Reposting this from our old blog - link to full size image in the replies.
At some point we will make a post further explaining aspects of the species and its history - but for now we’re gonna leave it at this! We think this gives a decent understanding of what we look like and how we function. For now, here's the funky slime mold aliens in all their glory.
[Image description.
Concept art depicting the alien species known as Amoeboids. There are 4 drawings on the reference sheet depicting different parts of the Amoeboid.
The largest image shows the full body. It is an amorphous creature with several tentacle-like appendages and covered in smaller cilia. It is very colorful with an irregular pattern of bright neon markings covering its whole body. It has a hypercube-shaped head with alien text on all sides.
The second image shows an orange menger sponge with several curling tendrils sprouting from it.
The third image is a larger drawing of the hyperscreen that is the creature's head.
The fourth image is the Amoeboid in the shape of another alien species. It has a centaur-like body with antlers on its head and tentacles sprouting from its back. It has the Amoeboid's head and colorful markings.
There is text all over the reference sheet. The text reads: Amoeboids are a class of artificially constructed organic creatures that were made to serve multiple purposes. They are highly intelligent, adaptable, curious, and often mischievous.
Amoeboids are extradimensional beings, as are their creators!
The "brain" is a 4D 'menger sponge' - a cubic fractal shape that has nearly infinite surface area while enclosing zero volume. this allows for massive amounts of data storage.
The central nervous system is made up of long tendrils that double as sensory organs.
(The brain and sensory organs can sometimes be visible through the body)!
The "head" is a hyperscreen - a 4D screen that projects images on all sides. (Depicted here as a tesseract). This allows for a lot of information to be shown at once.
Amoeboid bodies are largely composed of a substance in an indeterminate state of matter. this substance is malleable and extremely difficult to damage.
Amoeboids can take on any base form according to their own preferences or the preferences of their commissioner. They can change their shape, size, color, pattern, texture, etc, entirely at will. by default, they have no particular shape and will constantly shift and morph.
(Shown here in the form of another alien species - but still visibly amoeboid).
They have dozens of distinct senses and are constantly recording data about their surroundings.
Amoeboids are typically very colorful and use their morphing abilities as a means of self expression! They often communicate via changing their body shape and colors.
decided a while ago that Rausliers weren't quite working for me, so I've changed some stuff about their design to better suit my ideas for them, as well as making them easier to draw (for me lol).
hoping to make more posts on these guys soon, as well as my other aliens, buuut with my struggle to find employment i've been mostly focused on making ends meet as of late haha. if you'd like to see me draw stuff more often, consider leaving a tip if you have the means while I continue hunting for a job :)
Various art & portions of lore for my Astro-Sapiens, Organnauts, Shape-Shifters, and others.
Most inspiration comes from many of H.R. Giger’s works and John Carpenter’s ‘The Thing.’
There might be some inconsistencies because some of these are older, and sorry for grammar mistakes and misusage of words.
Tel-Nebuk. Old god inhabiting Tirar's caves. Greedy collector of precious minerals and ancient relics. Its steps send tremors that break open the earth and allow its cultists to gather and mine these precious goods.
A collection of differently aged sloman chicks and an adult with a meg on his back, shown translucent to view the inside.
Here are sloman chicks.
When a sloman hatches by tearing and biting through the megg, it's either lightly or fully covered by fuzzy feathers with little color. They feed on "soup" from their mother's chest pouch with some help from the father, who, however, isn't always able to make more soup after baby hatches. More megg detail (some visuals slightly outdated).
Unlike mammals, slomen have a less refined feeding system, and the chicks have to puncture the pouch to get to the "soup". The holes are very small, much like the tips of the drinking teeth of the babies. The teeth aren't very visible in the image, but they form a triangle from the bottom jaw that directs flow into the mouth. They also help with breaking the megg, these chicks have no other teeth.
