Oh, you are a world builder too. Concepting is the most time-consuming, but once you gotten everything laid out, then everything becomes a lot more fun and easier. Your alien reminds me a lot of what I’m working on for TiTs, except they are cousins of the Fanfir and they love eating birds. I mostly got my inspiration from Octolings, Chinese culture and of course the Fanfir. So far I got their language, culture and politics down. My biggest submission is on hold temporarily as I work on a twin enemy for Dhaal. I’m almost done with their busts all thanks to this screen tablet I got recently. What other species have you made?
Well.. A lot. I have a lot. In the Iodestre universe alone, hundreds, if not thousands. Of course, that is taking into consideration groups of species that share a common ancestor. For example, all the different forms that future humans will have, especially the bellors - biomechanical posthumans which engineer themselves into vastly different shapes, to serve different roles. Then there are also aliens for Archimeron, though I'm not going as broad with that one, with it mostly meant to be a rip and tear medieval gothic heavy metal in space universe. Then for my big fantasy verse, Breteslana, I decided to make my own races, not use any generic fantasy shit. And then there's Katophos, my monster waifu verse. At the moment, I have somewhere around 20 monster girl families. Each family has one base form, which evolves (Pokemon style) into one of four intermediate forms. Then each intermediate form has two final forms. So at least 260 there..
Don't have much up yet, but I'm going to start revealing species on a monthly basis. Here's another one from the Iodestre universe - darekka - space mermaids. They don't have vocal cords or lungs, and so their primary form of communication is gesturing with their head frills, plus sign language. And as they have no spoken language, "darekka" is actually an exonym, given by another alien race that I'll be revealing soon. They are still able to breathe outside water, just not too well. And the respiratory exit point is a pair of gill slits under the arms. The boob-looking slopes on the chest are a pair of fleshy opercula that protect the gill filaments, and can articulate to draw water or air through the chest cavity. They evolved in saltwater swamps, and made their houses in the trees above. So the legs, especially considering the prehensile feet, are specialized for hanging upside down from tree limbs, and *very* poorly suited to walking on the ground. They were found in a largely undeveloped technological state. And combining that with their physical limitations, they have had a rather unfortunate history with other species, routinely taken advantage of, and having their territory disregarded entirely. And it will be very rare to see them outside their home habitat, until much later in the timeline, due to how easy they are to victimize (not even able walk long distances unassisted, let alone run, or stand and fight), and the generally lawless state of the world during the early re-emergence period. Now, to be clear, I wasn't planning to deal them such a bad hand when I started designing them. Just kinda happened, after I decided they'd be largely aquatic. With my obsessive dedication to functional realism and all that.
And for another example, the guy on the left here is from a species who call themselves thetskanakti. (They are space ant people. By the way, I don't have any recent drawing of them other than this one, so yeh.) Though most humans call them either myrmidons, or some derogatory term which typically denotes some sort of insectoid pest. They also have no vocal cords, and they breathe though spiracles near their asses. They communicate by clicking, vibrating, and drumming with their mandibles and maxillae. They have four pairs of limbs, though most of their species have only two functional pairs, with the other two being vestigial nubs that hang around the ass. So far, they are the only polymorphic species that I have - rather than just one form for each sex, males come in two forms, and females have three. The smallest of them, called "workers" by many outside observers, are 5-foot-ish bipedal females. The next ones up, "warriors," are 6.5-foot bipedal males. After that, "protectors" are 7-to-8-foot four-legged males. Both male forms have an enlarged dominant arm, with the fingers elongated and hardened into massive claws. This arm has two to four times the strength of the other arm. And as the ventral chest muscles are actually inside the ribcage, the internal organs are offset significantly to accommodate them. Finally, the "noble" and "queen" are massive four- and six-legged females, respectively. Unlike terrestrial ants, all members of this species are capable of reproduction. The difference is how much they can reproduce.
They typically do not become sexually mature until fairly late in their lives, and the vast majority will never live long enough to raise their own young past the larval stage. As a result, they have a staggered generational system, where any given generation ends up communally raising the the offspring of the generation which raised them. The traditional concepts we have of family and parentage are completely alien to them, and lineage is tracked purely to avoid inbreeding. This causes a very strong inclination toward a hive society, and a tendency to see all members of their community as family. Being surrounded by "family" for most of their lives, they often develop at least moderate xenophobia, seeing anyone who is not "family" as a threat. This is, of course, especially true of more isolated communities. However, those which are in regular contact with outside groups may end up swinging to the other extreme, seeing any beneficial person as family, regardless of their species.
