Head morphing (Patreon)

One thing we've been working on this week is the dragon head morphing functionality in the dragon creator. I wanted something more satisfying than simply having a bunch of menus with sliders for each feature like in most character creators, which quickly kills any creative momentum and makes most people not want to spend too much time on it. Instead, the goal is to be able to hover over any part of the head to highlight the area you can modify, and then simply click and drag to shape it as if you were molding clay. This feels a lot more intuitive and lets you quickly sculpt a unique head without having to navigate back and forth through layers of menus.

Another change done in conjunction with this is reshaping the base head to have a more typical draconic appearance. The goal for the base head is to be a kind of unbiased archetype that can then be shaped to create more specific designs, while I felt like the current head design leaned a bit too much into the dinosaur look. It's being changed to a more neutral and recognizably dragon design that serves as a better foundation for subsequent morphing.