Alien designs

When making aliens for your settings, what do you do to try to make them unique and interesting? How do you go about coming up with aliens for your scifi campaigns? Do you think about the world's they come from? How their societies might be organized? Do they operate as one united group or are there different nations or cultures within?

What do you guys do to keep them from feeling too much like just green space humans, but keep them relatable enough to have them in your setting as either npcs or even playable races?

How do you guys design your aliens?

In lieu of an actual interesting post, have a cap of somebody else's interesting post from days gone by.

i start with a concept
then i create a environment that the creature lives in and how it evolved in it. then i flesh it out form there.

Hardly related but for the past weeks I've been mulling over how to get an alien conversation in about the stereotype that all humans like sandalwood and that it's actually true.

so as far as designing playable races you basically keep them approximately human?

also how do you handle languages and technology?

the setting im working on is mostly human centric, dealing with competing space fleets, but some aliens come to visit the solar system.

do we assume some convergent evolution? i mean obviously whatever makes it beyond the threshold of interstellar travel would have to be intelligent (or i guess it could be microbial asteroid hitchikers but thats not what im worried about), but how much does a sort of convergent evolution come into play?

for example, could we assume that they would almost always have fingers? eyes? language that s audible?

dawkins did a bit about that, talking about how many different times things have evolved on earth, like eyes, stingers, legs, etc. there does seem to be some convergent evolution with best adapted systems to given environments, with intelligence being the best adaptation to almost any environement.

also how far outthere do you get with designing their homeworlds? given what we now know about the wide range of exoplanets

I have a stable of alien species that I've developed over the years for various projects; eventually I organized them into a single setting that I pretentiously refer to as Deep Space, which is basically the 1920s/1930s IN SPACE.

All species below are basically human in shape unless state otherwise.

1/2

Chalak - nomadic space wanderers. Explorers, traders, raiders, and pirates. Oldest known spacefairing race. Reptilian, with turtle-like qualities.

Crelaki- hive insectoids. Inhuman. Only the Queens are actually fully sapient (everything is is simply trained, like a dog or monkey), and they spend most of their time competing with other Queens.

Dethek - insectoids, NOT a hive mind. Look like humanoid ants or beetles, shorter than humans, with four arms. In the process of stripping their home star system bare of resources since it's in the path of an oncoming black hole that'll reach it in about 10,000 years.

Elai - literally humans, but scattered across known space and beyond, seeded ages ago by no one knows what. Exist at various levels of technology. Three elai worlds united to form the Elai Protectorate, which is one of the three Great Powers and is basically a mix of Prussia and Nazi Germany.

Kana - simians (think baboons), not yet aware of larger galactic politics, having only recently achieved basic space travel.

Kyn - Look and act like humanoid cats. Jackasses, but an up-and-coming major power. Close allies with the dethek and actually gave them FTL travel in exchange for access to their resources.

Ikroden - isolationist, backwater people. Rubber-forehead humanoid aliens who want to be left alone.

2/2

Nbolgi - simians, think monkeys. Basically exist to breed, consume, and move on. Big into heavy industry and technology, not so big into safety. Note what their name is an anagram of.

Nyaran - insectoid, violent, and expansionistic, but xenophobic and tend to overreach. Inhuman in appearance.

Pah - Avian, like three-meter tall humanoid parrots with a massive god complex, utterly convinced they are the pinnacle of creation. Insufferable to be around. Homeworld's low gravity means they achieved space travel early and easily.

Selene - genetically elai (human), physically got into gene modification in a big way and so have longer fingers and toes and prehenile tails, adapting them to zero-g environments (for no real reason since artificial gravity is a thing). Convinced they're superior to normal elai.

Tor'qua - Humanoid from a very cold world with bioluminescent skin. Second-oldest spacefairing race, organized into the Tor'qua Hegemony that rules over a bunch of primitive species for their "protection". White Man's Burden meets 1984.

Tuxtla - small avians, inhuman in appearnace. Look like archaeopteryx. Technologically adept and skilled. Subject species of the Varjren Empire, and resent it.

Varjren - Tall reptilians. Devoutly religious in general, believe that the are fallen angels who must work to earn their place alongside God once more. The Varjren Empire is the largest of the three Great Powers, but this is a detriment as much as a boon due to the sheer size making it hard to defend, explore, and exploit.

I could go into MUCH greater detail about most of these species if you wanted. Some of them (varjren, kyn, dethek) go back literally decades to when I was a kid playing with LEGO's and making spaceships. Others (nbolgi, ikroden) are actually relatively new creations.

Similar setup is also pretty common in (pre-CGI) SF TV-shows, and games like Mass Effect, but for different reasons. It's a lot cheaper to give the actors some makeup or costumes to make them look like humanoid aliens than to make good looking puppets and animatronics, so most TV aliens would be humanoid and the more outlandish looking ones would be limited to select scenes, if present at all. And while in video games you can make the aliens look like whatever you want, making many of them share the same skeleton reduces the work on animating the models and designing weapons and clothing for them (you can see this clearly in ME, where the aliens you fight against and interact with most often are humanoid, while the non humanoid ones have far more limited amount of animations and appearances).

I use races/empires I have made in Stellaris

I did pretty much as that screencap for my setting, for the same reasons (and also because I figure it's be more convenient for PCs if the aliens they'd often interract with have roughly similar physiology, so they can use the same spaces, equipment, etc., and also because I was going for a more space opera than hard SF feel and humanoid aliens are a staple of that genre). Most of the "main" species in my setting are humanoid, and the ones with more unusual physiology have more of a minor role.
The most prominent alien species in my setting are:

Demosians:
Large humanoid reptile-like aliens. Physically very strong, and with strong martial culture. Their empire is built on a quasi-feodal system, with the ruler of each planet answering to the ruler of the sector, who answers to the hierarch, the ruler of the whole empire. Their empire is also highly expansionistic and has had a large war with humans over territory, which eventually escalated into a conflict involving all major powers.

Seirani:
Amphibian humanoids, who can breathe in air and in water. Their semi-permeable skin dries quickly without sufficient moisture, though, so they either have to keep the humidity in their habitats very high or wear clothing that retains moisture. They're a peaceful civilization that maintains trade relations with multiple other species.

Ni-hir:
Eusocial insectoids, with society consisting of three castes. The worker caste makes up the vast majority of the population, and are barely sapient. The administrative caste are larger and more intelligent than workers (they're as smart as humans) and their primary role is to direct the workers. The queen is the only reproductive member of a hive, as well as the head of state.
Each of their hive-cities is essentially an independent city-state forming a loose alliance (although in practice there are "dynasties" composed of multiple hives sharing common ancestry that act more like a single nation) .