DRAGONS CRACK

Motion

49 films, in seven kinds

These are not one library. A story and a walk through a place are different things doing different jobs, and a grid that mixes them tells you nothing. 47 of the 49 are shot upright, because that is the shape they were made to be watched in.

In play

The game itself, captured as it runs: a development build, flown here by the game's own autopilot. Nothing is staged and nothing is sped up. The twenty short cuts made for a phone in September 2026 open on a title, and their sound is the cues the game asked for during the capture, rebuilt afterwards rather than recorded live.

The Raid

27 seconds

A grown Fire Wyvern comes up the vent and finds the Bell Towns. They ring the Toll, and inside its ring a dragon cannot hold its fire. So the bell burns first, and then what it guarded.

Egg to Raid

20 seconds

One wyvern, from 0.35 m beside its shell to 1.8 m at the vent mouth: what it eats, how it grows, its first bolt, the way out, and what it does with the daylight.

Three Answers

19 seconds

The Red Hour, the Rising and the Narrowing: three peoples answer the same drake, in three separate runs.

Five Peoples, Five Homelands

18 seconds

Humans, Dwarves, Forest Elves, Dark Elves and Orks, each at home in its own land, cut from the store trailer: the Bell Towns, the Spine, the Greenwood, the Barrowlands and the Wastes.

First Sparks

18 seconds

The first sparks against the pit hounds. A Thicket Dragonet in the Deadworks, with a breath that is not yet a fire.

Small Teeth, Big Hunger

18 seconds

Grubs first, bigger steps next. A Thicket Dragonet finds its feet in the Dryways, where everything is still bigger than it.

Light Without Heat

18 seconds

Coldlight, taken from a cinder moth: a Crystal Wyrm in the Moth Galleries learns a trait from what it kills and carries a light that gives no warmth.

The Crown Sings

18 seconds

Crystal against tunnel swine in the Moth Galleries. The Crystal Wyrm does not breathe fire: it rings, and the resonance does the rest.

From Stone to Tools

18 seconds

Stone and wood become a knife and an axe. A Dwarf's preparation in the Spine, from the node to the bench.

The Flood Channels

18 seconds

An Eastern Lung in the Flood Channels, long and wingless, in the wet middens of the climb.

Tools Before Trouble

18 seconds

A knife, some wood, an axe. The work before the warning in the Bell Towns: gather, make at the bench, and have something in hand when the day turns.

Cold Ground

15 seconds

The lamp goes out and the heat-hunter finds cold ground. A Dark Elf in the Barrowlands, where the Guttering is the answer to a drake that hunts by warmth.

Not Every Breath Is Fire

15 seconds

Sparks, resonance, gale: three dragons, three different answers, across separate runs.

A Head in a Gap

15 seconds

The stone drops; the drake stops. A Dwarf defense, the Narrowing, with the forge court as its price.

Growing in the Dark

15 seconds

An adult comes out of the mine encounter. Eastern Lung play with the growth and traits in view: what it has eaten, and what that taught it.

The Crown Takes Hold

15 seconds

A seed, a crown, a moment's hold: the Greenwood catches the drake in the Rising, and later it tears free. Two passes, cut together.

The Toll Holds

15 seconds

One note interrupts the drake's breath. Before, during and after a Bell Towns defense: the bell rung inside its ring, and what the square looks like once it has.

Call of the Wastes

15 seconds

From the totems to the road: an Ork readies the Wastes as a drake comes in. The Red Hour, the Orks' answer, is a brace and a pyre in the lane the gout will take.

Into the Dryways

15 seconds

Not every encounter begins above ground. A young Western Drake works through the warm rooms of the Dryways, grubs first, and finds the tunnel on.

Fire in the Workings

15 seconds

Fire beneath the surface: a Western Drake reaches the Workings, the old mine, and lights them.

Back to the Ground

15 seconds

From open sky back to the square: the wyvern comes down among the burning Bell Towns and folds its wings.

The Town Sees You

15 seconds

A grown Fire Wyvern leaves the vent and comes in over the pines. The Bell Towns see it at ninety metres, and the notice goes up before the bell does.

