Hi everyone! 💚
We've already walked you through the water dragon and the fire dragon. Today it's the earth dragon — the one who came to us through the widest search of the four. Earth turned out to be an element with a lot of possible answers, so we let ourselves explore several of them properly before choosing.
So this post is a little different. It's mostly a story about the search.
Every dragon starts from his element, and the element usually hands you the silhouette for free. Water gave us soft rounded shapes and fins. Fire gave us sharp crests and a warm palette.
Earth gave us... everything. Stone, soil, roots, moss, mountains, trees. All of it is "earth", and each one pulls the design somewhere different. That's a gift as much as a puzzle: instead of one obvious idea we had several strong ones, so we developed the two most promising properly and let the game itself tell us which one belonged.
The first idea was the most literal one — a creature that looks like a piece of the forest floor got up and walked away. A mossy log for a body, twigs for horns, and a single bright flower on the tail so there's one spot of color to follow with your eye.
We liked him enough to take him all the way into 3D — further than a concept usually travels before it's chosen, because an idea this unusual deserves a real trial rather than a verdict on paper.
Then we textured him and dropped him next to a house and the player character, which is the test every character in the game has to pass.
And that test taught us the most useful thing we learned about this dragon. From the game camera he read as scenery rather than a companion — a log lying in the grass looks like a log (even when it has legs). So we wrote down our first real rule for him: he has to be a creature you notice instantly and want to walk over to. A design we're still fond of, doing the wrong job — and now we knew exactly what the right one looked like.
With that rule in hand we went bigger and stranger: a dragon carrying a whole crown of foliage on his back, like a small tree that decided to go for a walk.
Visually this is still the one we're proudest of drawing, and it handed us the second rule. The foliage sat exactly where the player's eye needs to be — it covered his back, his wings and half of his body language, and a dragon in this game has to be able to show you what he's feeling from across the farm. It also told us something we hadn't thought about: whoever he turned out to be, he needed a clear silhouette and a warm accent color to pop against a farm already full of green.
Two directions in, we had a clear brief and one question left: we'd been designing the material, so what happens if we design the feeling instead?
Earth is the slow one. It's the element that doesn't hurry, doesn't spark, doesn't splash. It's warm, heavy, patient, and everything else in the game grows out of it. The moment we wrote that down, the shape became obvious, and it wasn't a rock or a tree — it was a big, round, sleepy softie. Think of the friend who naps in the sun for an hour and then helps you carry something heavy without being asked.
In game he's described in two words: clumsy but friendly. That's the whole character.
Once we knew who he was, everything the earlier passes had taught us paid off at once. A heavy pear-shaped body and a soft belly, short legs, a wide flat face built around a smile. His back is where his element lives: small stones and little blue blossoms growing straight out of his scales, like a hillside that's been sitting still long enough for things to take root. And the one thing we kept from every earlier version — a bright flower on the tip of his tail.
His face does the rest. Half-lidded eyes, permanent gentle grin, zero urgency about anything.
Next the concept becomes a 3D model, and the main job is keeping the shape readable from the game camera, since you'll mostly see him from above and at a distance. Dragon Shelter is hand-painted 3D, so the textures are painted rather than photo-based — that's what keeps him looking like the concept once he's in the engine.
Animation is where he really became himself. The water dragon moves in long soft arcs, the fire dragon in quick impatient bursts. The earth dragon has a slight delay on everything: he starts a second late, sits down whenever the task is done, and finds a sunny patch faster than any other dragon on the farm. He's also the clumsy one, which gave the animators a lot to work with.
His element makes soil fertile. He turns ordinary beds into rich earth, and crops that refuse to grow anywhere else — crystal carrots, wise mushrooms — finally come up.
Like all our dragons, he also digs, plants, hauls, chops and helps out in the kitchen. But the thing we love most about him isn't any of that. He's a round, soft, good-natured lump who would honestly rather be asleep, and the moment a job is done he lowers himself into the nearest patch of flowers, nudges one with his nose, and settles in with his chin on his paws. You'll stop what you're doing to watch him — we do, every single time.
We hope you enjoyed the look behind the scenes! Tell us in the comments which one you like the most!
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Wild Forest Studio & Curve Games