#Spyro Resources

[nihoneshi]

Spyro Reignited Trilogy :: Freecam Edited Bases (100x100) MASTER-POST

VERSION 1 (of 3)

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LINK INCLUDES 4 ICON EXAMPLE SETS (ALSO POSTED) ICONS FOR ARTISANS: DELBIN, GAVIN, NESTOR & LINDAR PEACE KEEPERS: TITAN, TRONDO, ANDOR, RAGNAR, HALVOR, MAGNUS, MARCO & TODOR MAGIC CRAFTERS: JARVIS, HEXUS & ELDRID

---------------- DOWNLOAD LINK ::

EXAMPLE SETS:

Please Credit @gobulin & Myself (Mun Name: Tex / Blog Name @nihoneshi ) if you use these icons in any way Feel Free to Use/Edit/ etc... Further Editing is encouraged!

[totallyradicalmucky]

Starting a series, I’m making skylander coloring pages. All free to use!!

Trigger Happy Coloring Page and Ghost Roaster Coloring page

[da-floof]

Lindar being slutty

Because he can!

[24karatcherrygold]

Nana Crie'Cai: Warlord of The Fractured

In the chaotic, fractured realm known as The Spaces Between, where time glitches and reality shatters, there emerged a warlord whose war-horn still echoes across the Skylands. Nana Crie’Cai, a towering, muscle-bound powerhouse with a loud, reckless personality and a booming voice, built her fearsome reputation on the battlefield. She led her troops not from the safety of a command tent but in the thick of the fray, her laughter ringing out as she mucked around in the dirt or drank her soldiers under the table. She was as likely to win a battle with her fists as with her strategy, her sheer physical might and blunt charisma earning the loyalty of her shadow-forged army, the Crie’Nai.

Her right-hand, Loris Foe’Dei, was equally formidable but quieter and more calculating. Together, they were an unstoppable force of chaos and destruction. Their relationship focused more on strategy and conflict, but that doesn't stop two idiots fooling around—a dynamic that eventually resulted in their daughter, Little Foal. A surprise to both of them, Little Foal was disregarded by the soldiers and was never truly prioritized by her warlord parents, who were too consumed by their campaigns to offer much in the way of nurturing.

The Conquest of Light and Dark

Nana Crie’Cai believed herself the rightful ruler of both the Spires of Light and Dark, claiming her mastery of their intersection in The Spaces Between as proof of her destiny. With her Crie’Nai at her back, she launched devastating campaigns against both realms, leaving a trail of destruction in her wake. Her armies’ fracture-forged creatures, born from the chaotic energies of The Spaces Between, were unlike anything the Spires had faced before. Nana’s victories seemed inevitable until her enemies did the unthinkable.

The forces of Light and Dark, usually bitterly opposed, formed a fragile alliance under the leadership of Master Strix, Commander White, and the legendary Skylander Council. In a climactic battle, the coalition outmaneuvered Nana and her forces, using enchanted seals forged from both Light and Dark Traptanium to imprison her and her loyalists within The Spaces Between. Loris, ever loyal, shared her fate. Little Foal, still a child, was taken in by the Skylanders to ensure her safety.

Betrayal and Rebellion

The instability of The Spaces Between eventually eroded the seals binding Nana and her forces. Freed once more, Nana and Loris began rebuilding the Crie’Nai, this time with the aim of consolidating their power before resuming their conquest. However, their efforts caught the attention of Kaos, who sought to recruit them for his own schemes. When Kaos demanded their allegiance, Nana laughed in his face, amused by his arrogance. Loris, however, saw an opportunity. She argued that aligning with Kaos could bolster their resources and hasten their return to power.

The disagreement escalated into a bitter conflict, splitting their forces into two factions. Loris and her loyalists joined Kaos, while Nana and her followers were driven from The Spaces Between. Enraged by Loris’s betrayal, Nana stomped across the Skylands, her once-mighty army reduced to a ragged band of warriors.

