How to Raise a Dragon

June 25, 2009 5:18 PM

Preemptive Friday Flash Fun: How to Raise a Dragon, a game by Gregory Weir, where you make decisions about a dragon's development. Nice pixel art style.

I debated putting "game" in quotes in a naive attempt to stave off the argument over whether or not games are art.

posted by mccarty.tim (19 comments total)

Brilliant little thing, very cool tweaking to get different outcomes. Shame there's only three endings though.
posted by litleozy at 5:53 PM on June 25, 2009

There are more endings (if by ending you mean dragon type). Don't know that going through to find all the descriptions is really worthwhile. You can be any of four breaths, live in the town or outside it, and be nice or mean.
posted by a robot made out of meat at 6:24 PM on June 25, 2009

"Tooth And Claw" Proves That Dragons Trump Zombies
posted by homunculus at 6:32 PM on June 25, 2009

Does the color in the hatchling phase determine the breath powers at all, or is it just what you eat in adolescence?
posted by luftmensch at 6:43 PM on June 25, 2009

hatchling is skin color only, adolescence is when you get breath.
posted by Lizc at 6:44 PM on June 25, 2009

"Tooth And Claw" Proves That Dragons Trump Zombies

First, Jo is awesome. Everyone should buy everything Jo writes, in hardcover, because she is good people and an excellent writer and RASFW needs to take over the world before my usenet service gets turned off by AT&T in 3 weeks. (screw you, AT&T).

But "mashup"? She doesn't write mashups. Because TOOTH AND CLAW is no more a mashup than Bujold's A CIVIL CAMPAIGN is a mashup. Or is "mashup" the new "hack" where hipsters call everything that can't be pigeonholed into a single category a mashup?
posted by Justinian at 7:14 PM on June 25, 2009 [1 favorite]

That was fun, but I only tried out two of the kinds of breaths. :-)
posted by garnetgirl at 9:36 PM on June 25, 2009

This was fun, and a neat idea. I only wish it was longer and had some audio options.
posted by Kimothy at 10:08 PM on June 25, 2009

I ate everyone. EVERYONE.
posted by zennie at 10:31 PM on June 25, 2009 [2 favorites]

As an adolescent, does it matter whether you use your breath weapon to finish the stage or simply escape? And what happens if you ingest enough to get two breath weapons?

SPOILER I was really surprised after I was just running through everything with the healing breath turned on, and I resurrected the dead people on the battlefield as zombies. It made my day. SPOILER
posted by TypographicalError at 10:45 PM on June 25, 2009

SPOILER I was really surprised after I was just running through everything with the healing breath turned on, and I resurrected the dead people on the battlefield as zombies. It made my day. SPOILER

And did you notice that when you played as the hero, that all of the non-zombies in that area were now zombies? Funniest part of the whole game.

What's the fourth breath type?
posted by Kimothy at 12:09 AM on June 26, 2009

That's it?! I wanted to rock the world with my dragon & hero combo. Saving the day and killing gods or something.
posted by Submiqent at 3:30 AM on June 26, 2009

The fourth breath type is no breath. Which isn't much of a breath type at all.

litleozy is right: there are only three endings. The hero kills the dragon, the dragon kills the hero, or they both become friends. There are all sorts of different dragons you can make though. Aside from it's color and it's breath abilities, it can have four different titles (guardian, tyrant, watcher, or scourge, depending on where you make its home and how much interaction with humans he's had) and five different behavioral dispositions (fiery, rampaging necromantic, reclusive, wild). There's no way to make some dragons, like a fiery dragon with necromantic breath, by playing the game through, I think, but you can set one to be that way by continuing from the hero portion at the main menu. I think you get the rampaging disposition by eating a bunch of humans but not using any breath powers on them.

Cute game.
posted by painquale at 4:23 AM on June 26, 2009

I wanted a fucking rainbow dragon with sparkle breath.

Is that too fucking much to ask?
posted by schwa at 4:39 AM on June 26, 2009

Or is "mashup" the new "hack" where hipsters call everything that can't be pigeonholed into a single category a mashup?
posted by Justinian at 10:14 PM on June 25

It is this thing you say.
posted by Mister_A at 10:24 AM on June 26, 2009

Ok, I'm at work, so I'm not 100% concentrating on this game, but I've started 3 times now, and I can't get any breath at all. What am I doing wrong?
posted by Ohdemah at 10:47 AM on June 26, 2009

There's actually six dispositions. If you use the plant breath on the fields and not on the houses, you get the Fertile disposition.
posted by kafziel at 10:57 AM on June 26, 2009

Or is "mashup" the new "hack" where hipsters call everything that can't be pigeonholed into a single category a mashup?

Well, there's some truth to that, but to be fair, there's quite a bit of stuff that "mash up" is a pretty solid descriptor for, especially in regards to some of the genre stuff getting written now. "Master and Commander with dragons" or "Pride and Prejudice with zombies" aren't really "think outside the box" examples of genre-bending so much as fairly straight-forward "one from column A, one from column B" ... well, mash-ups.
posted by Amanojaku at 1:14 PM on June 26, 2009

You can click on the different things on the title screen to get different options on how you want your dragon to be, e.g. skin colour, breath type etc.
posted by WalterMitty at 12:09 AM on June 27, 2009