flight rising fanatic

jinoga #381689 | wind | just a gal who could be ur pal | fr-exclusive (+4dopt) blog

[jinogasux-fr]

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working on a visual guide that shows you all of the semi-transparent apparel pieces (+ some extras) that you can overlay to create a change in the apparel’s color, as well as their combinations, for when you need a dragon’s apparel to match the colors juuuust right. Here’s a few of my favorites. :3

You can find the guide here, but please be warned, it’s very image-heavy!

[jinogasux-fr]

girl of the wheat

[jinogasux-fr]

it's just so wimdy..

[bluedragon138]

Its Christmas time! And its time to rumble by adding some new resources on my Flightrising collection! First of all, Christmas items! Then flight theme candy canes and a specialty of books! Just enough to spread out the enjoyment!

I wish you all a happy holidays! ✨🎉

You can find my resources thread on flightrising here: https://www1.flightrising.com/forums/cc/3316077/1#post_3316077

FreeToUSE ♦ Mega Resources Hub ♦ | Creative Corner | Flight Rising

[batfossil-fr]

this might be the first fae I've ever owned. too cute to pass up

[meesefr]

Tiny visitor.

[hagweeds]

Hello!

I recently stumbled across Santae on Tumblr, gave it a try, decided i wasn't really vibing with it, and quit (never joined the discord or really poked at the forums) all before finding out about the... Unfortunate stuff going on.

I had no clue, and now im feeling twice shy about interacting or supporting other similar sites. I very firmly don't want to support anything AI related, so i was wondering if you maybe had a list somewhere of sites( in development or otherwise) that you can recommend?* I wouldn't even know where to begin looking.

(*Already Hoarding dragons on Flight Rising, so any OTHER sites)

omg sure yeah!! there are a lot of smaller petsims around and the two upcoming im excited about:

UPCOMING

- Pawborough (FR style breeding sim with cats)

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tbpt/paw-borough-the-feline-virtual-browser-rpg/description

https://www.pawborough.net/demo

PB is currently in closed beta testing and if lucky you might still find people giving away keys? But I think most are claimed now. Open beta will be open to everyone, but there will be no further wipes at that point so it could still be a while. Updates are posted daily in discord and it's open for everyone to join.

Breeding is slightly different than FR though so I would recommend playing around with the breeding demo. It's not wheel based like FR and I'd describe it more like when you mix paint colors?

Would encourage you to look at the more recent KS updates because they did revamp a lot of the art that's in the original campaign (hydde from fr is on the art team!)

- Mythaura (another breeding sim but with various mythical creatures)

https://mythaura.com/

https://ko-fi.com/mythauradev

Not currently in beta but the devs do put out monthly updates on progress, and you can donate to their Ko-Fi for beta keys. Currently I have 33 keys (and get more every month) so you and anyone else are welcome to ask for a key when it opens up.

This one was around in dev for a while but died off as the original creator moved on to IRL things. Current owners worked on the site with the OG owner and with permission reference the original concepts. Since it's been with the current team updates have been consistently every month.

Some cool previews for their DnD/adventuring mode are in the more recent updates! Also there are shiny familiars 👀

EXISTING

- Pixel Cats End (based on FR dom adopts from Ice)

Small community and new content is slow but steady as it is one dev. No gender restriction on breeding, cats belong to North/South/Trade. N/S can breed with each other and Trade can breed with all. Very gender inclusive and all cats pronouns can be freely changed at any time. Breeding is based on genotypes and it's fairly complex (cats have hidden traits and some are recessive etc)

If you like chasing rare breeding outcomes it's pretty fun! There are rarer patterns and things like Albino cats. There is also a DnD grid based adventuring mode that I find pretty fun to grind, final boss gives out drops that include a G1 cat generator.

4dopt

I'm just going to steal the post @jinogasux-fr made lol https://jinogasux-fr.tumblr.com/post/771749879998447616/doing-another-reblog-of-this-because-4dopt-had-to

Basically it's very customizable heavy adopts and all pets /items/etc are drawn by and submitted by players.

