what's the flight rising art direction post?? I used to play that game
for everyone who doesn't know flight rising is a virtual pet site ala neopets, but with dragons. On its forums I made a thread pointing out that the dragon designs were becoming relatively more "same face" over time, with similar face shapes and often with a similar "noodly" anatomy
my point being that they were both losing some of the charm of a lot of the animals they were based on (with bug, bird, and eel inspired dragons all looking somewhat similar and mammalian), and even more pertinently, not allowing for a wide variety of body types for user characters in the game - with most of the gameplay being a dressup/character creator, you see why having very few buff, chubby, stocky, etc character designs is a pretty big downside.
These are the dragons released in the first half of the website's history, with the shapes outlined:
(these pairs are the same species but have somewhat different body shapes, so they were both outlined)
And these are the dragons released recently. The stockier guy on the bottom left is the very oldest of these:
I also pointed out several of these designs have very similar faces, relative to the facial variety you could have with dragon designs (other two recent guys are outlined above):
In comparison, here's some of the head shapes from earlier dragon designs:
and yeah I think you can see what I mean about the shape language getting a bit more homogeneous. I expressed that I felt like the art team may have observed the popularity of the thinner, doglike dragons in comparison to the chubby reptilian ones and decided to err towards the former.
I also drew some dragons to better get across my point about shape language when people suggested I was failing to account for the fact that the "sameface" dragons weren't entirely identical:
(obviously I'm exaggerating shapes for clarity of point; clarifying here as some people believed I was knocking the art style and wanted it to be more cartoonish...)
I also pointed out that you could easily draw very identifiable fanart of two breeds which people were saying looked different:
(someone told me these didn't read as fanart of either dragon. you be the judge, I guess)
I did get a lot of very nice comments, both in agreement and disagreement, but also some comments that I was being disingenuous, arrogant, or (much more dishearteningly) suggesting that fat designs are simply too unappealing and that the artists can't waste their time on it because the website is a business.
yesterday they released a sneak peak at their newest dragons, which people believe are cetacean inspired. I tuned in as the initial preview that only featured and arm made it look pretty stocky:
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