Development material
Bits and pieces of in-progress material that I found interesting.
Concept art
Spyro the Dragon concept art by Charles Zembillas on [The Animation Academy] and [Internet Archive]
I love looking at how little Spyro took shape. Plus I appreciate how the Animation Academy's webpage has remained the same since 2002.
Pitch documents
I took the liberty of saving the items in this thread, on the assumption that Twitter will not serve as a perpetual archive.
Click on images for a lightboxed preview, or the text links for the full-sized images.
First and foremost, we've got the initial pitch document for Spyro the Dragon - at this point, the game was a totally different concept, referred to as "DragonSpan". Dig into the document and see what you can find.
- html version of the pdf for readability
- pdf link (hosted here)
- Original Google Drive link to the pdf
Here we see some early art of Spyro. The first is of Craig Stitt's initial design, which would later be dropped in favour of Zembillas' design, seen in the rest of the images. Spyro's original green colour scheme can also be seen here, as well as a colour diagram used for Spyro 2.
I'd love to know how to interpret the colour diagram. Each colour has 4 values, which implies either CMYK or RGB plus an alpha channel. Neither of those seem to produce colours similar to Spyro's.
Here's Spyro's source textures in their original, full quality. Hopefully Twitter's compression won't ruin any of these images, but I'll be uploading all of them to a cloud folder for everyone to download in their original quality, regardless.
Next up we've got a few concept art drawings for some adult dragon designs. Notice that these drawings - as well as Stitt's original Spyro concept - have "1.97" written on them - these drawings were from right at the beginning of development, in January 1997.
And here's a few different Gnorc designs, also from January 1997.
According to Stitt, there was originally some indecisiveness as to whether they should call them "Orcs" or "Gnomes" - apparently, someone (he thinks it may have been @MichaelMJJohn) got tongue tied and said "norcs" by mistake, which was a name everyone immediately preferred.
The user MichaelMJJohn appears to no longer exist.
Lastly for now, we've got a few level concepts. These "Beast Masters" concepts would of course eventually become the Beast Makers home. I'm not sure what "Aquatic" is supposed to be (or even which game it's for), but it looks quite Lost Fleet-y.
It looks remarkably Lost Fleet-y!
Animation tests
Spyro Animation, Colour and Enemy Tests on [YouTube] and [Internet Archive]
A video from very early in Spyro's development, demonstrating animation tests, colour tests and a test enemy.
Press kit
- html version of the press kit (hosted here)
- Found via [Spyro Forum]
The press kit describes features that were slated to be in the game. Many of these were cut from the final release. I was really hoping that the Reignited Trilogy devs would create and include these, but alas.
Features in the press kit I would have love to see included in a Spyro the Dragon remake:
- 120 dragons (up from 80 in the original game)
- Two more dragon worlds: the Machinists and the Aquifiers. (The Machinists levels became Gnasty's World, and the Aquifiers were cut altogether. The top/outside part of Aquaria Towers in Spyro 2 was going to be part of the Aquifiers world in Spyro 1.)
- Bonus levels involving collecting butterflies.
- Invincibility power-ups given by an armadillo.
Beta versions
LXShadow presents a walkthrough of the beta version [YouTube]
I love seeing game concepts/development because it’s fascinating to see what was cut and what made it in, and why. Make sure you keep annotations turned on; LXShadow adds some interesting commentary on dummied-out content of this and other Spyro games.