Wolvden/Lioden (wolf and lion breeding sims)

Both sites are owned by the same team but Wolvden is the newer game and works a little differently than Lioden.

Big warning that in both sites your pets will eventually die and freezing them is a premium item. The upside to this is your account does not "rollover" until you tell it to. So if you don't log in for a week, your pets won't have aged until you rollover again. Breeding is also a lot more restrictive in terms of who you can breed and when (like on Lioden you have one male pride leader who can breed, but if you want to breed one of your females to a different male you'd have to use another player as the stud unless you retire and select a new leader)

Both sites tend to have very dramatic communities but the gameplay is solid and functioning. Staff can also be questionable but if you keep to yourself it's not on the level of CJ DMing players yaknow

Subeta

If you liked the questing on Santae, just play Subeta bc thats where CJ took it from and they do it much better.

Subeta is older but still... relatively active? I think they're still revamping the site but everything still functions. I played obsessively 10 years ago.

Largely focuses on human avatars with pets. At the time it was kind of the adult Neopets site (iirc it was 16+ only originally)

There are some other petsites that I just don't recommend: Marapets (owner is a freak all I really remember), Neopets (as an old school neo player i just can't recommend neo anymore lol), Dappervolk, Lorwolf

In terms of where I find or go looking for these, it's unfortunately not one place. A lot of these I discovered either through my FR-based friends or through Tumblr. https://www.virtualpetlist.com used to be pretty good back in the 2010s but looking now they do seem to be featuring AI art sites.

I do frequently see that people tend to make topics in the General Discussion area for new sites, so it's worth keeping an eye there too: https://www1.flightrising.com/forums/gend

Sometimes I'll also browse Kickstarter or other crowdfunding sites as that's how I found PB originally.

[888-fr]

mystery skin reveal :D

this managed to sell 540 copies. thank you all for taking a chance on me!

[dfghjhkggfk]

Talk tiger auraboa | mochlus auraboa

video under the cut (epilepsy warning, some of frames flicker sometimes)

[pukaparade]

My Experience Working as an Artist at Santae

Just want to start off by saying that this is simply my personal experience and that anything following the cut is simply my own opinion based off of that personal experience. Readers are encouraged to please employ their own critical thinking and taking many grains of salt when reading another person's experience, mine included. Anyway, my feelings and experiences following the cut.

To start off when I applied to Santae I was really excited to be a part of the project. It's a project that has a lot of promise and it seemed to set itself apart from other petsites I've played in the past. I was really eager to try and be a part of it and participate in the growth of the site and community.

When I joined the server I received the typical greeting - CJ pings everyone to welcome new staff not unlike a welcoming party. It was a bit overwhelming but seemed well-meaning.

There were a lot of little red flags that sprouted up after my joining that I ignored or tamped down writing them off as caused by stress or seeing them as things that could be grown from. (Badmouthing past management, poor communication, etc..)

I can't and won't go into massive detail about everything that put me off and drove me to finally split ways because it would be splitting hairs after a certain point and I also just don't have the time, energy, or care to go through things with such a meticulousness. This post is mostly to warn others who may be thinking of applying what to expect and to cast a little transparency on the work environment. There are a lot of allegations going around and understandably a lot of people are afraid to speak up. I've already quit so that can no longer be held over my head (but we'll come back to this) and the worst that will happen is I'll become a social pariah on the site, or my account will be banned. (Kind of expecting this, so if Kasper #2468 gets iced just know it wasn't by my own hand lmfao. If my KS backing and SC earned by commission get nuked in retaliation ig it's a consequence I'm willing to accept.)

