I first spotted Dragontwin and mentioned it here in mid-2024 when I was last rounding up new games to talk about and boy has this one made a lot more progress than I initially expected. Solo dev Sidenius seems to be a powerhouse of dev magic as the weekly updates have consistently rolled in.
Quick summary: Dragontwin is a new upcoming dragon game currently in active development. While it’s technically a dragon riding game as opposed to one where you play only as a dragon, the focus seems to be very much on the dragonflight experience.
The first playable build of the game is due out in the next week or so, according to the most recent announcement post on the game’s Discord server. Of course, this is still a very early WIP, but visually, it’s looking amazing. This first build looks to just be showing off the flight system and will have a basic flying through-rings activity so that there’s at least some sort of objective to complete. Based on the dev’s updates in the Dragontwin Discord channel, it sounds like a full battle system is underway and a single-player campaign is planned.
Access to each early build is planned to roll out based on Patreon subscribers based on tiers. The (too rich for my tastes) $50/month Guardian tier will get you first access, with each lower tier receiving builds two weeks after the next higher tier. More info can be found on the Dragontwin website here.
I wish I had the money and time to support every small independent dragon game project that’s currently in the works, but capitalism is a fickle mistress. I’ll most likely slot myself into a lower tier for a bit to try out the first build or two, but otherwise I will probably wait for the full release. Sidenote, the impressive $8,559/month that Sidenius’ Patreon is bringing in at the time of writing shows to me just how hungry fans are for a project as robust-looking as this one.
It’s easy for me to get spun up and excited over how great this project looks. It does seem unusual to me (as someone with no real game development experience) that so much time is being spent on the graphics and visuals at this point, but dev Sidenius seems to be able to crank out what appears, to me, to be an impressive quantity of work in a relatively small timeframe. If it weren’t for the consistent, high quality updates and sneak peeks, I think I’d feel a lot shakier on this project. But compared to other similar small in-work projects that seemed to have mostly stagnated in the time since I’ve initially talked about them, Dragontwin still has me excited.