Spyro's Offer

Nana’s rampage eventually brought her face-to-face with the Skylanders once again. Though their initial encounters were hostile, Spyro saw an opportunity. Weary from years of war, Spyro understood the value of a powerful, if unruly, ally. He offered Nana a deal: the Skylanders would recognize her as the rightful Warden of The Spaces Between, granting her authority over its chaotic energies and ensuring no one else could exploit the realm’s instability. Additionally, Spyro promised to help Nana reclaim her forces and strike back against Loris and Kaos.

There was one condition: Nana had to take responsibility for Little Foal, who'd been raised by the Skylanders. Nana, who had never seen herself as a mother, initially balked at the idea. But the prospect of revenge, combined with the chance to reclaim her fractured legacy, ultimately swayed her. Begrudgingly, she accepted the deal.

Nana’s integration into the Skylanders has been anything but smooth. Loud, brash, and perpetually testing boundaries, she's a nightmare (pun intended) to manage. She drinks too much, fights too often, and treats rules as suggestions at best. Yet her strength and strategic mind constantly prove invaluable in every operation she's involved with. Her interactions with Little Foal are equally chaotic. Nana has no idea how to parent, but hopefully over time, she'll learn to bond with her daughter in her own rough-edged way.

-Gold

Nana was - to date - one of the most difficult designs for me to draw! I suck at drawing horses, so when someone's a half horse... Ugh! It was rough, I couldn't get the fucking legs right for so long!

*long suffering horse-themed sigh*

Anyway, time to gush! Despite the issues, I think they came out perfect! I managed to give her a more bulky build to fit her war-lord backstory. Her mane and coat were fun to mess around with, but I really like the grey and white of her body contrasted with the dark cerulean of her mane and tail.

Her armor was a fascinating blend of cool grey marker and violet pencil. With some extra gold accents thrown in. Their lance is based off of the ones used in jousting, as is the rest of their entire concept.

(Gold told me the lance looks like a dirty traffic cone, I told them to fuck off)

Oh, and the crest was fun to design, I literally just took a black colored pencil and started scratching like I was in kindergarten again, and I love it!

Nana’s status as a Demi-girl is my own personal headcanon, I’m not sure what Gold actually has written for them. But hey, they didn’t stop me!

Btw Nana has a scottish accent, nothing can change my mind on that.

Hope you like her!

With love

-Cherri

[oddygaul]

Zenless Zone Zero

Well, I’ve been playing the shit out of this game, so fair warning, there will be significant brainrot ahead.

Overall, I really dig it. I’m a huge mark for character action games, and well-done life sims tend to suck me in; Zenless Zone Zero is nailing both those aspects pretty damn well. In fact, it’s nailing them well enough that… how do I put this… it starts to slip into the territory of being A Good Game Generally, rather than just a gacha. And while this is a big accomplishment for ZZZ, this also puts it into direct conversation with other full-price games, resulting in its gacha elements causing more friction than Honkai Star Rail’s ever did*.

*I’ll be comparing this to HSR a lot, because I play way too much of both and they’re made by the same developer. I recognize that it is pretty odd and potentially even problematic to A / B compare them when I could be looking at the game through the lens of, you know, Gaming At Large. But hey, that’s why this is a subjective journal and not a holistic review blog! It is what it is.

So, the aesthetic of this game fuckin rules - it’s like, late 90s to early 2000s VHS-core. The main characters run a Blockbuster, for Christ’s sake. Presentation-wise (and systems-wise, and, hell, music-wise), ZZZ is obviously borrowing a lot from the Persona series, but like… great? I’d love it if more things cribbed that style and made it their own, from the confidant hangouts, to the small but comfy explorable areas, to the dynamic menus with edgy character poses. The character design itself is all superb, all the way down to the crowd NPCs - some the shopkeepers here have cooler designs than the main characters of some other games. Even aside from the designs, ZZZ is doing a lot with lighting and color desaturation that really lends it its own unique vibe. They actually have a cohesive artstyle in here! wild.

The presentation of the story is also killer. Sure, a decent chunk of the conversations are just models lip-flapping at each other - although they at least emote and pose a bit here, unlike the Star Rail dialogue scenes with their demure princess waves. In the main story, though, we get not only a heap of fairly lengthy cutscenes, but also this really cool comic panel-style presentation.

