Leviathan

In the Squawk Role-Playing Game, Leviathans are intelligent crocodilians. Like crocodiles and Alligators, leviathans are armored, swimming predators, but Leviathans have longer and more powerful legs, allowing them to walk bipedally like some crocodilian ancestors.

Leviathans are closely related to gygeans, another species of intelligent crocodilians in Squawk. Leviathans are much more robust than their stealthy cousins, with stocky bodies, thick tails, compressed snouts and short but still heavily muscled arms.

More pictures and information about leviathans...

Gygean

In the Squawk Role-Playing Game, gygeans are intelligent crocodilians with the ability to change skin color and pattern rapidly like octopus, squid and cuttlefish. In spite of the difficulty of depicting this ability in action, Gygeans are one of our most illustrated Squawk species.

Two gygean features are coincidentally found in that other dinosaur science fiction franchise, Jurassic Park. The late author of the Jurassic Park books, Michael Crichton, hints in the original novel that the velociraptors have some active camouflage ability like a chameleon. (In real life, velociraptors were covered in feathers like a bird.) In the second book he gives the Carnotaurus an even more dramatic camouflage which makes them nearly invisible when they hunt at night.

In the movie adaptation of Jurassic Park, Steven Spielberg gives the Dilophosaurus a neck frill which can be erected. This feature is present in the real-life Frilled Dragon and some of the Squawk gygeans. The creators of the movie knew that the real life Dilophosaurus almost certainly did not have this frill (or the ability to spit poison) but including these features in their fictional dinosaurs is an homage the revelations that come as we learn more about prehistoric life.

More pictures and information about gygeans:

• general information
• gygean anatomy
  

Left 4 Dead

Left 4 Dead is the best FPS if you ignore the problems common to proprietary games with high system requirements. It is not superior because of it's beautiful graphics or physics simulation (most decidedly not because of it's graphics and physics simulation) but because of it's superior game design.

Unlike Counterstrike or Halo, the objective of the game is survival, not sacrifice for an abstract cause. You protect yourself and help others who you need in order to survive. You beat the monsters off of your fellow survivors and help them get up when they are knocked down. You work together against strong enemies. You keep going when you are wounded, and when a comrade falls you find another survivor to replace them. The theme of "help is on the way" drives the game forward.

Dominant Position

Melee combat is more effective than shooting when the bad guys are up close, and it is much safer for the other survivors. The right mouse button does a melee attack regardless of which weapon you are using. The melee attack knocks nearby monsters back and often knocks them down if it doesn't kill them. Meanwhile the monsters try to overwhelm you with numbers, pounce on you and hold you down, strangle you with tongue-tentacles or throw you off of the top of buildings.

Survivors pack light: one or two pistols for your sidearm, one primary weapon (automatic weapon, shotgun or rifle), either a molotov cocktail or a pipe bomb and either a first aid kit or pain pills. (The first aid kit or pain pills can be used on yourself or the other survivors, and first aid takes too long to be used in the middle of a fight.) Defensive positions scattered around the game are stocked with extra supplies, piles of ammo (a generic resupply point that refills any weapon), gas cans, propane tanks, oxygen tanks and other situational weapons.

Personality

Movie-influenced monsters include the fast angry infected horde from 28 days later, Resident Evil style mutations (like the tentacle-tongued smoker, the fat vomiting boomer and the giant muscular tank) and even a creepy tricky girl monster like Samara from The Ring or the Blair Witch (by far the most feared enemy in the game even though - or because - you can avoid her most of the time, and not playable in the versus mode where one team of players control infected mutants.)

The survivors are represented as four unique characters: A vietnam veteran who is appropriately old, sharp and respectable (not a greasy tragic John Rambo misfit), a white thug playing the comedy relief Jayne Cobb style, a small, athletic female college student typical of horror movie survivors, and what I call the "white collar brother": a black systems analyst who fills the nervous jumpy survivor role.