The younglings generally start walking on their feet no later than two months. This is when they are fully covered in fuzz and may start growing new teeth. Though that walking isn't exactly competent. Much like baby birds, they wobble around and fall at every step, especially if they try to run. Before their famous good-enough-walk they often crawl around on their ankles, with a few just ignoring that they have legs, instead dragging themselves by their arms everywhere (a behavior important to correct early).
Slims start getting their stripe-fluff latest by half a year. These feathers are more solid than the cottony covering and all show a unique stripe pattern. While they may walk just fine, they aren't yet good speakers, and even among their age, they use signs a lot more than speech. Complex words and signs come with a better understanding of concepts. Before any of that, they can't be trusted running in the fields without an older sibling.
It can sometimes take over a year before a running child can be trusted with running.
By this point, some children will also slowly gain new coloration that, in some cultures, will decide their gender early. This isn't always a good idea, with how long the coat takes to develop and how much assuming has to be made based on older siblings and parent colors. So most slomen until a certain age are not gendered.
The new colors always start higher on the body. So most often, the face is the first to become fully covered in "adult" feathers. But yes, this transition takes their whole childhood and only becomes faster at puberty, where other changes come.
When it comes to scent, the youngest chicks share a very similar scent that is recognized as the baby smell. Later, they develop their more personal one to be recognized by by their peers easily among the many.
It's only in puberty that a personal scent can tell someone which sex someone may be.
Until older, slomen also have much smaller scent glands on their face, which makes their faces a lot flatter than an adult's. The air space in the area also grows.
Most definitely. Just like human babies, slom ones whine.
Although, since they are more independent sooner than human children, being able to walk or even run, they don't need to scream to attract the adults' attention as much. They can come and get the attention themselves. So they will run, climb, poke, scream, and if they are extra naughty, knock stuff over like a cat that has not been fed for 500 years.
Various art & portions of lore for my Astro-Sapiens, Organnauts, Shape-Shifters, and others.
Most inspiration comes from many of H.R. Giger’s works and John Carpenter’s ‘The Thing.’
There might be some inconsistencies because some of these are older, and sorry for grammar mistakes and misusage of words.
Styraphant mouth mechanics! This is like a part one primer before I get into the FOOD aspect. Further knowledge below the cut!
Styraphants of course have two interlocking trunks that function analogously to the arms of a human, but at the end of the day the main purpose of them is for feeding. Descended from browsing ancestors, the trunks basically function as a conveyor belt for plant matter leading towards a gnashing, grinding beak. The upper teeth of the beak grind against each other to break food down into a fine paste, which is very necessary since their esophagus is very narrow as it runs through their brain. Styraphants cant really swallow anything larger than an almond without risking serious damage so chewing is ESSENTIAL!
This feeding pattern wears down their teeth pretty bad leading to modern folk opting to use gastroliths and spare their teeth as much as possible. Styraphants are eating all day so they really value their teeth! They typically leave the bottom half of their trunk empty for daily tasks, but will always have something their chewing on in their gizzard. Just before the gizzard they can 'queue' up food in waiting so they can keep on munching.
All in all they be munching. Most will only be food free in circumstances where they need their entire trunk. But the majority of the time they will be just finishing up breakfast when lunch rolls around!
In the Spectrum Solar System in Broken Yolk Galaxy, three roommates travel from planet to planet on the spaceship Appex (x)(x), for work and misadventures.
Rutan was born and raised in a zrai community on a space colony that broke off from an older zrai colony that was uplifted by the sophant space faring nedal centuries ago, which chose to recreate ancient zrai traditions. He was brought up to follow his ancient ancestors’ culture, but grew up ostracized due a skin condition that makes communication difficult and leaves him with difficulty socializing. It also didn’t help that he was more interested in nedal culture, and that the art he wanted to make didn’t follow his cultural norms. So when a pair of nedal ambassadors recognize his artistic prowess, Rutan made the tough decision to move abroad on-planet to study art in a nedal university. With the accommodations he received, he was able to graduate in 3D modeling and animation. He works for a while in animation before going solo.
