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How do you design?
Topic Started: Apr 11 2011, 07:19 PM (1,041 Views)
SIngemeister
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Hive Tyrant of the Essee Swarm

I go the rule of cool route, then plausible it up.
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RRRAAAAAARRRRGGGGHHH!!!!!
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bloom_boi
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What The?
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I either:

1:do a totally random doodle, smoothen it up, think about where it lives etc...
or
2:Do what Dorian does. Do the Dorian...
"You shall perish, whatever you do! If you are taken with arms in your hands, death! If you beg for mercy, death! Whichever way you turn, right, left, back, forward, up, down, death! You are not merely outside the law, you are outside humanity. Neither age nor sex shall save you and yours. You shall die, but first you shall taste the agony of your wife, your sister, your sons and daughters, even those in the cradle! Before your eyes the wounded man shall be taken out of the ambulance and hacked with bayonets or knocked down with the butt end of a rifle. He shall be dragged living by his broken leg or bleeding arm and flung like a suffering, groaning bundle of refuse into the gutter. Death! Death! Death!"



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Flisch
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Superhuman
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Mmh, in all honesty, I never really thought about this... The ideas usually just pop into my mind without me actively thinking about it.

I think the way how I come up with species is very different from project to project.

For Sagan 4 for instance, it was mostly about filling empty niches for me. More often than not I was even creating basic pieces of the food chain. Usually everyone just created interesting and highly specialised species and I always tried to make it the project more believeable by creating the Silverlings, Double Plents, Swarmers and Wingworms.

For my own pet project over at the Gamingsteve Fanfic forums, the planet Nai, I created the animals mostly by copying earth animals and alienise them. I had some basic features that defined all vertebrates on the planet and I would turn real life animals into Nai versions. Though, I guess there were some unique designs as well, especially the finheads, which I have never made public. Or the fishbowl beetle, which is basically exactly what the name implies.

For one-offs, such as contests, I mostly just design what's cool. The rudderhead for instance is one such creature. I don't know exactly what the initial inspiration was, but I thought it'd be cool to have a runner that steers with a large extension on its head rather than its tail.

For Cyto it is a different story altogether. Since I created all the kingdoms of life on the planet from the start-up, I can basically tweak a certain design that already exists to fill a new niche. This creates a very convincing ecosystem, where each animal is related to another one (same for plants) at a certain degree. It also helps to think of evolutional "hoops" as I call them. Usually, when you design alien ecosystems, most of the species seem to evolve linear. It's like you have the end of the evolution (current organisms) and the starting species from which you base all other evolutions, and all intermediate steps are simply transitional forms, as if you morphed from animal A to animal B without any history between. It's like going from a lancelet to a human, and totally ignoring the steps between that look like neither (reptiles, rodent like mammals etc.). This is what I think I successfully avoided in StG. However, this is also impractical for conventional projects, as you would basically have to design all of the evolutionary history, while showing only the end result.
We have a discord. If you want to join, simply message me, Icthyander or Sphenodon.
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Zoroaster
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Fecund Fundiment
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I like to start at the "top" and work down... it can be heavy going - because it's much easier to be enthusiastic about a large voracious predator and about some bug or worm or weed, so when you've done all the cool shit you then have to go back and work on the boring bugs and shit...

I kinda envision it like an amateur naturalist would on visiting an alien world - first they'd see the megafauna, then try to figure out how it fits into its ecosystem and the complexities at play, maybe try to eat it to see if it's nutricious?...
The Speccer Formerly Known As Magoo...
My exobio project(s) :
Hormizd / Zarathustra

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SabrWolf
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Pup
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Having done very little in the way of actually getting of my ass and working on any of my potential future/alternate evolution projects I don't have a really defined answer to this question.

However I do have a bit of insight into how I will likely be going about doing it in the future.

Step 1 - Define the biome I'm working in.
The biome needs to be well defined so that I can decide what niches exist. Without knowing what niches exist how could I possibly know what kind of flora/fauna would inhabit the area?

Step 2 - Define the niches.
Just because you know which "general" niches exist doesn't mean that you know "exactly" what all of those niches are. So by defining the exact niches, I can gain more insight into what organisms might inhabit that niche based on the flora/fauna that are close to that niche in the current day.

Step 3 - Define the global characteristics of animals.
There are some biomes (tundra for example) that allow for some very similar characteristics across all flora/fauna (some kind of thermal insulation or white coloration for fauna in the example given). In determining if the biome has a need for global characteristics I can then determine what adaptations these are and apply them to the organisms in said biome.

Step 4 - Determine the flora/fauna.
Once I begin thinking about what flora/fauna are close to the niches that I have defined I can then go about deciding exactly which organisms I want to use.

Step 5 - Determine the Evolutionary advantages.
Convergently evolve the flora/fauna chosen to have characteristics that the niche requires as well as incorporating any of the global characteristics that the biome requires.

Step 8 - Determine what other organisms would interact with the current one.
This helps in building food chains and deciding predator/prey relationships.

Step 7 - Step back and look at what I've got.
If the new flora or fauna seems plausible and believable, I stop. If it does not seem plausible or believable, I keep working at it to make sure that the organism IS reasonable in those respects.

Step 8 - Draw it.
Now that I have a defined idea of what the organism was, what it looks like, where it lives, and what it eats (eats it) I can put the idea to paper with several sketches.

...

Yeah. That sounds about right to me.
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Spugpow
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Prime Specimen
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I usually start with a concept, like "suppose there was an animal that combined an abdomen and head into one functional unit, rather than the head and thorax the way spiders do". From there I draw a creature, and then take the basic template and alter it to fit into different niches. I was annoyed when I found out that Purple Plasmid (Doodle Demmy) independently came up with this concept and posted it on Deviantart.
Spoiler: click to toggle


Another one is "suppose something like a flatfish evolved into a terrestrial form". Another guy on Deviantart, Preradkor, made this one.
Spoiler: click to toggle



My deviantart page: http://amnioticoef.deviantart.com/
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