I feel like there was a bit of a trend in the PS3/360 era of games to present a game’s story in this comic panel / storyboard style. I understood the motivation: games increasingly demanded a more involved, consistent storytelling approach, rather than the ‘One big rendered cutscene at the beginning and end’ they used to get away with, and the generation’s increased visual fidelity meant that doing even basic, in-engine cutscenes took a lot more resources to make something half-decent. In Spyro the Dragon on PS1 you could get away with a fun little 15-second gag with a barely animated polygonal yeti or whatever; in the PS3 era, you were going up against tryhards like Metal Gear Solid 4. Amidst this landscape, the pitch of having your illustrators pretty up some storyboards and put them in the game sounds like it’d save a lot of work - plus, consoles were finally outputting a high enough resolution that this sort of flat image wouldn’t be compressed to hell.

Thing is, I always kinda hated that approach. In some cases, I think that’s the popular opinion - I fuckin love Bayonetta, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone defend its weird slideshow cutscenes. Even in games where the execution is perfectly fine, though, it rubbed me the wrong way. I think of Infamous - objectively, the art’s solid and fits the tone of the game, and the motion graphics aim to capture some of the dynamism typical cutscenes would provide. Despite all that, it still feels cheap to me - all of the panning, effects, and graphic imagery feel like they’re trying to polish up something that inherently doesn’t fit.

In ZZZ, though, I’m loving every one I come across. It’s obviously still done for efficiency reasons - there’s already a handful of characters that exist only in these panel scenes, saving the team the effort of having to model and rig them. But the freedom this allows for staging and storytelling is huge; the characters are more expressive here than anywhere else in the game, and we’re able to see situations with huge crowds and new locales much more often than would be possible in typical cinematics. And the illustrations are genuinely good, too - full of character, cool poses and creative compositions/angles.

if everything actually had to be modeled, there's no way we would've gotten Legally Blonde Nicole

Plus, the cutscenes are constant, and boy do I love the animation here. It feels so rare nowadays for a high-budget game to do stylized 3D animation of this ilk. Your biggest budget games are all going for the cinematic look, and pushing realism as much as they can - and while I know an immense amount of work and craft goes into animating something like The Last of Us, boy, I just could not care less about something so lacking in flair*. Even bigger properties that use a stylized artstyle these days, like Breath of the Wild, still tend to lean towards fairly naturalistic animation. Zenless Zone Zero’s cutscenes, on the other hand, spin and stretch motherfuckers around like we’re back on the PS2, are filled with forced perspective, and I am absolutely living for it. It’s not even reserved only for bombastic action scenes, either - we get honest to god character acting-focused conversation cutscenes.

*Seriously, take me back to the Naughty Dog that animated Jak & Daxter. Jak’s hero animation is top tier to this day

Of course, the combat animation slaps too; each of the playable agents is absolutely dripping with character. Even characters whose designs initially left me cold won me over once I saw the amount of care put into their movement and combo strings. It’s honestly shocking to me that this is the same studio that made Genshin Impact, a game I dropped after about 2 hours because of how lifeless all the animation felt*. Unique run cycles for every character, actual non-human designs, the flourishes everyone has when stopping mid-combo to snap them back to idle, the absolute synergistic audiovisual bliss of the parry… it’s really impressive stuff from a young team.

*Same studio in name only, totally different team, I know, but still

Mechanically, I have some mixed feelings about the combat as a whole. Zenless Zone Zero is, without a doubt, aiming to present complexity and depth as a team battler - that is to say, it’s more about team synergy, tag combos, and knowing who to use when, rather than soloing as any particular character. Nonetheless, I really would’ve appreciated individual characters having a bit more depth to their movesets; a jump, a launcher, cancels, anything. As outstanding as all the animation work is, there’s some characters that only have a normal attack string on square and one special attack on triangle. Like, sub-Dynasty Warriors level of complexity here. It’s rough.

This is where ZZZ’s gacha nature gets a bit ugly: so far, more complex kits and skill expression are mostly locked behind rarity, which is kind of scummy. In Star Rail, for the most part, 4-star characters are defined as such due to their numbers: they still have mechanics and complexity, they just aren’t tuned as high as the limited characters. Hell, in some cases they have more complexity. Ruan Mei is an almost incomparably stronger unit than Asta, but Ruan Mei’s play pattern is fucking boring: you use skill every three turns when it runs out. Asta, meanwhile, basically has her own risk & reward minigame that demands more thoughtful SP management.

