I have partial spritesheets for a number of race mods, and prototypes for some of their armor, and am trying to decide which to finalize and create an actual mod for. As such, I would like to know which of the following concepts would interest you guys the most: 1: Selachs Serpentine, quadrupedal shark people Tech/building style: very bulky overengineered magitek (think Aperture Science, but built by sane people that are also wizards; or, to put it another way, wizard robe power armor). Cultural style: centered entirely around their intense fear of danger. Player character’s scanning characterization paints them as one of the few brave enough to join the protectorate; bravery is undermined instantly during initial attack of the Ruin. Mission concept: horror-themed, part of the horror being basically a joke about how ridiculous the way sharks rot looks (not to put all too fine a point on it, 90% of aquatic cryptids are basking shark remains). Customization options: head fin shape, body color and arm and leg fin color. Pros: 1. Their heads are, despite their strange shape, easy to rework head armor for. 2. Their head sprites are the most natural-looking and suited to expression of the various prototype sprites. Cons: 1. Non-humanoid shape that lacks clearly defined torso means difficulty making leg and torso armor compatible. 2. Tech style is difficult to work with. 2: Merosta Humanoid sea scorpion people Tech/building style: organic Cultural style: early 20th century American cities. They make huge, occasionally underwater sky scrapers on toxic planets Customization options: head fin shape, primary exoskeleton color, secondary exoskeleton color Pros: 1. Body shape fits normal torso and leg armors, apart from tail; head is only divergent aspect, but heads are the easiest to do complete resprites for, so all vanilla cosmetic armor sets should be available for them within a reasonable timeframe. 2. There’s a very fitting completely unique weapon type I could give them: tentacle guns. Cons: 1. Cultural style overlaps with penguins. 3: Udolmids Bipedal, turtle-dragon-fish people Building style: modern west European cities. Buildings tend to be large, multi-story and feature large amounts of exposed brick. Tech/general style: Hard sci-fi, but with a side of “ordinary guys, but for people who find humans boring visually”. For their general aesthetic, picture container ships or coach buses. Ship is a realistic sci-fi-style “gravity ring” setup, viewed from front-to-back instead of from the side. Customization options: head fin shape, shell color, flesh color, webbing color Pros: 1. Has a lot of lore pre-written for them regarding history and biology 2. Ship concept is novel. 3. Uses modified techs to give them the ability to use a second set of arms as grappling hooks to give a more unique experience during play. They would be able to use the vanilla techs with this, but this would just add extra code to the existing techs so they would be able to use both them and their grappling hook arms at the same time. Cons: 1. Entirely non-humanoid body shape means incompatibility with all armors, which means that it could take a very long time for the vanilla cosmetic armors to become available to them. 2. Grappling hook arm tech will be difficult to implement, will most likely only become available late in mod development. 3. Kinda plain in terms of cultural and tech/building style, few unique hooks for people to work off of when coming up with their own characters. 4: Glaspi Box jellyfish people; in case you don't know what box jellyfish are, they're like normal jellyfish, only somewhat square and have four advanced, human-like eyes. To make them a bit less plain visually, they have hardened discs on their head similarly to some man-o-war species. Tech/cultural style: unapologetically silly retro space; think pulp sci-fi magazines. Their ship is the classic “oval with fins rocket” setup. Basically, if a work of sci-fi talks about swamps on venus, it’s their territory. Their buildings, since that’s not something that genre of sci-fi focuses on much, is more giant submarines and arctic bases, both found on arctic planets. Mission concept: You join up with a stereotypical sci-fi crew, fight a bizarre monster for no clear reason, and it apparently turns out the archnemesis of the sci-fi crew, who has not been foreshadowed or mentioned previously at all, was the reason for this. Customization options: head tentacle shape, leg, arm and head tentacle color, body color, cranial disc color Pros: 1. Style is broad yet specific enough to provide hooks for people’s own characters. 2. Easy to make a broad variety of armors for. 3. Humanoid except for the heads, so easy to get vanilla cosmetic armor sets working for. 4. Offers unique mechanic possibility of duplicating food using a nutrient paste machine. Cons: 1. Kinda plain visually, albeit not more so than the vanilla races. 5: Gouille Scale-armored, partially stone slug-people (yes, slugs that are partially made out of stone really exist; they’re called chitons), with dragon-like wings; kind of like gargoyles. Tech/cultural style: pre-medieval Slavic. Basically, if your mental image involves classic three-headed, four-legs, fire-breathing two-wings dragons, very ornate castles, stone rituals or princesses slaughtering armies singlehandedly, you’ve got the right idea. Because the main god in Slavic mythology was strongly associated with lightning, they also have a lot of lightning theming going on. Customization options: horn shape, flesh color, primary scale color, secondary scale color Pros: 1. Humanoid except the wings and head; wings can if necessary be made equippable items to avoid conflicts with back items, so easy to get vanilla cosmetic armor sets working for. 2. Cultural/tech style is very distinct from vanilla Starbound, offers several hooks for people coming up with their own character’s backstories. Cons: 1. Cultural/tech style is somewhat similar to what’s being done by the Saturnian race mod.
They all sound fun. Depends what you feel like - I would like to see more none bog standard bipedal races, so 1 or 3 would be more of interest. Having said that, they're also going to be the two biggest timesinks for you.
Since I imagine this is relatively uninteresting without some visual of what the work-in-progress sprites actually look like, here are some examples from each concept: The first row is just the plain, naked species sprites, the second row contains, in order, a Selach in an alternate color scheme (because I haven't completed any Selach armor set sprites yet), the Tier 1 Merosta armor (the initial Merosta armor is supposed to resemble relatively uncomplicated, undifferentiated flesh, but later tiers resemble specific groups of animals, like vertebrates and sponges), an Udolmid fancy dress cosmetic set (Udolmids have weak electroreception, which in practice means particularly conductive materials, like copper, appeal to them), a Glaspi casual cosmetic set (because I wanted to make something approximately as ridiculous-looking as old sci fi movie civilian clothing) and a set of Gouille cloth cosmetic armor.