Assymetrical Conflict

Left 4 Dead is not a war of attrition where victory goes to whoever is last to run out of hit points or ammo or soldiers or minerals. The action goes through cycles of slow recovery, exploration, stealth and avoidance, hunting and stalking, ambushes, escape and big boss battles which you you must sometimes trigger intentionally to meet your long term survival goals (call an elevator, radio for help.)

See my other blog post about the Steam Cloud technology used in Left 4 Dead.

Gremian

In the Squawk Role-Playing Game, Gremians are highly derived deinonychosaurs related to gafflings. They have completely lost most of the distinctive features of their close relatives: sickle claws, feathers and even the long tail. They have developed a relatively enormous head with a shortened snout and a more erect posture.

Some of these adaptations are examples of paedomorphosis, where adults of the species retain features from earlier stages of development. Superficially, gremians resemble avian hatchlings with their bare pinkish skin and huge heads.

More pictures and information about gremians...

Gaffling

In the Squawk Role-Playing Game, Gafflings are intelligent deinonychosaurs whose three-fingered hands have exceptional flexibility and opposable thumbs.

Gafflings are the original Squawk species. We designed these creatures (formerly known as "raptors" or "hobgoblins") for an earlier series of RPGs called The Dark Woods or Metazoica, and the Dinosaurs with Swords idea that eventually became Squawk grew out of this idea of an intelligent feathered velociraptor.

More pictures and information about gafflings...

Drome

In the Squawk Role-Playing Game, dromes are intelligent theropod dinosaurs. Several drome features suggest that they are primitive theropods like Eoraptor, Herrerasaurus, Coelophysis or Dilophosaurus, and not bird-like coelurosaurs like Tyrannosaurus, Velociraptor and modern birds:

Dromes have a narrow ribcage instead of a broad, bird-like bellows. This suggest an aerobic metabolism somewhere in-between a normal "reptilian" and avian system. They have skinny legs and relatively small hips instead of thickly muscled thighs. Dromes have four fingers on each hand, and they are covered in scales instead of feathers. (So far only ceolurosaurs have been discovered with feathers.)

More pictures and information about dromes...

Borean

In the Squawk Role-Playing Game, boreans are intelligent avians descended from primitive flightless waterfowl. Like penguins they stand upright instead of having a more typical avian horizontal posture. As primitive birds they retain the sharp teeth and claws of their dinosaur ancestors, but their hands and feet are webbed and their teeth more needle-like for catching fish. Boreans have evolved an echolocation system which allows them to navigate by sound, similar to bats and dolphins.

Boreans are inspired by interesting prehistoric creatures from the real world:

• Anthropornis, a man-sized, long-necked, long-beaked, tropical peguin
• Hesperornis, a toothed diving bird with virtually no wings
• Archaeopteryx and other primitive birds with claws and teeth

More pictures and information about boreans...

Behemoth

In the Squawk Role-Playing Game, behemoths are gigantic intelligent dinosaurs related to sauropods. Unlike most sauropod who walk on their fingertips, behemoths are knuckle-walkers and can also walk on two legs, allowing them to carry and operate tools with their hands. The behemoth on the right in our illustration is a chimera with extra skin armor, insect-like appendages and batteries of some kind of openings on it's shoulders.

In real life, sauropods were long-necked, long-tailed dinosaurs and included the biggest land animals that have ever lived, like Diplodocus and Brachiosaurus. In recent years we have learned a lot about the skin of sauropods. Except for the feathered dinosaurs, it appears that all dinosaurs were covered in small non-overlapping scales like the skin of a turtle or gila monster. Some sauropods had armored scales like a crocodile. Elongated dorsal scales in some sauropod skin impressions inspired the row of spikes running down the back of our fictional behemoth (only in the male of the species.)

More pictures and information about behemoths...

Aeolyte

In the Squawk Role-Playing Game, aeolytes are enormous flying birds. The ability to fly makes aeolytes valuable as messengers. Male aeolytes have more flamboyant coloring than the females. Aeolyte speech sounds like low, hoarse bird noises.

Lighter than most intelligent species but large enough to limit maneuverability while flying, aeolytes can weild a relatively large weapon with either of their powerful talons while flying or hopping on one leg.

More pictures and information about aeolytes...