In ZZZ, on the other hand, the lower-rank characters straight up have less going on in their kits. Nicole has like… one tech, sorta. Anby has one single animation cancel to chain her normal into her special quicker. Lucy’s only skill expression is choosing whether to tap special or hold special. Meanwhile, Zhu Yuan, a limited character, has a normal string that bounces between melee and ranged attacks, can be dodge-canceled at any point in the combo to branch into variations of the string, and a hold-normal attack string that’s completely different and has the same branching dodge-cancel tech.

It’s one thing to lock raw damage and meta viability behind a gacha, but locking the characters that are mechanically more interesting to play straight up sucks. If I hadn’t been lucky enough on the standard banner to pull exactly the two characters I find the most mechanically satisfying, I don’t know that I’d still be playing - and this is the point where ZZZ begs comparison to other, non-live service character action games. Sure, it’s probably not fair to compare a random A-rank’s moveset to Devil May Cry V’s iteration of Dante, a feature-creeped nightmare of a kit 3 console generations in the making. But what about Sengoku Basara Sumeragi, my personal character-action GOAT? By all accounts a mid-budget title, yet it offers 40 full characters chock-full of more unique mechanics and animation cancels than you can shake a stick at.

Fuck, can we please get a new Sengoku Basara? Please? I’m desperate out here. I’ll take anything, y’all.

There’s also the inherent issue that plagues every action RPG (usually deftly avoided by the character action genre), which is the delicate balance of player success depending on the numbers vs actual mechanical skill - a balancing act made even more noticeable due to the gacha genre-standard of characters taking weeks of grinding to level up. This is a topic for another day, but suffice to say, a big part of the reason Honkai Star Rail works for me as a very pretty version of Cookie Clicker is because of the Autoplay option. In Zenless Zone Zero, if you’re not willing to grind out the same mob fight for a week or two, you’re gonna hit an endgame roadblock of doing chip damage to a boss you’ve mechanically mastered because you’re underleveled, and boy, that never feels good.

For all those issues stemming from the gacha, I will say, it’s great that the story missions let you use the characters that are actually supposed to be present for those missions, even if you don’t own them. Aside from how nice it is to have an opportunity to put the whole roster through their paces, it goes a long way for actually getting invested in the story. Honkai Star Rail’s storytelling is a hot mess for many reasons, but it’s always particularly jarring rolling up to a sidequest at like, a local theater troupe with a wanted space criminal, the sitting president of a completely different planet, a ten year old child, and a shirtless cyborg cowboy, none of whom have canonically met each other; ZZZ’s approach sidesteps this issue. The proxy angle even provides a pretty valid diegetic explanation for why agents that don’t know each other might be working together.

Now that we’ve sort of meandered back to the story after talking about animation led us on a long detour - the story is surprisingly solid. In particular, I really appreciate how straightforward the writing is. I don’t know if the issue lies with the original text or the localization, but Star Rail’s dialogue, even in simple missions, tends to be incredibly meandering and overstuffed; ZZZ is a lot better about letting all its characters talk like actual humans. It also helps that the plot so far is a lot more grounded, and spends more time focusing on each faction’s group dynamics rather than the overarching plot. These games live and die by their characters, so leaning into those strengths is a smart move.

Zenless Zone Zero is, unfortunately, fully in line with Hoyo’s weird conservative politics - in particular, 1.0 and 1.1 are absolutely stuffed full of copaganda. With how many safety regulation jokes they made at the construction company, I initially hoped they’d lampoon the police faction a bit, or make a commentary on how comically heavily armed New Eridu’s police force are. In a vacuum, Zhu Yuan shouting combat lines like “Stop resisting!” or “Freeze, hands up!” while blasting someone with her gigantic, ‘JUSTICE’-emblazoned rocket launcher shotgun feels like it ought to be satire. Every time we talk to the officers, though, it’s just line after line about their solemn duty to protect the people of the city, how essential and important they are for the community, and so on and so on.

