Perseus Patrol devlog #6: Alien races
In this week’s devlog I wanted to address two things with the upcoming game:
- an overview of the important alien races in the big picture,
- and to introduce the main race to contrast humans against.
The first point is a long over-due one I have with both Giant of the Stars and now with Perseus Patrol, so here comes the details. For the second point however the route took more turns over the years and let me show how far I am from nailing down a design.
Overview of alien races in this universe
In this universe, the laws of a Dark Forest is not as important, yet still very few races develop into space-faring civilizations. For most galaxies, only 1 or 2 races manage to reach this level, for some none survive the great barriers of evolution.
Rule one of evolution in Souldash: life starts out everywhere easily, but extinction barriers are often encountered too.
Evolution requires a drive for survival which innately contradicts itself as it always drives ego and selfishness of individuals versus the survival of the race. Most extinction barriers center on this problem and large portion of the races drive themselves into it. For the remaining who encounter another space faring civ is the undoing of their beliefs with either assimilation or conquest remaining.
Yet all species experiment with forms of hierarchy and organization, one of the prequisitions to evolve. While our physics rules are the same, planets and systems create different environmental rules. With a wide variety of starting points, evolution plays out in a similar manner to Earth but with different traits elevated and punished.
This leaves us with a few relevant races playing in the Milkyway:
- Humans: fledgling democratic society with very varied cultures spreading into the Milkyway.
- Taries: old predatorial race in a great houses and casts structure mostly infighting while wandering the galaxy for new breeds of prey.
- Primordials: multi-galactic ancient race posessing the quantum technology secrets the other races are barely start to comprehend.
Quantum technology
In Souldash’s universe the quantum entanglement effect is greatly utilizable, allowing instant communication, then transfer of energy, even matter-energy conversion for ultra-advanced technologies.
Another effect this has is if anyone can know the position and motion of atoms on the quantum level at the same time, they would be able to calculate the future given they have fast computation.
Humans barely can make the quantum comms and FTL drives yet with some tricks they learned from the rebellion against the Taries. The Taries are practicing quantum-based planning for centuries and the Primordials mastered on top of these the energy harness of black holes, neutron stars and even quasars channeled into individuals.
A Primordial as such carries an almost limitless energy reserve quantum entangled into an energy potential harvester. The most ancient and strongest ones have amassed over thousands of sources along many galaxies.
Scale of the civilizations
Primordials being the fewest yet the longest living, practically immortal demigods. The Taries have a decent few colonies around their homeworld, but only an accidental discovery propels them near Earth. And after their collapse and rebound from the cataclysm what the Tary ship brought, humans spread to hundreds of worlds extremely quickly. While individually weak and fragile, their communities and institutions scale much greater.
Lesser species
On the journey you may interact or encounted other non-space faring species, some may be sapient and already formed their own language. Even industry, yet they still have plenty of extinctional barriers left in front of them. In this game, they are mostly inconsequential beyond some research utility.
The contrasting aliens, the Taries (plural) or Tary (singular)
Humanoid creatures, bipedal, eyes forward, but generally taller than humans, greyish, blueish colors of the skin (they developed under a blue giant on a rocky planet just a tiny bit smaller gravitational field).
Their human name derives from “Sagittarius” as their home world is known to be laying in the direction after the galactic core from the point of the Sun. They called themselves the … [unreadable] … and arrived from the planet … [redacted].
— Federal archive, 2453, Campignon, brief from the diary of Robert Maghar, dated to 2065.
How to build an interesting alien race?
I believe in depth of design and thought to make any character or world interesting. For a race, the story of their evolution is impacted by many factors:
- their homeworld’s type, flora and fauna,
- their initial successful survival method,
- the environment and its changes over time,
- the societal events and directions their history took,
- their anatomy and features developed over millions of years.
Never a goal to run a full simulation of possible evolutionary tracks, even though would be fun to work on that. Instead of spending my life’s work in evolutionary science, let me simplify the problem from a narrative perspective:
- the themes I want to explore: the types of communities we build and how they perform under stress, from the perspective of individuals;
- the conflicts I want to explore: democracy versus hierarchical systems, culture shock of vastly different cultures, building communities over differences;
- the stories I want to tell: individual’s place in the world, the effect and levers they can pull and the sacrifices they make, the emotions they experience.
For all these to succeed, I need a race that is similar but still an extreme of humanity. But where to start even? A while ago I saw a great historical video with one of my favourite reactors and it strongly stayed with me:
In this theory, the similarities of our cultures on Earth and their differences too were driven by the grain we could cultivate on our lands. The vastly different three major grains birthed different cultures: rice, cereal and maize.
Thinking of a race that had a very different world yet evolved similarly to our ancestors: with no grains to cultivate on their home planet, they had to be mostly predators. Leading to mostly the same body type, bipedal, fast and nimble, weaker than most successful predators yet posessing something we humans are unique on our planet for: ability to plan. With planning and long term memory we and the Taries became the top predators of their planet: nothing can compete with a collective of revengeful beings working in concert to bring you down!
The difference where we really branch away is their inability to grow large amount of calories by plants. Their world only allows low calorie green leaves to survive high above the surface smog of their very vulcanically active planet. We developed farming culture, then entertainment and sedentary living working in office cubicles. They never had the luxury to have so many people live low-movement lives except a certain few posessing very special planning skills. Over time their hierarchy remained more feudal with the great houses lead by the best planners.
Planners only work if there are followers though, and plenty of them. More follower, the better. As the cast divide grew further, they almost resembled two races yet they looked exactly the same: the workers and fighters were many, and an extremely few elite with a small but strong circle of researchers, mostly from the planners families. As space travel became a reality for the young Taries, a blimp of equality and democracy turned up as they spread out into the nearby systems.
A colony planner family earned respect of most of the population leading to the conspiracy of the other families to topple them. Discovering the quantum echo effect, their newfound look into the near future overpowered the unsuspecting but benevolent family. A thousand years of infighting and conquest over the 6 systems, lot of lost lives, failed and newly rising families at the rule led to a fragile truce. An information cold war. Unable to travel time, but seeing some part of the future, they continued scheming and outmanouvering each other.
Until one day, a planner family carrier with one of the quantum farseer on board tested a new drive system crossing the galactic core. Locked into a warp bubble, hurtling in a line just near Earth’s path. The Sun’s gravity yanked them out but severly damaging the lone ship, stranding them far in unknown space, unable to repair their drive. Their exit temporarily blinding human technology and their desperation growing.
Looking for enough workers to build new drives and their supply chain, they looked at Earth and their billions. They figured, could not control this many individuals. But if they could fasten the obvious climate change, they could cull the herd to a more manageable size…
Further details coming in a future book of mine 🙂 Until then, their homeworld remain unidentified by humans and an occasional interception of vessels will be possible in the game but for now there is no plan that the player can visit their worlds.
Next step is to design more details for the Taries, like their anatomy, their traits, even their food chain and industry composition to support the direction I want to take with enough reality to be believable. Then to create their space craft and technology.