He acquires the spaceship Appex and decided to pilot it around the solar system traveling to new places. He does this at first on his own, and still does so now with his roommates. Rutan is sociable and energetic, though his lack of close friends throughout most of his life left him prone to being clingy and naive to being taken advantage of. He greatly enjoy the company of close friends, but because it’s a rarity for him, he’s adapted to his favorite hobbies which he mainly does alone, such as urban exploring overlooked infrastructure, surfing ancient websites that are centuries old, and artistically recreating his dreams.
Donelja is a delorix who’s from a moon colony that’s cohabitated by delorix and masakas. The main landmark of the moon colony is an expansive national park that they’ve dreamed of working in since childhood. Biology is a life long passion for Don, but earning an academic certification in it has been a life long struggle. Only being able to graduate in general studies, Don tried various volunteer work in the nature preserve instead, living year to year in various leased board housing, but was never satisfied doing ‘grunt” maintenance when they wanted instead to be a scientist.
It wasn’t until Don met Rutan visiting the moons’ national park, offering more permanent room in his ship, did Don see an opportunity to work more closely with the preserves’ scientists by hauling their bio samples off-moon to the neighboring planets’ laboratories. Don became more satisfied working more directly with the scientists they admired since childhood, though still laments not being to do their work directly. Don has pathological anger issues, and resents their lot in life. It’s been an uplifting opportunity to have a friend like Rutan as support in their career and emotionally. They both bond over journaling, while Rutan journals about cities in their travels, Don journals about the nature they come across.
Vertex spent several months on the run as a hobo before Rutan offered to take him in, something Donelja was never on board with, but ultimately whatever captain Rutan says goes! Ver doesn’t like talking about where they came from, and is emotionally closed off. They’re constantly taking about moving out of spaceship to live on their own while in the middle of six month interplanetary trips, yet can never find a “good enough” place to do so. Their home planet, the only place in the solar system that would easily make room for them, they consider “crummy” and “off limits” for some reason.
Vertex is closed off and uncooperative, which irritates Donelja, and is easily forgiven my Rutan. Ver spends most of their time borrowing Rutan’s tablet, so at least they’re quite and out of the way for the most part.
Basic masterpost of all the Broken Yolk Galaxy sophonts, all drawn to scale. These are (almost) all space fairing species originating and coexisting within the colliding galaxies of Broken Yolk. Their space fairing histories collectively go back several thousand years. An overview of their history can be read below.
The nedal have the longest history in space, going back thousands of years. This hypersocial people spent the first millennia or two exploring and sending satellites to the far reaches of the galaxy and building simple colonies on neighboring planets beyond their homeworld looking for signs of life to befriend, or at least to care for. They've spent centuries feeling alone in the universe until they came across the planet of the zrai. All zrai originate from hunter-gatherer villages centered around their "mother" polyps, with cultures highly invested in socializing, the arts, altered states of consciousness and memory sharing. The nedal, elated to have finally found "space friends", made a vigorous attempt to befriend and aid the zrai "to civilization in space", to varying degrees of success depending on how much each village was willing to meddle with foreign extra terrestrial influence. To the initial confusion (and at worst abandonment anxiety) of the nedal, most zrai villages rejected this treatment and contact altogether, only some were open to a close allyship, and only a rare few consented to be uplifted to join the nedal in space. All modern space populations of zrai outside their homeworld are descendants of these past uplifted zrai.
Nedal made contact next with the delorix, who by now have settled with a few of their own intricately complex space colonies across the galaxy. The delorix, who focus their space expansion on terraforming, bioengineering and planting life on other planets, saw a common goal with the nedal, and together the two pulled resources to build more colonies across the galaxy, often with settled planets housing delorix and nedal (and the uplifted zrai under nedal care when applicable) in cohabitation.