This wholehearted embrace of the world’s current power structure is something Zenless Zone Zero approaches in nearly the exact same way as Star Rail. In both games, your playable character is someone that’s sort of operating outside the law - in Star Rail, as the maverick organization that is the Astral Express, while in ZZZ you work as an illegal proxy. Despite this setup, any time the protagonists come into contact with a governing body, they are no less than thrilled to help them enforce the will of the law.

In Star Rail, you aid the local governments (one of which is an undemocratic monarchy) in committing massive cover-ups to hide their failures from the populace not once but twice. In ZZZ, you aid the police to an obsequious degree - playing along with them to not arouse suspicion is one thing, but helping them organize a fucking community day on Sixth Street? Fuck that. Hell, said community day is even shown to initially be DOA because none of the local residents trust the police - and you best believe we get two full scenes of the MCs changing the resident’s minds, resulting in them spouting shit about “Oh, it was our fault for judging the police too harshly - they really do have our best interests at heart!”

is it tho

There’s an argument to be made that the N.E.P.S. are a little different, given that they exist in a post-apocalyptic world with monsters popping up every day - and ZZZ’s copaganda is certainly a little less flagrant than something like Spider-Man helping the NYPD install civilian surveillance networks in Insomniac’s Spider-Man. And, sure, perhaps this can help excuse why they post fully armored, rifle-wielding soldiers in the Lumina Square DMV, and provides some justification that their existence is more helpful than the real world’s civilian-murdering property guards.

Thing is, though, at every turn you’re hit with dialogue and situations which make it clear that, no, they’re the normal cops. Every other sidequest seems to involve calling the N.E.P.S. in on somebody or helping with an investigation, and for every time we see them handle ethereal activity, there’s two instances of them being called in for petty property theft or something similarly minor - even the playable character has heaps of dialogue choices threatening to call the police on someone*. Much like Star Rail’s reactionary politics were strangely at odds with the ‘blazing a new path’ ideals of the trailblaze, Zenless Zone Zero’s obsession with the police puts a damper on its underground, counterculture aesthetic.

*Including a case where both options threatened this, leaving me without a non-narc dialogue choice.

illustration by Lv01KOKUEN

And finally… I don’t know where to fit this in, so I guess it just goes in its own little section at the end here. Lots of people, myself included, have touched on the Persona inspirations - and they’re certainly significant. One thing I’m surprised I haven’t seen anyone mention as a huge influence is Yasuhiro Nightow’s Kekkai Sensen / Blood Blockade Battlefront. From its sense of style to its worldbuilding, ZZZ damn near feels like fanfic to me. Hell, it’s right in the name - BBB? ZZZ? And this is on top of the dimensional crossover / big city vibe, the retro fashion, the different factions. Victoria Housekeeping might as well be Libra 2.0 - Von Lycaon is a damn near perfect 50/50 expy of Klaus and Stephen Starphase. And then Belle / Wise, who assist these powerful fighters in a noncombat role just like Leo, also turn out to have some sort of special magical eyes granted to them by untold powers from within the dimensional rift??

I’m here for it, don’t get me wrong - love Nightow. But that can’t be coincidence, right?

[tigerarainbowra-blog]

Tigera, your art is very beautiful and unique! I always recognise your style when I see it. Do you think you can provide some tips on developing such a unique style? I’ve been trying, but it is a struggle. Thank you, and I understand if you cannot !

Thank you very much!! Yes, somewhat. Ysee the thing is, I never focused on having a "style". I've always just tried to draw things i like as exact as possible. I also often study art I happen to see and I think is amazing is well done, which often makes me test new approaches in my art. I never really understood other artist obsession with "having my own style", you will always draw things that exist or have existed, from the world your brain can perceive and comprehend, or from other fictional works. Nothing is quite new, and that's great! Because it means you can stop stressing about being 100% unique. And perhaps you might come up with a cool concept that people haven't heard of before who knows. But that aint all. I didn't get to my level by just doing that and sitting down, I studied basic principles. These are the building blocks, the base concepts, that you can use to make your art: shapes, volumes, shading, color, composition, values, perspective, etc... If there's a word/concept in there you don't understand, RESEARCH IT RIGHT THE FUCK NOW. Be curious, observe things around you carefully. Pretend you are a fucking scientist in a lab and you have a bunch of cool liquids and you can mix them up with not much consequences, try things!! It's ok if you fail it, you'll be fine!! Also for studying said principles, here are some ressources:

I didn't get the luck of being able to attend an art school, so I'm self taught. We are EXTREMELY LUCKY to have a library of knowledge available to us at any time called the internet, USE IT.

