Drawing dragons at the kitchen table.

It started with a rainy Saturday and a stack of printer paper. My daughters wanted to draw dragons, so we drew dragons, a lot of them, most with far too many legs.

By lunchtime there was a dragon with a teapot for a head and a dragon that was mostly a cloud. They had names, favourite foods and, in one case, a very detailed backstory involving a lost sock.

I scanned the best ones that evening, mostly to keep them. Looking at them on a big screen, I realised they were better art direction than anything I would have come up with: bold shapes, odd colours, and a total lack of concern for anatomy.

So the next Roariverse game will use them. I am tracing the drawings into vector shapes, keeping the wobbly lines, and letting each girl choose the colours for her dragons. They are taking the job very seriously.

There is a lesson in there about constraints. The drawings are not polished, and that is what makes them feel alive. Trying to clean them up too much would turn them into generic cartoon dragons, and nobody needs more of those.

Mostly, though, it was a good Saturday. The game is a bonus.