

The development team later went on to call Cynder a "Midnight Dragon," owing to this Gothic nature, and all the design work was handled by Bruno. The platinum jewelry was evident as a personal touch for the 'evil' version of Cynder and served to signify her as both feminine and regal, but also gave the impressions of servitude, as if the decoration about her throat was less a necklace and more a manacle, indicating her enslavement to Malefor's thrall. But pretty soon, Bruno was exploring Gothic overtones in keeping with the visual cues of Concurrent Skies, the environment that Cynder was first encountered in.

They used the villainess's reference in terms of her lithe, sinuous form, which they adopted for Cynder's overall body structure. Bruno Rime, Cynder's character designer and art lead of the project in Krome Studios, determined that this villain be female and a black dragon, as the previous dragon villain in the earlier Spyro titles ( Red) was generally red coloured.įor both Bruno Rime and Jared Pullen, another artist who worked on A New Beginning, from the get go presence was most important, and the black dragon Maleficent from the Disney movie Sleeping Beauty had that in spades. The story for the first installment of the trilogy, A New Beginning, called for "a powerful and shadowy dark dragon" to be Spyro's nemesis, beyond that no specification was given and the starting point was very loose.

However, they also felt as if she had been a part of the Spyro mythology for quite some time.