So just have fun, I know social media nowadays makes it hard because of peer pressure and shit, but please, make art because you love making art and because you love whatever it is you are drawing!

TLDR: calm down, it'll come in time. I'm here right now because I kept drawing my pikachu plush when i was 6, and a buncha pokemons and Spyro and shit. You'll be fine! Good luck, have fun, and stay curious! OvO

[merriway]

Do you have any tips for how you developed your style? I want it to be like yours :3

OH my style has been developed over the course of many years through many different inspirations. I dont really have a name for it either per your other ask its more just like a hodge podge of all my favorite things. I can list some of my prominent inspirations for you to look up as well as list some of the things I focus on when arting!

For inspiration I'd have to go back to elementary school and say that my first creative inspo was probably the Nightmare before Christmas. I think that really encouraged a love of weird and whacky shapes in character design. Anime was obviously also a huge inspo and I love a lot of retro anime from the 80s/90s. Ranma, Moomins, Add in some PS1-PS2 era platformer mascots like sonic, spyro, crash, and klonoa. If we're talking video games too i gotta bring up pokemon cause thats been my obsession since the games first came out. From highschool through college I really studied a lot of art from classic disney and I'd say one of my favorite book series is "They drew as they pleased' I think studying that gave me a love for gesture drawing and acting. I think there was the show Wakfu which had a lot of art from Gobi and Bill Otomo and I loved how they pushed shapes in their character design. Takashi Nakamaru is a big inspo for me in how he stylizes and animates. He has such a level of volume and weight that what he animates feels so real but his style feels so cartoony and whimsical. Yuasa Masaaki headed one of my favorite anime, Kaiba. Which had a very stylized toony look but held a lot of darker heart wrenching themes. I really love cute/fun aesthetics mixed with heavier topics. Yoh Yoshinari is another major artist I reference a lot. Hes a major hitter at Trigger and I love the way he has blended both western and anime styles together. Also his extreme poses are so fun. I particularly love his book of sketches he did of Osamu Tezuka characters. Very toony but animated stuff. There is probably a lot more but I would say thats a erally good starting place to know where Im coming from. As for how I approach drawing. I will echo this as long as I live but gesture drawing gesture drawing gesture drawing. I took several life drawing classes in college and my favorite thing was to do short timed drawings of people and animals. There are so many videos for free on youtube about the Line of Action, about how to start gesture drawing as well as so many resources to find models/reference to draw from. Do 5 second gesture drawings where you can only get like three lines on the page, that helps you to focus most on the feeling and energy of a pose. Then 30 sec, 1 min, etc See how people do life drawing too. I really like Heinrich Kley and he was a huge inspo for many of the classic disney artists. You keep practicing that and it'll start to show up in your more stylized work. When you learn how to twist and bend shapes it starts to show in your personal art. For my personal art I tend to have a lot of mood boards, pinterest boards with artists I like and work that inspires me. I sometimes just spend 15min-30min looking at my favorite art, injecting the things I like about them into my brain and getting hyped to draw! Draw all sorts of styles, all sorts of things! Experiment with a variety of styles and eventually you'll start to create your own signature look. And dont be afraid to make a bad drawing!! I made so many! I drew on notes in class, on napkins, on post it notes, you name it. Just doodle and sketch bad things then try to figure out how to fix them through reference and learning. But remember to just stop and think about what you want! For example, what do you like about my art? is it the posing the shapes, the energy? Think about those things. Take a moment to ask yourself questions like 'what am I going for?" "why?" I think having a motivation, a drive, or something similar to that helps you want to draw and not get caught up with social media and trying to compete with your peers. Overall enjoy the journey! You're your own unique person and all your own personal experiences can feed into your work in a way others may not! And good luck with drawing, I hope it stays fun for you!!

