#alien sophant

[selkra-souza]

Each day that goes by, I get more satisfied with my alien designs. For example I plucked the butt ears off the masaka and gave them to the nedal, and replaced that detail with flower inspired facial displays.

Can see right through these things irl before editing *sob emoji*

[selkra-souza]

In the modern day, most smazel live their whole lives in their self sufficient space stations navigating outside the orbits of stars, preferring their isolation. But some of these space habitats are lived in by smazel communities who immigrate to inhabited star systems, who are more receptive to interacting with aliens. Many orbit these star systems and simply trade with aliens, but some take it a step further and integrate directly with them.

Above shows an exchange program between multigenerations of a smazel family and an individual nedal who starts this career young and continues this work into their older years. Nedal colonies across the galaxy are all too ready to work their ambassador programs toward assimilating smazels into the galactic community.

[selkra-souza]

At this tropical beach during the autumn season, sweet polyp algae fruit bloom while in the rock-like corals at the edge of the sea. The toddler twins and cousins of two siblings find a coral loaded with them during the low tide, not caring that their new colorful flowing armings are being ripped to shreds as they dig into the tight jagged chambers.

[selkra-souza]

A polycule of nedal traveling in their home spaceship - scheduled to land on-planet in about an hour - strap on their leg braces. Cultures of sophants who are accustomed to space life in zero or microgravity often need to reinforce their limbs with mechanical braces to handle the gravity of terrestrial planets. This family is really into the stylish laces of their braces :)

[selkra-souza]

It’s that stage of alien design where you pluck a part off one to give to another. Figured butt ears would look more interesting on the nedal rather than the masaka, and more interesting than their previous normal ear holes on their head that I didn’t even draw as a shorthand half the time.

+32 frolicking ability; it suits these space bards well

[selkra-souza]

Your species are so cool. How did you go about designing them and what advice do you have for a person myself looking to get into speculative biology?

How I went about designing my alien species and how I advise others to do it are quite different!

I've had a life-long appreciation for critters. I've been drawing animals and made up creatures since I was 4 years old. It accelerated during my childhood thanks to being a huge fan of Sonic and Neopets. It really kicked into gear when I first got Spore in 2009, I got obsessed with playing it, designing alien animals and civilizations and their space opera wars. This is when I first designed the alien sophants I have for Broken Yolk Galaxy today, they all looked very different back then. Below is what the delorix (left) and masaka (right) first looked like in 2009 :v funi fellas

I found the spec bio art community on deviantart and more relevantly on tumblr in the mid to late 2010s and it happened after years of having my Broken Yolk Galaxy lore be a dramatic war-heavy space opera, I was pretty burnt out with that by then because space wars didn’t interest me anymore but I didn’t know what else to do with this lore. So when I found spec bio and its emphasis on world building, culture, and often more slice of life stories with sophant characters, it revitalized my interest in my Spore aliens and it inspired a sort of reboot where I remade the alien species to be more of a worldbuilding project as opposed to "merely" Spore fanart, which was fun for me! And that's the vibes of BYG running to this day.

★ BUT! All this art work has been going on since I started playing Spore in 2009. Most of those years were sent being an inexperienced tween, teen and freshly new adult. There's faster ways to start getting into making speculative biology designs if you want to start now! When I feel stuck with my own worldbuilding and designs, this is what I do:

Get REALLY nerdy about biology: Watch nature documentaries on Youtube about animal life cycles; read books about mushroom classification; go down wikipedia article rabbit holes about how the Krebs Cycle works; take walks around your neighborhood and pay close attention to the local plants and bugs; get curious and identify them using iNaturalist, Plantnet, Picture This; read biology textbooks from Libgen; anything goes! Learn about anything and everything you can get your hands on. Find time to observe and learn about nature a little every day however you can. Find joy in it! Make this a part of your personality. BONUS POINTS if you also get nerdy about tangential sciences like geomorphology, meterology, cosmolgy, chemistry, psychology, etc, because those subjects can also help inform your spec bio designs.

Now that you're immersing yourself into all sorts of biology (and hopefully other science) related subjects, start paying attention to what REALLY interests you specifically: Maybe you end up thinking the physiology of kangaroos hopping is really cool for example, and maybe you notice you have an interest in anthropology (such as studying differences between nomadic and settled cultures), and maybe you think a bisex species has the potential to have unique perspectives with gender. These three interests can be put together into one spec bio species. The more you learn about those three topics, the more information you have to use as inspiration for your created species. This is an example of what I've done with the delorix.

