process with the Acid Spitter because it is the simplest model (no extra limbs) to get in the rhythm before jumping into the more complicated models. After some hiccups along the way (like realizing the Acid Spitter was missing a spine), we are very thankful we did.

While the amazing work our animator and modelers are doing is worth the wait, it's been a slower process than we had hoped for. So we have some important news to share with you...

New Animators are Joining the Team!

We are thrilled to announce that TWO more animators are joining our team! Both have done amazing work and we are honored to have them join the DoD Development Team. We'll have them introduce themselves in a future DevBlog. While Karly will still be our main rigger, each animator will have their own creature to animate. We look forward to sharing their work with you in the future.

Shadow Scale Baby and Elemental Model

Check out this cutie! While the colors and pattern is not yet finalized, the baby version of the Shadow Scale is. We can't wait to see these little guys hatching out of their eggs and causing all kinds of mischief when Genesis goes live!

Now that the Shadow Scale model is being rigged, Jia Hao has begun refining the Elemental model. He is looking quite terrifying. We will keep you updated on the Elemental and Shadow Scale in the DevBlogs to come.

More Acid Spitter Animations

Congratulations to those who received the first DLC keys for the Acid Spitter during the surprise giveaway in celebration of Bad Parrot's birthday on our official discord.

The Spitter is coming to life more and more each day as his list of completed animations continues to grow. Here are some of his new moves.

As always, thank you to all of you who have supported us. Check out our next dev blog for an inside look at the Shadow Scale's progress, IK (inverse kinematics) in the game, NPC Dragons, and more!

A Word From Our Lead Developer

Greetings everyone,

I'm Jonathan Slabaugh, the Lead Developer for Day of Dragons.

I want to personally thank you for checking out our DevBlog! A lot of progress has been made since our last DevBlog. As already mentioned, our Soundtrack was finished and mastered and it turned out great! Everyone who has heard it likes or loves it. Rey and his team did a fantastic job. We've made it available to everyone on Spotify if you want to listen to it for free.

As you all know, we have not updated Day of Dragons: Alpha in over 6 months. That is because we are hard at work preparing for you our next update which we call, "Day of Dragons: Genesis." This is DoD the way it was meant to be. We have rebuilt the game from the ground up, updated the Engine, refactored the server code, and putting all that Kickstarter funding to good use - making the game we all want to play, the game we promised all of our backers. I hear the phrase often, "Where is the game you promised?" The answer to that question is, "We're making it and it takes time to make it right." Games take a lot of time to make, often years go in to developing, which is the beauty of Early Access. With Early Access we can release DoD Genesis 1.0, and then keep updating it with more and more Dragons, features, and content as time goes on before we reach our "Release" state. Then post-release, we continue to add more content in the form of Dragons, creatures, and maps. That is the long term plan anyways. But to get there, we need time and testing. It all begins with DoD Genesis which is actively being tested right now. Seriously, I'm sitting in the server as I type this listening to people test the Genesis update. :D

Speaking of testing, Closed Testing has entered Phase 2 of 5. The testers are doing an amazing job finding and reproducing those bugs. So a special thank you to them. (you all know who you are). The server has been amazingly stable, there were only 3 server crashes, all 3 being in Test Phase 1. Since the crashes were fixed, it has been rock solid stable. This is one of the benefits to having only 1 programmer! ;) Testers have also been providing feedback which has shaped the game in some ways as we are always willing to listen and improve what we've built.

After Phase 5 is completed, we'll begin open testing where anyone who owns the game can download it and hop in to the test server. Open testing will continue until all DoD Genesis content is finished and combat is balanced and then we will push it to live. The ETA on that date is... when it's done.

Regarding the ETA to DoD Genesis. In development, you can set schedules, organize your production charts and workflow, but you can't control how long it takes to get each system or each item done. That is the mystery variable in determining an ETA. I do know that Phase 1 took us about two weeks, Phase 2 is three weeks and counting now. We probably have another week of Phase 2 before we go to Phase 3. There are 5 total closed testing phases before we begin open testing where everything is balance tested before we push it live. Each new test phase will last longer than the previous. Those are the details regarding an ETA which we get asked about a lot, but the honest answer to the question, "When will the DoD Genesis update be out?", is, when it's done.

Some of the things coming in DoD Genesis include,
- Vulkan support
- Linux Client support
- Nesting System
- Genetics System
- Mutation Trees and Mutation Points that enhance your character
- Clan System
- Interactive Foliage
- Animation IK
- Skins
- Alpha Growth System
- Unlockable (through Gameplay) Skins/Creatures
- New UI, Character Panel, Social Panel, Admin Panel, etc.
+ And much more!

We appreciate your patience as we continue to work everyday on this update which was made possible by you, our supporters. Our goal is to make the best Dragon Survival game ever, and we're slowly getting there, one day at a time.

Thank you for your faith in us, your love & support, your well wishes, and your feedback. I look forward to playing with you in Jrakhon, the world of Dragons.

Dev Q&A Livestream

We are currently planning to have another live Q&A in the upcoming months. Keep an eye out for the exact date, coming soon.

From the Community

Some of our favorite recent screenshots...

by Itasa#6682

by Death Wing#1646

by Chonk#6682

Some of our favorite artwork from the community...

by ShiftyRaven(halofan523)#1506

by Horus#9404

by Kass#5988

Thanks for reading!

~The Day of Dragons Development Team

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