Creation of Free Spacer Aliens

Posted on May 20, 2010 | 2 comments

Last Post I told you all about aliens and my journey to bring aliens into Free Spacer. I was asked to tell you more about “the method used to design your aliens… …How did you determine your desired criteria for what was acceptable and what wasn’t”.

Random Alien Generator

One of the Pillars of Design for Free Spacer is that the game allows the Gamemaster & Players to be the authors of their own adventures. To espouse this design goal I am using the same tools that I am creating for the Gamemaster. The core setting tool, under development, is the Sector Generator. This tool will allow the Gamemaster to create an entire sector from the system to the life inhabiting it including fully playable Alien Sophonts.

The Sector Generator will be a group of unconnected charts allowing the Gamemaster to create a full Sector quickly from any direction.

When the aliens were originally designed, only the Sophont Generator segment of the Sector Generator was complete. After a lot of research and testing I decided against some of the standard categorisations, such as mammal and reptile, judging them too earth-centric. Instead I divided the Sophont generator into four categories: Structure, Diet, Reproduction, and Details. I then figured out the most probable options for each category.

For example, the structure charts determine the number of limbs, percentage of these that are manipulators, type of Skelton, type of locomotion, and average mass and length.

I made each chart to return the most likely outcome and restricted the stranger outcomes to those that are usable in the world.

For example, the most common number of limbs on a Sophont is five (includes tail) with the highest number at eight and the lowest at 3.

The generator is designed that the most common return will not be human; instead the most common return will be strangely average being not too different or hard to understand.

The Chart also returns a set of natural Skill augmentations that allow aliens to be mechanically different without taking over individual characters choices in life. One of our design goals was to make aliens that were not typecast into particular roles like Klingons.

Societies

One choice I made early in the design process, is that Alien species would not dictate the Society the aliens were a member of.  In Free Spacer there is no Human Federation or Alien Empire. Instead all major powers are multispecies, a particular species may establish, be more common, or even dominate the society, but there would be very few mono-species societies. This decision had huge repercussions; it made characterising both species and societies far more difficult. It also made it much more difficult to explain the alien species to players. Still this decision had its desired effect, much more believable societies and species that would believably function.

Making Aliens

When making the aliens we used a combination of Random rolls and inspiration based choices to build up the list of ten aliens. To ensure our aliens were not ridiculous assortment we created two directly from humans and created a few guidelines to help us through the process:

1. Cannot be too similar to one another
2. Must be able to fit inside a Starship
3. Cannot  be one animal in bipedal form
4. Must be memorable, fun to play, and a bit awesome.
5. Must be able to manipulate objects with its hand or other type of manipulator.
6. Must have a face to allow emotions.

While these simple rules seem obvious, they were much more difficult to implement then you might think, especially during the art phase. People have a tendency to generalise an alien. I would often hear players say things like “Lizard guy”, “Armadillo Guy”, or “Plant lady” and art concepts would initially come out as generalised.

Result

After all this work my art director is currently inking and colouring the Alien concepts. While it is still easily possible to generalise the aliens as “Armadillo Guy” or whatnot, but if you think about it, Avatar Aliens are just big blue cat people. Still Free Spacer Aliens are different enough to give them more depth than that. I think they look great and would love to hear what you all have to say. An upcoming post will introduce you to one of the aliens and explain their specific design process.