Nedal made contact next with the delorix, who by now have settled with a few of their own intricately complex space colonies across the galaxy. The delorix, who focus their space expansion on terraforming, bioengineering and planting life on other planets, saw a common goal with the nedal, and together the two pulled resources to build more colonies across the galaxy, often with settled planets housing delorix and nedal (and the uplifted zrai under nedal care when applicable) in cohabitation.
Nedal made contact next with the delorix, who by now have settled with a few of their own intricately complex space colonies across the galaxy. The delorix, who focus their space expansion on terraforming, bioengineering and planting life on other planets, saw a common goal with the nedal, and together the two pulled resources to build more colonies across the galaxy, often with settled planets housing delorix and nedal (and the uplifted zrai under nedal care when applicable) in cohabitation.
While the delorix and nedal/zrai colonies expanded in one corner of the galaxy, their satellites orbiting around another corner observed an unusual amount of star and planet debris. They'd come to discover this was not due to a natural phenomena, but had agency behind it. Turns out the cause was the masaka warring with the smazel over territory. The dominant religious group of the smazel homeworld began a crusade centuries ago against the perceived corruptions of physical reality that led to fully detonating their own planet with the belief that it would bring a rapture that would cleanse reality of corruption. When that didn't happen, their agenda shifted to other planets and stars, with the goal having shifted to detonating as many of them as possible until the rapture they've prophesied comes true. The masakas, who were expanding their territory for resources and trade opportunities amongst their own space faring countries, just happened to get caught up in the crossfires of the smazel empire crusade. This conflict was spreading across the galaxy, encroaching the nedal and delorix colonies. Informed by their satellite data, they prepared for their first and only intragalactic war.
Once the smazel were up against two more attacking space militaries, their close wins gradually shifted toward accumulating losses, though this took place over the course of long grueling centuries and did not come without many tragic casualties and planet busted worlds. As time went on, growing countercultural smazel groups budded off and fought against their own empire's agenda as well. In the modern day, the crusading smazel empire has lost most of it's power, but still carries out their agenda in more covert ways that don't rely on military might (such as hacking, sabotaging resources, and propaganda). Most countercultural smazel have remained broken off from their parent empire, and either continue living independently in their spaceship colonies (where they are free to govern themselves but can be left more vulnerable to crusader attacks and influence) or have integrated into cohabitation with other sophont governments (where they are more beholden to foreign influence but tend to be left more secure from crusaders). Some corners of the galaxy are more vulnerable to crusader influences than others. With how quickly smazel reproduce compared to the other sophonts and their ability to adapt quickly to using new technologies made by other aliens, some think it's unlikely the crusading empire's agenda will ever be fully abolished permanently.
The main setting I'm exploring in BYG takes place at least a few centuries after this intragalactic war, and isn't focused on it, but the effects and legacy of it no doubt still has a hold on it.
getting into my weird creature designing. i call these guys ali'geck because theyre... alien geckos... more or less. idk how to name things. it's ok i designed them specifically for me :)
Sprites are the complete opposite from the Dragon hunters. Less stoic and hardheaded, more cheerful and peaceful in comparison. They arent the voice of reason in this chaotic world, but decide to have a more thoughtful approach, cheerishing the nature of Deadlands while staying wary of the Hunters themselves, seeing them as nothing other than ''silly and childish'' for their actions, and a potential danger if they happen to be found by them. Their colony is massive, built from mud, grasses and twigs, with multiple rooms and compartments for storing various food related items or trinkets.
And in the center their colony, their chief resides. Momomi the great, a Sprite born with gigantism. He lost the ability to fly long... long ago, so he is quite dependant of his people, a bit of a prankster but also a wise, kind-hearted ol' bag of feathers. They may look harmless, and while they dont wish upon harming anything, Sprites pack a nasty bite with those serrated beaks, and their claws are sharp enough to rip and tear tough vegetation. They communicate through clicking with their beaks or via screeches to express distress, and are fully capable of learning other languages via mimicry
