Imagine that you’re dropped onto the Isle of Berk. In the distance, you see a dragon named Toothless, hungry and alone. You feed him some food, pet him, fix his tail. He’s ready to fly. 
This is How To Train Your Dragon brought to life on Roblox, and today we’re spotlighting how it came to be. @GeneralGory at Sawhorse Productions worked closely with a team of modelers and animators, in partnership with Universal Pictures. They coded an entire flight system, recreated dragons out of high-fidelity assets, and built mountains upon mountains of terrain — all in just six weeks. Read on as we take you behind the scenes of this fan-favorite experience.
Bringing Berk to Roblox
When GeneralGory and the team at Sawhorse Productions pitched their game design proposal to Universal Pictures, they hoped their plan for a 6-week development sprint on a beloved franchise would stand out. Brand partnership experiences often take on heightened scrutiny from the pre-established fanbase, so getting it right took tremendous attention to detail. Fans clearly wanted to fly in this game, so that was top priority for GeneralGory and the team. The film also focuses on the emotional bond between Hiccup and Toothless, so the team wanted that to be another highlight of the gameplay. They incorporated common pet game mechanics like including objectives that restore a pet’s status and tasks to maintain the relationship between player and dragon.
Sawhorse won the pitch and the real work began. From day one of this partnership, the client was looking for the highest fidelity Roblox could provide to replicate the look and feel of the live-action film. At the same time, Roblox games have their own identifiers that the veteran developers wanted to stay true to: simplicity being key, quick instructions, and jumping straight into the fun. So how did they balance the asks of the client with their knowledge of Roblox?
A lot of time and effort was put into the first three to four minutes of the game, where a player is introduced to Toothless and then learns how to tame and fly. This introduction event went viral on TikTok , especially for the famous taming scene.There were of course a few non-negotiables the development team had to abide by, like ensuring the dragons weren’t violent or in combat with one another. But as GeneralGory and team continued working with the brand, trust was built and the client let the native Roblox developers lead development with their knowledge and familiarity.
The game loop goes like this: Once you’ve met Toothless, tamed him and learned how to fly, your objective is to defeat islands that are firing at you. After you’ve cleared the camp, you release the dragon. Each island gets harder with more difficult enemies and various dragons to rescue. This is all in preparation for the boss event, that coincided with the release of the film. They designed everything around making sure as many people as possible would get through to the final goal of beating the Red Death boss.
Taking Flight on a Powerful Dragon 
The core tenet of the game is for the player to feel that this powerful dragon they’re flying is responsive and alive. Flying also needed to feel the most frictionless on mobile, without requiring a mouse or tons of keybinds. They tackled the flying first to get the foundation figured out earlier on in development. @Codesense was their sole creator for the entire flight system. For the first couple weeks, he had a t-posing Toothless flying around and experimented with multiple physics restraints to smooth out the mechanics. Once fully built out, the flight system received constant tuning until launch. Codesense’s focus on refactoring and tuning led to great results.
The team played games like Wizard West and War Machines to find effects that would create convincing flight. The whole team also spent hours a day just flying about aimlessly. Codesense eventually split the system into objects to help support the combination of flight, combat and visual effects. He used springs and exponential equations to conserve speed from diving and boosts to simulate a more satisfying flight, rather than a realistic one. Open source modules like CameraShaker and Epoxyish spring were also crucial for this implementation.
Building Island by Island, Dragon by Dragon
The art team was handed high quality, film-optimized models of the dragons made up of at least 600k triangles. While daunting, the artists pored over these models to figure out how to reduce the hundreds of thousands of triangles. The most challenging dragon to bring into this experience was Zippleback because it had two heads. While on the surface two heads doesn’t seem complex, the logistics were anything but easy. Which neck do you sit on? 
Everything required special thought in rigging, animation and programming: flying, fishing, petting, melee, and even UI screens. They even toyed with creating a twin of your avatar to sit on the other neck or riding with a friend. These were the steps in adapting a film dragon into Roblox:
- Reworked the topology and reduced the triangle count from 600K+ to 10k-20k triangles.
- Recreated the texture from hundreds of UDIMs to 2 UDIMs to match the film.
- Rigged the bones for animation, and kept the number of bones as low as possible.
- Animated a comprehensive move set for flight, land movement, and melee.
- Imported the rig and hand to programming to adapt the gameplay controls to the unique dragon. Each dragon has unique qualities, including the amount of legs, or even heads.
The art director @Heart_Hertz was intent on visually creating the heart of Berk, especially all of its unique details. He ensured that all of the artists were on track and up to speed with the scope and technical guidelines of the project from the start to finish. For such a massive environment, with tons of props, optimization was key.
One of the artists @snowmancat1 also had to create a scaffold made out of hundreds of planks. To ultra-optimise, a row of planks was rendered out from a birds eye perspective. This texture could then be used as the top and bottom faces of the model. Double siding these faces gives the illusion of 3D. As for the left and right sides, the end of a singular plank was rendered out and projected onto a singular triangle. These triangles would meet with each plank within the top and bottom textures, giving you a much more performant row of planks.
Bringing the environment and islands to life based on just the trailer was another feat. In one afternoon, their Lead 3D Artist @Cronqueror studied one island from the trailer and discovered it was one of the Faroe Islands. He took a 3D scan of the actual island to replicate it in the game and give it a realistic feel. This was just one of five islands in this Roblox experience: Berk, three neighboring islands with new dragons, and Dragon Island for the Red Death boss battle.
How the Fans Responded and What’s Next
When the game was released, the audience was overwhelmingly 18+ players who loved the original film. GeneralGory wasn’t expecting older fans to find the Roblox activation, and was happily surprised that their enthusiasm proved the team got it right.
The team monitored analytics on who was completing the four main skills: combat, fishing, flying, and bonding. They figured out that people weren’t fishing as often, so they added it as a first quest to encourage more people to try it. As the game grew traction, they followed the analytics and assessed what would bring the best value, especially that first week following the release. Some fans also flooded the group Wall with their love and feedback, which the team read every day – everything from “WE WANT MORE DRAGONS NOW” to technical bugs.
The Sawhorse team is working hard on some exciting new updates: egg collecting and hatching, new dragon skins, and other rarities!
Tips for Entertainment Brand Partnerships on Roblox
-
Test the experience on low-end devices as much as possible. Roblox is a mobile-first platform with a range of devices and global audience. While you and the brand might want to make an experience that’s super high quality, you have to ensure it can run smoothly for the majority of the playerbase. The Sawhorse team tested their experience on mobile devices every Monday to optimize for performance.
-
Identify the most important IP elements. It’s tempting to want to put every niche character and easter egg into a branded experience, but you have to be cognizant of your scope. Think about what will delight fans the most and build with that in mind.
-
As a Roblox creator, it’s your job to guide the brand on all things Roblox. Be firm about what will and won’t work on the platform.
Thank you to @GeneralGory and the team at Sawhorse Productions for chatting with us about their experience! Be sure to follow them for updates on LinkedIn and Instagram.
