DragonVale

DragonVale is a theme park style social game, where players look after and breed dragons on their own personal floating islands. From mobile game company Backflip Studios, Dragonvale has become a popular free app on the iphone/ipad platform, with an average customer rating of 4.5 stars (itunes, 2012).

itunes image

Dragonvale is a good example of how a well known attraction like a theme park or visitor centre can be given a fantasy twist.

In the game players are given a floating island where they can build their dragon resort. This strait away sets the scene for a fantasy based game, having a giant floating plateau as the starting point for the game. Each dragon is then based on a theme, from basic elements like fire and water to manmade objects like fireworks and mines. There are even limited editions dragons like the Bone dragon, Leap Year Dragon and Reindeer Dragon. This idea of combining different aspects together, I have found has been a good starting point when creating things for the fantasy genre.

http://www.dragonvalebreed.com/all-dragonvale-visual-breeding-charts/

I have not specifically designed any fantasy creatures as part of my role in the Magicians Nephew project but if I was to do some later, combining elements would be a useful place to start. An audience would suspend their disbelief (see earlier blog post) if you present it to them clearly enough. Take dragonvale for example, we know dragons do not exist but when we play the game we are willing to go along with it and pretend. We know fireworks do exists and in some way we have almost certainly all seen them. In Dragonvale they have combined dragons and fireworks to create a Firework Dragon- yet within the world that they have laid out in the game it is totally believable. In another setting it may not work but combined with all the other elements of the game; floating rocks, other themed dragons, magic, back stories, reasons for being etc it makes sense.

This tells me that to help an audience understand they need not only something for their imaginations to latch onto but also a back story and a convincing reason for why. Why does it look like that? Why does it move like that? How does it? Why? Only when all these are put together can an audience relax, suspend their disbelief, and get involved with the world you are trying to create.

I think Narnia and particularly Charn are good settings to design creatures and plants with symbiotic relationships. Charn’s heavily machine and clockwork based world is perfect for creating machine and organic symbiosis; like dogs with mechanical hearts, dragons with clockwork babies, Whales that fly through the sky like blimps, the possibilities are endless. Unfortunately time has run out for doing this as part of our MA work but maybe as a future project we could work on it.