Last week, we talked about the planets of the sector you’ll be traversing during your time playing The Chaser’s Voyage. This week, I’ll be showing off the different denizens of the sector that will make up your potential clients. One of the best parts of making a sci-fi/fantasy setting is creating all sorts of fun and interesting new sapient species, so we were really excited to not only show off some alien creatures, but also to write some history for them. Like most of our art, we gave our artist a lot of freedom when it came to the designs, only offering our input to make some refinements (adjustments that fit better into the larger lore we had in mind) or just some designs we really wanted to have in. From there, we wrote backstories to fit the designs, doing our best to avoid any typical alien tropes that one might see in a lot of sci-fi settings. We particularly wanted to avoid any kind of histories that would imply that everyone of a particular species shared a belief, mindset, or personality type.

 

Humans

 

 

Of course, humans exist and are quite common. We even have all our your crew mate characters be human. We did this because while encountering and befriending aliens is fun, we wanted to ensure that the vast diversity of humans was also represented in our game (and even then we were unfortunately limited since we only have four crew mates). In a lot of sci-fi/sci-fantasy stories I’ve encountered, humans are always very common either through massive colonization, a focus on places like Earth, or their commonness was not really explored at all. We wanted to explain this commonality in a different way. When thinking of the human backstory, I was inspired by an episode of Power Rangers (of all things) where they hand waved extra-terrestrial  humans by simply saying “humans exist elsewhere too.” As far as I know, that was never explained in the context of the series, but I liked the idea. So, we decided that humans would be a kind of galactic mystery, where despite what evolutionary science might say, humans came about independently on vastly different planets, all over the galaxy, thus explaining how common they are.

 

As for the other species, well, I don’t want to spoil too much since you’ll be able to find out more about them in the crew journal, once we implement it. So, I’ll give you just a little preview of them here.

 

Chlik

 

 

The chlik are an imp-like people from the swampy planet of Yazou. Thousands of years ago they colonized planets that would would later be collectively known as the Deadworlds.

 

Faeian

 

The faeians are elf-like humanoids from the forest planet, Tethalon. One of the insignias that you can equip in the game, The Angel of the Radiant Moon, is actually tied directly to faeian culture as part of their most common religion.

 

Fear-Eaters

 

These goblin-like creatures were part of the warrior caste in the religious theocracy on the planet Temekko. Since the fall of that theocracy, fear-eaters are way more common throughout the sector.

 

Gnathus

 

The gnathus are a fish like species, though they’re more like amphibians, living both on land and underwater. When it came to making different varieties of gnathus we wanted a mix of colors reminiscent to real world fish, with some being explicitly more tropical and others being more arctic. They originated on the icy world of Balitore, though because of their advanced colonization methods, their coloration changed to adapt to new environments.

 

Gryphinian

Gryphinians are avian people from the mountain world of Ai’lika. Like gnathus, we wanted the variety of colors for this species to resemble the birds we have on earth.

 

Ka’koi

 

The ka’koi are a lizard-like species from the industrial world of Agasta. They’re kind of our example of how a species could be designed in such a way to fit a character archetype, but you could still easily apply those traits to fit different kinds of characters. Ka’koi’s eyes, for example, are described as being perfect for hunting, but we say in-game that characterizing them as bounty hunters and warriors is a stereotype and that plenty of ka’koi have gone on to use their innate abilities for medical work, racing, and farming, among other pursuits.

 

Kingii

 

Our other lizard inspired species, the kingii, is the first species on this list to not originate within Sector 99 (besides humans). They are from Klik-Sss in Sector 22.

 

Maloodans

 

The mysterious maloodans are from the wasteland world known as Dusta. This species was an interesting challenge to write for because they were designed with a mask, but since you could encounter so many of them I had to come up with a reason for why they would all wear masks. What I came up with is that it’s a breathing apparatus featuring some of their cultural designs. Had we more opportunities to explore other maloodan characters, I think it would have been neat to have more variety in their masks. Oh well, there’s always the sequel.

 

Mayvian

 

The mayvians are spider people that are the descendants of those who survived a major cataclysm that happened on their home world of Old Serata. I wanted to take this opportunity to show that in this galaxy, those big origin myths that might be the backstory for an entire saga can just be fun information to anyone else.

 

Nygothan

 

 

The nygothans are another species from outside the sector, like the kingii. Their people’s history is seeped in some of our deep lore, so instead I’ll share some of the thoughts we had developing them. While the other species were designed to be gender neutral in their presentation, the nygothan design we chose was more feminine. So, we used it as kind of an opportunity to riff on the, frankly, annoying trope of the all female alien species. They only look all female due to our biases in our perspective. Their species just has very different, culturally contextualized, ways of presenting gender (kinda like us humans do.)

 

Paju

 

The poor paju come from the forest world Quitos, but mass colonization eventually forced them to all migrate off world. Their sad backstory was directly inspired by those sad little eyes.

 

Sin-Eater

 

Sin-eaters were the lowest caste on Temekko and used their special ability to make people forget specific memories. Then, they would have to atone for those sins themselves. Luckily, most sin-eaters live less traumatic lives now.

 

Todean

 

While I’m not entirely sure, I think I was inspired by some of the jokes in Portal 2 when making the backstory for the mantis-like Todean people. They have strong cultural ties to genetic modifications. I think I want it to be ambiguous whether or not the mantis form is how this species naturally looked before they adopted genetic mutations, because that’s much funnier.

 

Xanapor

 

 

Finally, there’s the xanapor. When we saw this design, we loved how weird it was. In fact, I think we specifically wanted something really out there. So naturally, we had come up with a backstory just as weird and mysterious as they are.

 

 

These are the species of people you can find as clients, but throughout our crew journal we mention several more species. Usually they are just from outside the sector. All of the art featured here was done by our client artist Santi Leigh Biondolillo.

 

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