Scholastic Home Base & Wings of Fire models

[pyral]

EDIT Hilariously, I just got tipped off that someone actually dumped (most) these dragon models to Model Resource. Though for some reason they went as far as to rip the sloth model, but not Tsunami. Poor Tsunami.

This is a funny side tangent. I figure I should write this up somewhere as a minor archival piece.

Apparently seven years ago now, there was a weird Club Penguin-esque online game from Scholastic. It was called Home Base, and as someone way beyond the target demographic's years, I had to check it out of curiosity. Only because of one reason: They had Wings of Fire. I didn't grow up with WoF. I didn't even know it existed until around April 2022. But during that period I was going through the books and amused enough. Dragon media is rare (daily reminder to buy/wishlist the Crop and Claw series on Steam) and there was a lot of accidentally funny stuff, but I was charmed nonetheless.

What is style consistency

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I jokingly call it Club Penguin, but Scholastic Home Base really wasn't that far off. I only goofed around in it a little and probably streamed some of it. It had a few places you could go to, based on various Scholastic IPs like Bad Guys and Dogman. There were minigames, you could buy stuff with ingame currency including outfits and home decorations, and there was a home you could decorate. You'd mostly waddle around and meet new friends, or in my case, ignore people and go play minigames. More importantly, they hid some dragon eggs around that unlocked a few things. I don't remember the specifics. Home Base is particularly interesting since it's the first official 3D rendition of the Wings of Fire world that I know of. I think there might've been some obscure Flash games of Wings of Fire before this, so it isn't the first playable material.

It seems, if I'm reading correctly, that it was outsourced to Blowfish Studios, who I have no idea who they are or what they do, but it seems to line up with an interview from someone there, where Scholastic was outsourcing at least some stuff to them. https://web.archive.org/web/20251214135 ... interview/ I think they're still around, so I assume this was Scholastic who pulled the plug, and not Blowfish going under.

The entire game was made in Unity, and I see two versions of it backed up on Archive. The most recent being here: https://archive.org/details/scholastic-home-base. Anyone curious or interested in preserving online spaces could probably hack it up and make it run offline. This was important to note because indeed, at the time I had a Windows laptop and grabbed some tools to dump some files. Specifically, I was interested in preserving the dragons from Wings of Fire. I assume they were somewhat constrained by time or budget, as even when I toyed with it, it was a little behind on advertising. The advertised books for Wings of Fire were Book 14 and the Dark Secret GN, when every time I hopped on, the most recent was Book 15 and the Brightest Night GN That remained for a while I think, and have no idea if it ever updated. They might have literally just added a snowy rock and stuck Snowfall on it some time shortly before my visits. I remember movement was funny too, since it seemed like a very stock Unity navmesh agent (but mostly functional.) Additionally, they used a lot of off-the-shelf stock assets. The music in particular, as some sifting had me identify the Wings of Fire island music was Pond5 royalty-free music (and I actually quite liked it) https://www.pond5.com/royalty-free-musi ... ull-length

I do wonder, given the timing of November 2025, if Unity's recent exploit discovered back in September of the same year played a role in it stopping development. I would guess it'd at least have been a final nail in the coffin, as I can't imagine it was bringing revenue in for Scholastic and Unity's so shaky of a platform to develop on that you never really know what's going to happen with it (the latter hardly matters since the industry will keep using it anyways due to momentum.)

There's some stuff out there on Youtube that showcases the general game. Maybe we'll get a Death of a Game entry on it. It'd be interesting to see. It's kind of surprising we even had a Club Penguin-like as late as 2025, and from an IP holder like Scholastic, given Roblox and Minecraft monopolized a lot of that attention. Granted, that could also be why it's only died recently.

[pyral]

The Wings of Fire Models

So as mentioned, a few years back, I dumped the files and did some digging. It wasn't too difficult, as it was an unencrypted Unity game. This was back when I had Windows and could easily grab all the tools to do it. I don't know if Unity decompilers exist on Linux, but they should because Windows is a legacy product that should be considered obsolete in the long term.

There were a lot of 2D assets, but some of the dragons were made in 3D. Only one minigame used any 3D assets among these, though, being based on Qibli's escape sequence during Book 10. Given it was a never-ending gauntlet, I believe that is probably not canon. Most of the other minigames were basically Rainwing sports like racing and shooting venom.

There's not a lot to say of the dragon models themselves. I imagine they were struggling to get them to stylistically mesh with other Scholastic properties. They're relatively higher detail compared to the likes of Dav Pilkey or Bad Guys stuff (see the banner above) and I don't know the modeling team's specialties. It'd be interesting to see some information from folks who'd worked on that come out.

Another thing of note was that I believe Unity's model import, or its game export, had lossy rebuilding and optimization of the rigs. This means there's a lot of strange and janky bone rigging that is unlike how it probably looked when in development (I'd assume Maya, going by industry trends.) I believe Unity's exports would've been FBX but I don't have the original dumps anymore. There's even a funny mistake I'd noticed in game and was able to confirm after dumping and importing into Blender: Qibli actually has some strange weighting on one of his horns, leading to a stretched vertex whenever his head moves a certain way. It was visible in game, but pretty missable.

Without further ado: Some of the models in full and closeup.

Glory

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glory1.png (236.63 KiB) Viewed 407 times

The model rigs are lossy and optimized, probably.

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glory3.png (363.39 KiB) Viewed 407 times

Snowfall

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snowfall2.png (280.25 KiB) Viewed 407 times

Tsunami

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tsunami2.png (211.53 KiB) Viewed 407 times

Qibli

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qibli1.png (229.56 KiB) Viewed 407 times

qibli2.png (420.26 KiB) Viewed 407 times

qibli3.png (550.28 KiB) Viewed 407 times

and for fun: Qibli's mistaken horn in video:

qibli_weight_small.mp4

Qibli's horn has inaccurate rig weighting.

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[pyral]

For whatever reason, I don't have Snowfall's animations in these files. It's likely it dumped incorrectly. Most notable given Snowfall was added later, whereas the other three were from launch, I believe. But despite that, here's some crunchy uploads of the animations in Blender, featuring angles and closeups you couldn't see in-game.