To the friends I've made on the team and the folks that reached out after I quit and removed from the server - I'm glad we met. And thank you to the former coworker who offered to post my goodbye for me after reaching out to me in DM (I declined because I didn't want anyone being ~ tainted~ by association lol) I was in the middle of typing a goodbye when I was unceremoniously removed from the server. When I joined staff got to say goodbye and some even hung around for weeks after parting ways, but since Sky was removed without being able to say goodbye it seems like being instantly deleted might just be the new standard. Not to mention the other artist who was just removed overnight without even a comment. To everyone else, I kind of assumed our camaraderie was as fickle and transient as my time on the team and wasn't surprised to be proven right. I'm sure it doesn't help that (in my experience) CJ has a habit of hopping into VC to badmouth anyone who doesn't align with his vision.

Anyway this is super disjointed already. Let's get onto some specifics.

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"You didn't even need reply ^_^"

I mentioned that the pings were stressful because we had already received multiple about this 'game' and it was getting stressful. When I mentioned that, I got a passive aggressive dm and followup about it afterwards. I will also note that a coworker added an agreeing 'react' to my post about the pings which cj then. removed. lol. I did not reply to the message bc by now I was tired of the manipulation games.

✦•······················•✦•······················•✦

Commission Discomfort

I held off confronting about this for a long time because I feel that CJ does not take confrontation well and didn't want to make things worse for myself of others but by the end I was nearing my limit and needed to enforce a firm boundary.

I did some graphics work under the expectation that I'd be getting a divine figurine for it and had to follow up multiple times as usual, at which point CJ tried to pin it on a fellow artist coworker 'making him uncomfortable'. This is a common trend with poor communication on the team.

"management" would prefer that staff not commission site artists. This just always rubbed me wrong, especially after the, in my opinion, territorial behavior over me doing commissions. I also dmed some coworkers about it since he said he'd 'tell all the other artists' but no one else had gotten any similar messages from him.

✦•······················•✦•······················•✦

Streaming in Server

When I started it was pretty casual for art staff to stream site work or personal work in the vc. I stopped streaming personal things after the first uncomfortable dm I got when working on an offsite comm and stuck to santae only work from then on. I don't have a screenshot of my own that I can use for this unfortunately but cj sent a message saying

"Hey @ artist @ lead artist @ lead clothing artist I would like to stop streaming art in the staff voice chat channel as technically the behind the scenes is for BMaC so it's just a gray area, however I would love if you all still wanted to stream but would like you all to stream via our Twitch platform or TikTok

Login credentials will be provided as well.

This is a perfect time to stream with the referral contest live it would be very beneficial I believe.

If you would like to stream please reach out to me, There will be SC pay for streaming, 5sc per hour with a max of 4 hours per day and max of 10 hours per week per artist :dravalove: your normal pay rates also apply this is just additional :heart:"

When the most recent artist to stream asked about back-pay for the stream done for the site the response was a gif of an empty wallet and a crying shimmerint emoji. These messages were later deleted.

further commentary as follows -

The only reason anyone noticed he deleted his messages was because in voicechat when other staff were asking why we don't steam anymore he said 'oh I deleted that' and then said that we can stream again in vc. This was followed the day after that vc by the following

CJ not only shared images to the BMaC in my time, but also would take the images directly from the art approvals channel and drop them into the staff vc anyway to show them off to whoever was around. Frankly this felt like shit every single time and felt like he just wanted the dopamine hit of people complimenting the art. Rarely were we credited during the fawning, too.

A fellow staff reached out to ask why I wasn't around as much, this staff member was in the same vc where he said it was ok again. CJ in my opinion likes to say things one way publicly but then if there's an issue he'll take it to dms or involve as few people as possible. To me his public and private faces are very different.

✦•······················•✦•······················•✦

Final Straw

The screenshots from above reposted below

As you can see, they're clearly the same, lol. I will also mention that these plush items take twice as long to do and require more revisions than other items. On top of that I have concept art that I can't share due to NDA of the heartstruck concept - full roughs of the pets that I was not compensated for in any way. None of this was discussed prior to me starting the work which is my own fault and not a mistake I'll make again. I spent days, long consecutive hours working on the concepts before I could even start on the plush themselves. This time and the work I put in will remain unpaid.