[pai-n]

[unofskylanderspages]

Trigger Happy was the first Skylander outside of the original-four to be designed and is one of three Skylanders appearing in Spyro's Adventure's starter-pack. His original design had him spend his gold as an ammunition resource with a secondary ability that would pull coins towards him with the coins acting as projectiles. The psychology of spending your gold resource as ammunition proved to be too negative and would eventually contradict one of Skylander's character design tenets: spammable primary attacks that are fun no matter what. Due to some confusion with the marketing team, Trigger Happy has a french accent in the early commercials. In development, Trigger Happy was first referred to as "the Golden Cheat".

[faeriekougraz]

A Hero’s Tail eggies!

I want my spyro resources for decorating pages so i made transparent gifs of the eggies!

(Sorry theyre choppy lol)

[turqrambles]

Trying to stay out of the tag drama and this poster got some harassment from the post that said this but...

This is just such a wild thing to say about Skylanders, the game where the main conflict is ALWAYS "Oh no! This main villain invaded our villages and started stealing our stuff in a bid for world domination!" Every single villain is very clearly The Oppressor and he is Stealing Resources like cutting down trees because Stealing is Bad.

Even the battlefield level in Spyro's Adventure with the WWI imagery (which hey, super loaded for a kid's game, I get it) was like "hey, we are fighting back against this evil army that has already invaded and polluted other peaceful territories including this one". How can you arrive at "the Skylanders are the oppressors" with even the most uncharitable read.

[starsworn-sanctum]

PINNED POST THING

hi, I'm Caelus or Lusa - i'm some really confused guy who draws things. mostly dragons, knights and silly adds.

Fandoms

Fate Series

Elsword

Fire Emblem: Three Houses

Arthuriana

Wings of Fire

Legend of Spyro

oh also some of my art may contain sensitive subjects, I use it to vent sometimes so uh...yeah

Socials

Toyhouse - Starcatcher

Artfight - SANCTUM

Ask for my Discord if you want it idk

More info (such as tags, dni, etc) under the cut here

dni if you're anti-endogenic or whatever... otherwise basic DNI criteria (pedos/MAPs/noMAPs, racists, lgbtqia+ exclus, terfs, dni) also don't send me targeted overly sexual asks or otherwise harassment-adjacent ones or I'll block you lol. kindly please dont waste either of our times.

Tag List (only listing what's not inherently obvious in regards to fandom stuff)

resources - Things that are helpful.

writing stuff - Cool writing-related things. Not necessarily things that I make.

vega's art & my art - My art tags. The latter is an obvious one but meh.

chapel of ramblings - Venting/personal ramblings tag. Placed here for easy blacklisting if you'd rather not see it - don't worry, it wouldn't offend me.

(Userboxes by @tazmaboxed)

[holographicpiink]

Hey Kelsey! I was curious, since you're a low poly / pixel art wizard, I was curious if you could help me out with something I've been thinking about with my Azumi model. Right now I'm using a simple UV Mapping node to swap between a texture atlas for her expressions. It's simple to set up, but not very dynamic. I'd like to try something a bit more flexible, but the fact that her eyes are just whites against a mask is a bit different than a traditional eye setup. Do you have any ideas on how to make this a bit more flexible while still staying in the ballpark of the PSX look?

aw jeez, i wouldn't call myself a wizard though any stretch of the imagination 😫 but you could always try some techniques that come from games like crash and spyro? especially since your renders end up resolution crunched, it should still fit the aesthetic you want!

i grabbed these from the models resource just to demonstrate-- from crash 1(who looks to be ENTIRELY vertex colors) on the left and crash 2(very visibly has cool new texture eyes and eyebrows) on the right: if i remember without doing a bunch of research offhand, "Crash was animated entirely in-engine via vertex animation" in this twitter thread!

all this to circle the drain around the idea you could replace the white texture eyes against her mask with mesh planes and really not be straying too far away from the idea of PS1 limitations.

