Genetics and skins

[visual topaz]

I got my first pearl the other night, and was disappointed that it wasn’t additive to my normal skins. I used to breed snakes, and I think you could add some gameplay to genetics this way.

A creature would have a natural pattern to their scales. Morphs would add to or take away from those patterns allowing you to have a much wider array of possible skin outcomes. In addition, the morphs are different alleles so it’s possible to pass more than one trait on. Pattern morphs and color morphs could be used. Recessive and co-dominant traits.

A snow boa is a combination of an albino and anerythristic which basically removes the blacks and reds. As a young snake they look white, but they yellow up as they age.

A simpler approach would be to just have things like pearls be additive. A melanistic dragon with a given skin would look different, than a leucistic with the same skin.

[errant mural]

The game is currently missing a vast majority of its eventual skins, the skincrafting (via breeding) system, and the varient color and pattern iconics.

The plan is to make skin-patterns and color pallettes seperately inheritable, with skins of lower rarity having a greater dominance to high rarity skins. As well as adding "hybrid" skins (discribed as using a recipe of breeding specific skins together, such as leuc and mela in legacy making overo, or in your example an albino and an anerythristic making a snow)

The exact number of skins and pallettes this system supports has only been mentioned in Patreon exclusive areas, so I cannot comment other then my opinion that the total possible number of combinations is monstrously large should the system be utilized to its full extent.

In legacy, each skin was hand painted by the devs, with skincrafting (update 1.3, current build is 1.2.2) the initial coding set up is more involved, but after that the devs no longer need to hand paint every possible varient for base skins, as they still would need to do for the varients when an equipable pearl has reactions to differing base skins (such as the current gold pearl and the reaction to the backer skins)

The current skins in game are slim pickings, the iconic and the backer skins for each dragon, with a few early released rare skins. The remaining skins are waiting for 1.3 and after. Some more examples and discriptions can be found in #development-news i recomend using the search bar, they are a while back.