2.5. Speculative Biology design is about being a jack of all trades (as you learn more about the science), but it's also about finding your niche (based on your interests from Step 2): You're likely to keep learning a lot about biology and other sciences with time, but it can feel extremely daunting to try and incorporate everything you learn into your worldbuilding. I made this mistake, and it's a quick road to burnout, so don't do it! Focus on the stuff you have learned that interests you and remix them into something new! You could potentially find interest in anything! If you really like biochemistry and linguistics, you might gravitate to creating speculative pheromones with specific chemical compounds used for communication or even complex language. If you really like insects with complete metamorphosis (like butterflies), and developmental psychology, maybe your focus will be creating a species with complete metamorphosis and how they spend their larvae stage as intelligent sophants with culture they pass down before transforming into short-lived adult stages that only reproduce. Any knowledge can be remixed into something new. ★ While typing this up, I got an idea: if you ever feel really stuck in this stage, write up all your interesting fun facts on slips of paper and place them in a jar, and prompt yourself with new ideas by picking out two or three of these papers randomly from the jar without looking, then smush all two or three of those ideas together to create something new!

3. Don't forget to have fun lol: Don't be afraid to scrap and recton and change and de-emphasize ideas later on down the line if it means making the lore you make more fun to play with. Maybe you suddenly don't want to worldbuild detailed space wars anymore like I did with BYG, so I stopped putting a major focus on it (it still exists as past history with a legacy, but it’s no longer the focus of my main setting). Maybe you've lost interest in creating a matriarchal culture, so scrap it and replace it with something else you're now interested in (I made this change with the zrai species). The point is to have fun with it! I only learned this lesson surprisingly recently :v

My spec bio species in BYG have an emphasis on developing coexisting space alien sophant cultures, but spec bio can be approached in any way really. I haven't even really mentioned about the spec bio I do for my emotionsona headworld, but that spec bio is more cartoony, fantastical and built on puns, metaphors and Rule Of Cool because instead of being made of matter and physics, it’s a world made of imagination. I don’t really have to think about how functioning eyeballs attached to a moth wing would work because it looks cool and is based on the “false eyes” wing pattern seen on many real moth species. (On the right is the Io Moth (Automeris io) photographed by Susan Sanders).

BYG meanwhile has a more realistic angle. Pretty much two ends of a cartoony to realism spectrum. Spec bio world building can take any form really: it can all take place on one planet, or all take place inside a single organism, have a hard or soft sci fi leaning, or could be under the fantasy genre instead, sky's the limit. Pick your favorite and run with it like a horse into the sunset ★

[selkra-souza]

Some character prompts for BYG!

For existing characters: What's their living condition, what does their room look like. Who's the best at cooking? Characters' fav item (clothes, weapons, misc...)? What crimes have they commited? What did they look like as children?

To create new characters: Gentle giant. Small but feisty. Scrungly down-on-their-luck. No nonsense leader.

What about space jobs? Space pirate. Spaceship door to spaceship door salesman. Mech mechanic. Asteroid field clandestine racer. Alien doctor. Space priest...

Feel free to take inspiration from any of these (I might draw some of these myself)

I'll pick who's the best cook because that one's easy: Donelja is the best cook because they're the only one who cooks. The Appex spaceship the trio live in is Rutan's ship, but it's a ship that was built to accommodate delorix the most comfortably, so Don is the one who's the most ergonomically comfortable in it, which includes the use of the kitchen and food storage. Don can actually cook with fresh ingredients when the ship make pit stops to locations that provide them.

The other two pretty much make do with freeze dried, canned and other foods made to be stored long term. Rutan is an obligate carnivore who's comfortable eating one huge GMO (made for zrai) vegetative aquatic animal sausage per week, containing all the necessary muscle, fats and atrophied organs for balanced nutrition. Vertex is a herbivore who technically needs a balance diet of various foliage species, but when he first starts living in the Appex, he kind of just ends up eating TV dinners Rutan gives him from his personal collection. Ru likes to collect colorful nedal foods he can't eat because they come in cute and colorful packaging, often featuring his favorite mascots on them. He's had them on his shelf for years. It took months to reach their next pit stop, so eventually Vertex was able to get actual fresh food, but until that point he had to put up with old junk food that was stale as hell.