Something I noticed while I was putting this together is that CJ has deleted at least one message from our dms, which is funny because the message I noticed got deleted is one that I had originally read as being sent with the intention to manipulate -

I have also been reached out to by a former coworker with a 'message from cj' which I declined. Respectfully, I've got you blocked for a reason man. If I had to guess he probably feels like there's something he needs to smooth over to cover his ass but I'm just not interested.

Overall my experience on art staff was quite stressful and the environment definitely felt like there was an in- and out- crowd that was decided by how present you are in vc and how willing you are to participate in the toxic positivity and bobble-head nodding. Also, getting frequently misgendered to your face and behind your back is a special kind of torture.

Anyway, I could probably ramble on more about the time he burst into voice call while I was in there with a coworker and ranted about another coworker for like 20 minutes totally ignoring me before just leaving, or how he's always talking shit about people behind their backs (hi new admins) but not to their faces but I don't have receipts for any of that. Nor energy. And besides there are other places where folks air their grievances and allegations if that's what you're looking for. So I guess I'll leave it here, take care y'all.

[jinogasux-fr]

I'm so sorry you were put through all that, that is unbelievable disgusting and unprofessional behavior.

You have such a wonderful artstyle, and I really hope you can thrive elsewhere. :(

[jinogasux-fr]

SPARKLE DRAGONS ARE REAL!!!!

[mem-fr]

my lunar new year skin that is available now , and some recolours that i am considering +v+

[pawborough]

January Check In

Hello, all!

Happy update day, catfolk! We apologize for the late update, but we wanted to share the Beta dates with you in this update. We took extra time to ensure the dates were accurate without risking something not being ready in time or causing burnout for our team. We’ve done quite a bit of internal assessment on the pros and cons of letting ~2,000+ people into the game. 

Our most pressing thought was how to reconcile needing to continue working on key features while getting valuable feedback and play data on all that we already have. There was a lot to consider, in reputation, timeline, and team morale. We did not want to give the wrong impression that we felt anywhere close to a done game, but we have a lot of high fidelity mechanics and playability to share which need high population testing regardless. We’ve finally settled on rolling our sleeves up and opening to testers. At the start, we’ll provide a comprehensive breakdown of everything we’re planning to add over the months of the test, and continue our monthly check-ins on our progress. We’re ready to grind, and we hope you are too! And in many ways, it will be much nicer to get the comprehensive mass testing whenever we have something new to roll out!

We hope you will all agree that this update was worth the wait, as we have exciting news to share with you today, along with our most exciting news yet! :)

Accessory Progress

We are proud to announce that we have 47 unique accessories, altogether with 564 color variations. 

We have just about reached the edge of our odyssey in the first production run of accessories. After 8 months of practice and training for our fledgling team, we’ve improved immensely at our pipeline. What has previously taken us months now takes a matter of weeks. We have one more backer accessory to develop, and any additions in the near future will be small, simplistic items in comparison to our full sets, but I’m very proud of the team for how far we’ve come, and the marvel of quality they produce in good time.

This month’s new progress includes:

Frog Friends

Illustration by Remmie, sponsored by Hag

Protogear Recolors

Recolors by Emma

New decor

We’ve also been busy with decors. 

Argh, matey! 

Macaws by Jersopod, cannon, barrel and newspaper stack by Giulia and Remmie

In addition, style compliant sketches of the original rose decor!

Sketches by Remmie

Archetypes

We’re here to introduce a very exciting mechanic that has been in the works since our initial overhaul. It’s one of my personal favorite concepts, and the primary motivation behind how we’ve structured the cat design system.

Introducing… cat archetypes!

Archetypes are a specific combination of traits which, when fulfilled, mark the cat’s profile with a badge and reward the user as an achievement fulfillment. (If the cat’s traits are changed, the badge will be removed. Cats may fulfill multiple Archetypes simultaneously.)

