darkSpyro

Was this generally well known? This is the first I've heard of it: https://www.bleedingcool.com/2...-dragon-mmorpg/

Yeah, the Helios demo was found here iirc? People had a chance to play around with it before the site was taken down. It was a looong time ago tho, and of course no one sees the very obvious wiki articles DS users created about it.

Honestly, between the cartoony artstyle clashing with the prototype realistic graphics, they really didn't have much of a chance. But I do wish they were given something else instead of shutting down with no games to speak of.(though it's possible they shut down because the name is taken by a VR company...)

Yeah, Spyro's Kingdom, Skylanders before Skylanders.

Those screenshots are after he was made playable. I don't think there's any footage of King Spyro, except maybe the beta footage on vimeo with Sun Dragon which has a few cut areas.

Nope, no art ever surfaced, just the mentions in the interviews - and we know there was art, that iteration of the game lasted until 2010 easily. Maybe a TFB employee will post it one day.

Quote: Bolt

Looking at some of the concept art, I'm kinda not surprised that they never got aboard the game ...

But yeah, here is Toys For Bob's original concept if you were interested.

I'm sorry that's the most childish concept art I've ever seen, especially the one of the Guardians fighting. Teens were drawing better LOS fan art over a decade ago.

It just looks like a traditional artist that's very unfamiliar with digital. The islands look too good for the characters to be that rough.

My point is they hire professionals to do that stuff don't they? Like university graduates with a lifetime of experience in art even if they have no professional experience right? Whatever else that artist can do they did not do a good job of that art. I'm no good either but I'm also not a professional concept artist.

Couldn't find anything on Helios because of the other company with the exact same name, so I wouldn't know, but sometimes it's a group of devs that got together right after university with little or no experience. There are art schools out there that'll teach you next to nothing of actually following someone else's style or just plain transitioning from traditional to digital properly, so that might've just been a starry eyed artist that didn't know what they were getting themselves into. There are even artists out there that plagiarized concept art to get into dev teams and killed entire pitches, so it's really all sorts of people.

I will never understand plagiarists. It makes life easier in the VERY short term but people eff themselves over so completely in the long run I just can't fathom what they're thinking. Hell, there are tons of free to use photos someone could trace over and while it would still ruin them professionally at least it wont affect them legally because the pictures are free to use.