selkra-souza

[selkra-souza]

GANG'S ALL HERE!!!!!

Ft. Some doodles :D

[selkra-souza]

I had to draw him or I was going to explode.

[selkra-souza]

Rumination.

[selkra-souza]

Brain bugs! 🙌 ✨

I love how snooty Disgust looks 💚

just remembered inside out. I think my brain is controlled by funny little bugs

[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. 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. 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]

On Happiness

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Covetous and fickle

The colors, the stories, the corpses

Turn not thine eye to look inside

It is the world that sparkles

-

[selkra-souza]

Each of the five sophant species of BYG can't eat each others' food, so when it comes to bonding at the table, they turn to sparkle water, which is carbonated water that's often colored with inorganic artificial dyes that are synthesized to be chemically harmless to each species.

Vertex and Donelja don't get along often, but they're willing to make do over this drink.

[selkra-souza]

🧡.

On Anxiety

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WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AT WAR

WITH VENOM DRIPPING FROM MY TOOTH

I SHALL MEET MY ENEMY, CLOSE AT HAND

WHO HIDES BEHIND BRIGHT CURTAINS

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[selkra-souza]

Dream locations

[selkra-souza]

Thinking about my fusion between Joy and Anger being called Passion and dressing like a punk jester. The hat, the jacket, the patches… thinking about it.

[selkra-souza]

These goobers.

They’re still awesome ✨

finally... my emotionsonas ref/height chart! for future reference just in case!

[selkra-souza]

On Dread

I SEE A POINT IN THE DISTANCE

IN ITS GRAVITY I STAND TRANSFIXED

THERE IS NO OTHER ORBIT

INTO WHICH WE SHALL ESCAPE

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on Solace

LIGHT WITH NO BEGINNING

LIKEWISE HAS NO END

THE RACE WE’VE ALL BEEN RUNNING

WE WERE NEVER GOING TO WIN

[selkra-souza]

Do iiiiit :)

The fun parts of spec bio and world building: designing creatures, their habitat and clothes for them to wear

The scary parts of spec bio and world building: biochemistry, economies and conlangs

[selkra-souza]

On Envy

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I AM A CHASM THROUGH AND THROUGH

A HUNGRY HOLLOW VOID

EVERY JEWEL THAT’S EVER GLITTERED

COULD NOT HOPE TO FILL MY THROAT

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[selkra-souza]

if inside out was based on how i feel/experience emotions

[selkra-souza]

I’ve decided the zrai are no longer this sexually dimorphic, because I’ve lost interest in giving them matriarchal cultures. Both sexes now look how the males are depicted above. Gender still exists for them but it’s not a very influential part of their cultures.

The stripe patterns are also a bit different too, but the choromatophore color chart is still accurate in a simplified way.

Zrai are cold blooded and have smooth moist skin fit for the semi-aquatic environment they evolved in, the salty reef-mangrove coastlines. They've evolved chromatophores on their skin to display their emotions, and every zrai language heavily incorporates color as a supplement to vocal speech, which is especially useful underwater. Each language uses unique colorful flashing stripe patterns, but all their languages use the same color for each emotion, with few exceptions.

It's very difficult but possible for a zrai to learn how display any color they want independently of how they feel, it's a skill that generally takes years of practice to pull off effectively, though rarely it comes naturally for a small few. Those that can pull this off are usually regarded by fellow zrai and other sophant species in the galaxy as emotionally mature and above average intelligence compared to other zrai, and often live in or move to nedal settlements to pursue careers in acting and performance (though it varies whether they live up to the high exceptions put for them).

Males evolved to generally have more choromatophores so their matriarchal female partner can keep better track of their harem. Also, most females who you ask would tell you it makes them more cute :>

[selkra-souza]

Still loving all their color pallets! The greens on Trevoga ✨💚

my headbugs