For example, this badge means the cat fulfills the Ruby archetype, a badge which requires the cat to have the color Ruby in all slots.

Examples of the Ruby archetype include:

To give examples of the specificity, other Archetypes include for example “Leopard,” which must have the following to comply:

A Yellow range Leopard overcoat

Light Greyscale or Light Yellow undercoat

Yellow or Greyscale Claws

None for the second accent

Here are some Leopards!

Owning these cats will give the user rewards, sometimes completely custom to the Archetype. 

What we hope to achieve with this system is a greater incentive to think creatively within the restrictions of our cat builder, and to reward our players for intentioned play in collecting, breeding, and designing a variety of cats. After all, it is the core of the game!

And with each new addition of colors or patterns, we’ll release an onslaught of new Archetypes! We plan to introduce a healthy amount of them, some easy to get, and some harder depending on genetic obtainability and the obtainment method.

This system is already up and running on our servers, and is in its infancy. We’ll get a lot of data from testing it out!

Originally, this system was on the backburner while we focused on bigger picture mechanics, but we’ve fast tracked it so we can bolster and better encourage casual play while the Guild system is still in its preliminary beta state. 

Pelt System

Perhaps the feature we are most excited to see in use and tested is the Pelt System, which we briefly introduced in the 2024 November Check In. There is a frankly insane amount of functionality behind this feature, which includes autonomous user decision and interaction every step of the way. 

First, we were able to implement dynamic layering. This means that Unclipped (top layer) pelts can actually sport layers which are placed behind the cat automatically. Valuable uses for this feature include the inside of sleeves, backs of hoods, and items which you would otherwise always want to go behind anything it’s stacked above.

Users can view their pelts already submitted, see their submission progress, choose to submit more to the pelt, choose to print their pelt themselves, choose to list pelts for buyers to print on demand, and view their pelts on any cat.

There is also a draft system which allows users to store information they aren’t ready to submit yet. 

Users can list pelts as a print-on-demand resource, and are able to control how many copies they will allow to be printed. 

All prints will require a tax which will be dependent on the coverage %, calculated based on the amount of pixels that cover the canvas. This means that small pelts, like a hat or a monocle, will take only a small tax!

January 20215 Update - Pelt system showcase

AND we have a rudimentary tagging system going as we experiment with this feature! Big news! Once we iron out the kinks, we’ll be able to roll out user filtering and tagging of other content, such as cats or forum posts.

And drumroll please…

As teased at the beginning of this update, we are overjoyed to announce the Closed Beta dates!  Early access launches on February 3rd, with the regular Closed Beta starting on February 6th!

During the Closed Beta, you’ll have the chance to experience many new and polished gameplay features, exciting customization options, and the now refined economy! We encourage all testers to not only find any potential bugs and ui improvements, but also to provide feedback and suggestions on all of our game features and our economy!

All 253 Early Beta, 1940 Beta and Kickstarter codes have been generated, and we will begin sending them out shortly over the next day.

In the coming week, we’ll put out writings on our expectations early on and the features roadmap that we’re currently staring at. We can’t wait to see you all in Kotemara soon!

To summarize: We shared decors, Protogear recoloring, Frog Friends, pelt system showcase, archetypes and closed Beta dates.

What to expect next month: Further asset and development updates. Check-ins for how closed Beta will be going.

[hagweeds]

YALL LOOK AT THE FROGS!!!

this one makes me so happy

[cloudmancy]

been getting into pixel art

[cloudmancy]

progress pics for myself

[jinogasux-fr]

oh, how much of a king you would look, gazing up at the tip of my blade.

[bluedragon138]

A challenge has been accepted - food related texture for these icons! Many had wonderful Suggestion but these are the ones i went with. What you think? Can you ping point what they are??

Icon reference: flightrising.com

If you guys like my work and wish to follow me closer, I update my threads regularly: Bluedragonite138

[jinogasux-fr]

local tangerine freak tries dirt aesthetic, how'd i do