PLUS! if you look at things like MMD models, you can shrink some extra pieces inside the head if you decide you'd like little extra over the top comic book emotions; i can't find any good screenshots but if you open MMD models in blender there's a bunch of good examples all driven by shapekeys(you can probably do the same in maya, but i don't know the exact process to open MMDs there)

i also just woke up so like if this makes absolutely 0 sense, lemme know and i can try to make a more visual explanation of what i'm trying to convey!

[supersoftly]

I think gifted is actually a broad description in of itself after reading this and another response along with the thread, it seems depending on what resources were made available to you changed the outcome of your learning strategies and the expectations that came with it. My limited experience was that gifted meant you were thinking outside of the box which meant your education also had to be designed outside of the box. For example, since I was little, I've always had test anxiety (literally had to ask my friend to beat spyro bosses for me because it stressed me out too much), but the gifted program involved a lot of short and long term projects that were self-guided and meant to strengthen your sense of self-management and organization skills, so test taking was certainly a part of your grades, but certainly not the majority.

Your complaints about the heavy workload and expectations remind me a lot of how I felt in highschool when being too ahead meant you were objectively more trouble than you're worth in the eyes of faculty, which is also why I too opted into applied math courses (that I peer tutored) and played pokemon games in with friends cuz it was certainly way more fun than studying more. Unfortunately this led to extensive coasting as long as I made the honour roll as there was no immediate reward for hardwork other than to boost your marks from 85 to 90 (who cares).

I feel like if the gifted program extended into highschool, I would have had different expectations going into college/uni that would've prepared me better, but overall the coasting mentality is what really cost me going forward. I relate a lot to what you've written even if we were raised differently, I failed most of my post-secondary pursuits afterall, but I can't say I regret the educational experience I had while I was in the program, I just honestly wish they extended that curriculum to all levels of learning as I think the One-size-fits-all method is archaic and overall devalues learning for most children.

people misunderstand what ‘gifted kid’ actually means but it’s ok it’s fine it’s cool it’s good

[basickabyl]

This time we head to Gnasty's world where we sabotage his attempts to refine a clean burning and renewable resource.

Spyro is a classic series of action adventure platforming games where you play as a little dragon collecting gems and jumping around. The Reignited Trilogy remasters these games for modern platforms giving us pretty new graphics while keeping true to the fun of the originals. We're still a little dragon and we're still collecting gems.

___

Join our Discord server!: https://discord.gg/ZCuEwuEWX3

New lets play videos daily!: https://www.youtube.com/c/BasicKabyl

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[mossyotherkin]

Dragonkin Resources

For @talon-dragonbeast

Documentaries

∙ Dragon documentary

Gear

∙ Mini dragon hoard diy

∙ Moving dragon tail diy

∙ Dragon scale mail from cans diy (please be careful, it can be sharp, make sure to sand the edges)

∙ Dragon desk mat (Etsy)

∙ Dragon journal (Etsy)

∙ Dragon fidget (Amazon, Etsy)

∙ Dragon skull mask (Amazon)

∙ Dragon wings (Amazon)

∙ Arm dragon wings diy

∙ Dragon Coloring Book

Makers

∙ Dragon Maker Picrew

∙ Wings of Fire Picrew

∙ Dragon Picrew

∙ Bright's Picrew Hell (you can make dragonic humanoids)

Media

∙ Fire and Steel (Steam)

∙ The Wings of Dawn unreleased (Steam)

∙ Spyro Reignited Trilogy (Steam, PS4, Switch, Xbox)

∙ Steam list of dragon games

∙ Skyrim play as dragon mod

∙ Skyrim play as dragon mod 2

∙ The Inheritance Cycle (Amazon, B&N)

∙ Dragon webcomic recs

∙ Wings of Fire (Amazon, B&N, Scholastic)

∙ D&D homebrew dragon race

∙ World of Dragons podcast (Spotify, Google, Apple)

Mythology

∙ Dragons from different cultures

∙ Quetzalcoatl

∙ Bakunawa

∙ Legend of the European Dragon

Other

∙ Dragon diet

∙ Tips on how to eat raw meat safely

∙ More tips on safe raw meat consumption

Theres also a bunch of super helpful comments now so I recommend checking them out! Might add them to the list when I have a bit of time.