User:Krayfish/Development of the Vaikan

Here's a bonus page for making the effort to read my userpage.

The Early Stages
When Spore: Galactic Adventures came out, I conceptualized the Dhragolon, a new empire created specifically for that expansion pack. I wrote down an early backstory for the Dhragolon. When I played them, they quickly became one of the strongest forces of the galaxy, rivaling the Grox. They were very peaceful in the past, but were merciless upon entering space.

On December 11, 2009, the Dhragolon were officially written down on the Spore Fan Fic wiki. Little did I know that more than two years later, I would still find myself writing tens of articles and numerous stories all based on this one race.

The original backstory was that the Dhragolon were a peace loving race. They were made to be the perfect society and lived in harmony with one another. There were no conflicts until the Dhragolon entered space for the first time. In fact, until then, they did not know what evil was. They had a life span of a whopping 5000 years!

Then, I thought it might be neat if I came up with some deities for the Dhragolon to follow. That would add more culture to their race. I chose "Krayhan" as a god of goodness and peace (I changed it from "Kray" for obvious reasons), and "Uszaroth" as a god of evil. Their society would be based on their religion as their prime motivation.

Having developed an actual race with some detail, I thought, "Why not write a story? I should create a character." That's when I invented King Rustiagon Karrel and his subsequent story, "Karrel the Grox Slayer." I wrote down the whole story on a notebook, but I never finished typing it up.

Close encounters of the Third Kind
In late 2010, User:SupcommMonroee came along and thought that we should do a crossover of our races meeting for the first time. I had done some previous work with User:Panthean, though our two races never directly met. This was different. A completely new story involving the meeting of two races. After writing a fiction with User:SupcommMonroee, what came out was The Meeting. Since it went well, we wrote a sequel called The Reunion.

Later some other users who were once inactive returned including User:Nra 'Vadumee and User:Panthean. Together we begun collaborating to create some massive storylines and essentially another universe. This includes many things such as the Kklxin and the Titans.

The Rework
As the Dhragolon became more developed, I realized just how unrealistic the Dhragolon were. It seemed rather implausible that the Dhragolon were completely peaceful. So what did I do? I completely changed them. I added a good number of wars and battles spread throughout the Dhragolon's history and even changed the teachings of Krayhan and Uszaroth. Rather than just the standard good and evil, they turned into deities of balance and chaos respectively. I thought I could make Uszaroth somewhat of a comic relief villain (or perhaps even...an anti-hero.)

Secondly, I changed the Dhragolon's appearance. They used to be blue dragon people, but they now resemble tall, blue elves with scaly skin. I wanted to make the Dhragolon more unique and realistic (and also to make them different from the Karnasaurs and GHD, two other dragon races). I also cut down the Dhragolon life span a lot since the entire history of the Dhragolon would have only consisted of a handful of generations.

Because of the rework, I ended up never completely typing of "Karrel the Grox Slayer". It was too aged and outdated by my standards.

Migration
Eventually, our fictions grew beyond the universe of Spore. It was something of its own. We decided to migrate to a new wiki, the one you are in right now. I took this opportunity to go back and revise more aspects of Dhragolon culture and update old stories. On that list is "Karrel the Grox Slayer" which will be written, updated and revised soon.

Design of the Dhragolon
When designing the Dhragolon, I focused on the culture and society first and worried about the appearance later. Even though they were the Knight archetype in Spore, I ended up playing them more like a Zealot. And thus, I created deities for the Dhragolon to worship to make them a religious people. But what exactly should the Dhragolon themselves be like?

I felt giving a medieval feel to the Dhragolon was appropriate since during medieval times, religion was the dominant force, much like it is for the Dhragolon. I emphasized this by making them wield swords and wear knightly armor. It was to contrast the advancement of humans who evolved basing their society on technology and science.

Now that I firmly established what kind of people they are, I changed the Dhragolon's original design in Spore to something entirely different. I took into account that Ucharpli was dominated by reptiles so scaly skin would be appropriate. However, I wanted them to still be relatable to humans in order to reflect their cultural similarities to our own so I made them very humanoid.

After the (near) completion of the Dark Prophecy story arc, I decided to retcon the Dhragolon once more. The medieval feel worked for a time until I realized how tiny and primitive it was in comparison to its allies, the Eteno Imperial Triumvirate and the Karnasaur Meritocratic Federation, when they were supposedly around the same level. I decided to retcon the Dhragolon once more and increase their military strength and technology. I went for a retro-futuristic style - I still wanted to keep the medieval feel to it, but at the same time depict an powerful, technologically advanced race. Though they still use swords in combat, they have firearms as offhand weapons. Subsequentely, I gave them an army of mechs to compensate for their lack of being able to reproduce quickly.

Eventually, I decided to revist the Dhragolon once more. As I did more research on xenobiology, accretion theory and astronomy, I found myself correcting a lot of science errors I had before to the point where I redid Ucharpli itself as well as Dhragolon physiology. Rather than making my planet a clone of Earth, I tried to mix it up a little more by adding some features to the planet that would make it unique. I also attempted to portray some climates that would be hospitable to humans but not to Dhragolon to balance things out.

Re-redesign
Still, I could not find a way to make the Dhragolon non-humanoid without having to change many of the stories. I would be better off creating a new species entirely. However, I realized that because I'm writing for a human audience, humans tend to enjoy characters that they can relate with. To appeal to this, rather than going for ultrarealistic traits (which would still be cool anyway), I decided incorporate several neoteny traits. By doing this, although I am sacrificing a good degree of realism, the characters are far easier to relate and imagine at the same time giving them bizarre alien biology.