Did some concept sketches and design docs for bug game today, here's some of the enemy design art. We've got a half-dead husk and some banditos. Not pictured: the giant Grub - I've still gotta figure out how to make the anatomy work on that guy.
The husks are actually "tribeless wretches" and are definitely inspired in part by the idea of hiveless hivers losing their minds and the fogmen. But also I'm playing with the underworld and the land of the dead conceptually, so they're sort of undead.
I've done it! With a head scarf anyway. One of my first art posts here was a beetleherd. Looks like it's gone now though.
Thinking about how gender would work in colony insects where most of them are female but effectively neuter. Would they have common genderless pronouns and special ones for male and female breeding castes? Something like 他/她 ta but condensed as a universal third person pronoun? What do non-colony insects use?
Yo I have plenty I could talk with you about regarding this. (I have an enormous pile of speculative cultural output from the pov of a culture inspired by colonial insects.)
I ended up using "she" for literally everyone, but that was just a choice made early on that I couldn't really change once I was deep into it, (plus I imagined the translator wasn't exactly educated in gender theory.) But don't forget that the males in most of these species are essentially brainless--I ended up having others describe them in a sort of utilitarian manner, with the male sex being less of an identity and more of a role.
And also, since reproduction would be mostly handled by the queen, the gender dynamic of a colonial insect in general seemed to me like it would be defined not by their role as sexual counterparts, but by more interpersonal categories that they identify amongst each other, or codified by things like behavior and physical traits like size, as well as predilections towards jobs. As an example, ant researchers identify "types" of ants like workers, soldiers, majors, that kind of thing, and those seemed to me to be the kinds of "genders" these little colonials would be defining each other with. After all, these groups look different, have different temperaments, and tend towards different tasks as a result.
I've been immersed in this for long enough that I can't tell how deranged this post would seem to others, so hopefully this stuff is useful and not rambling nonsense.
Thank you, it's hard not to run full sprint with this stuff considering the way humans and eusocial insects sort of convergently evolved their "civilizations."
Old ladies doing the majority of their warfare, soldiers policing workers (sometimes lethally) who had the gall to reproduce when there's already a Queen, the sometimes antagonistic relationship between queens and the clonal offspring she cared for--there's drama and conflict in every corner of those communities.
That's quite clever! A great bilingual and multi-step pun, which I love conceptually. I doubt I could make it work in a way that players get it, but maybe it could be a very specific Easter egg somewhere.