The Raid, Interface On

14 seconds

The same morning through the player's own camera, with the interface showing: take wing, spit a bolt, and watch fire walk to what stands next to it.

One Bolt, One Bell, One Town

14 seconds

The wyvern does not breathe a gout. It spits. What one bolt does to a bell tower, and what the fire does after that.

Stories

Sequences with a beginning and a consequence.

The Feast

32 seconds

What happens after. The same six people butcher the dead lung, cook and eat it, and sell the meat, scales, whiskers, horns, claws and hide at market. A dragon is worth a great deal, once it has stopped moving.

The Farm Battle

20 seconds

Three lungs come down on a farm in open lanes. The defenders do not scatter: they run, brace, thrust, draw and release, and a coordinated volley brings one of the three down.

The Chicken Raid

15 seconds

A lung comes in low over a smallholding and leaves with a chicken in each foot. Undefended calories, and nobody in the yard is equipped to argue.

Market Disaster

9 seconds

The smallest lineage, loose in the one place it can do the most damage.

Bell Town

8 seconds

A square, a militia, and iron in a tower. A town is a fight, and some of them have done this before.

Fire Against Crystal

10 seconds

The argument the whole collection is built on, staged once: orange against cyan.

The reaches

Ground level, one film per place. 6 of the 8 daylight reaches have one so far.

The Barrowlands

28 seconds

Overcast moor, grave-mounds and ruin. A small Dark-Elf party moves through ground remembered for generations; at night, the Guttering steals heat contrast from hunter and hunted alike.

The Holdings

20 seconds

Ground level in the pasture. Thatch, livestock, no wall, and no idea what is under them.

The Fens

20 seconds

Standing water, reed and mist, and a sky full of fairies. Nothing heavy crosses it and nothing dry lives in it.

The Greenwood

20 seconds

Old forest, elf-held. Nothing to eat and one thing to fear.

The Spine

20 seconds

Mountains, and dwarf country: halls cut into a range, high and dry, with a hard floor under them.

The Wastes

20 seconds

Burnt, open, and full of orks, who are not there by accident.

The climb

The world as a continuous move rather than a scene.

Out of the Dark

40 seconds

The climb itself: three kilometres of shaft, end to end, from the chamber where you hatched to the first daylight you have ever seen.

The Surface Flythrough

80 seconds

The atlas opens into all eight daylight reaches. The route stays anchored to the generated map while each finished homeland supplies its own scale, landmarks, people and light.

Growing up

Egg to adult, which is a real animation rather than a number going up.

Egg to Adult

14 seconds

One animal from the shell to full size. Growth is staged, fed and irreversible, and every stage is the same creature rather than a different model wearing its name.

Short cuts

The same work, cut short.

Flythrough, upright

80 seconds

The same flight, cut upright.

The Shield Wall

15 seconds

Six spears set against a charging ork horde, cut a stride before they meet.

Collection Cut

8 seconds

All five lineages, in eight seconds.

Flythrough, square

8 seconds

The same flight, cut for a square frame.

The craft of the reaches

One trade per people, held in the fist: forge, fletching, bronze, stone, totem and lantern.

The Bell Founders

16 seconds

Bronze falls in a burning thread; the cope comes off the raw bell; the first strike.

The Fletcher

16 seconds

A Greenwood elf draws a shaft, sets the third feather, and looses at the butt across the glade.

The Lantern-Wrights

16 seconds

The fairies' round: the swarm kindles the fen lanterns one by one down the boardwalk.

The Totem

16 seconds

Orks lash the tusked skull, score the shaft, and haul the totem upright as the drum starts.

The Waymark Carver

16 seconds

One dark elf, one lamp, one stone: a spiral cut tap by tap, then raised light down the old line.

The Forge

16 seconds

Three smiths of the Spine at work: hammer and sparks, the bellows, and steel into the quench.

How they got made

Every cut has older cuts behind it

Each of these was arrived at by looking at the previous version cold, finding what was wrong with it, measuring it, and fixing the cause rather than the symptom. Every earlier version is kept locally; only current cuts are linked here. If you want that story, it is in the devlog.