Saving and sharing dragons (Patreon)

One thing I've been looking into this week is making it possible to share dragons that were made in the dragon creator so that they can be loaded up by someone else, possibly for further modification. At this stage, having a full blown workshop with server hosted files and in-game browser is outside the scope of the initial dragon creator release at least, but I wanted to see if I could make something simpler that still gets the job done. What I came up with is a custom .dragon file type that contains only the information needed for the dragon creator system to reconstruct a specific design, similar to how a human can be constructed from just its DNA.

When saving a dragon in the game, it creates a dragon file for it that one can optionally share by sending it to someone or uploading it somewhere for people to download. You can then drag and drop the file directly into the game to create an identical dragon on your end, which you can then modify or pose as you see fit. The file size is actually very small since it doesn't contain the real dragon (just the "DNA"), so you can even send it over Discord for example. Later on I will also look into having a channel in the Discord server where they can be exchanged!