Dev Blog #7

20 Sep 2020Developer post

Source: Steam Community (opens in a new tab)

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

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!