Bonus Content Disc/Creatures: Hanar

The following are transcriptions of the artists' comments for the design gallery "The Creatures of Mass Effect: Hanar" found on the bonus content disc of Mass Effect released in 2007.

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Matt Rhodes: When designing aliens, trying to find shapes that no one's seen before but that they'll still believe and they'll still be able to connect to, it's this big void. And the only way to fill it is to really just fill it with stuff. You'll never know where you're going until you've thrown something down in front of yourself and seen if it works. So this is a way of very quickly sorting out just some thoughts on the subject. Sort of figuring out directions that you would never choose with your intelligent mind, but if you just quickly throw it down in black and white, quick silhouettes then you'll do stuff that you wouldn't have realized otherwise.

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Matt Rhodes: Here's one of the guys taken from the silhouettes. He's still wearing sort of like the modified space suit. And that was actually kind of fun is-- the space suits, by putting them on, on the aliens, it sort of connected them all in this galactic market, in this galactic economy. So that like, you know, you build a space suit for people and then you have to build it for turians, you have to build it for the weird and wacky ones. And it was a fun way of trying to make them a little bit more believable.

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Matt Rhodes: This mystical little spiderwick guy... You know, he was fun but he didn't quite suit; and again the narrow limbs are difficult to pull off well visually. They don't read that well on the screen as it is now and this, again, just... it's a little too "fairy tale," a little too mystical.

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Matt Rhodes: This little creature was also fun. It was just, you know, the simple idea of too many limbs, like what did too many limbs look like? And it ended up being this. I kind of like the no mouth, head pulled back, kind of, you know, the pointy hat head. The little legs in the front actually, the tiny set of legs, I really like how those work. That might be fun to use later on.

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Matt Rhodes: This guy I always liked. And I am kind of sad that he didn't make it into the game. But, you know, an alien that was scary, that was intimidating, that was kind of frightening, but didn't really mean you any harm and it was kind of the idea of like the scholar. Sort of a scholarly, almost like mystical librarian alien. So here we've got, you know, the tinges of blue. He kind of looks like a mortician, or an undertaker.

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Matt Rhodes: And this is another example of where ideas can come from crazy, weird situations. I was just flipping through a magazine, a video game magazine, and I saw the Mass Effect article and I thought "oh great, this is cool." I haven't seen, you know, real paintings in an actual magazine before. And I saw this one early illustration and way in the distance, way off in the background was this tiny blob of a sketch of a guy and I was like "that's the guy! That's the guy that I want to draw." So I came back to work the next day, and blew up the illustration and realized "there is no information here." So just started painting directly over the very low res image and just tried a few different options. This guy was-- he had the red robe and the thin arms, the big tall head and it was actually a really fun way of going about it. So this is sort of our duck or platypus webbed priest.

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Matt Rhodes: When concepting creatures, one of the things that it's always good to keep in mind is the concept, that it's all about the idea. And when you're out of stuff to draw, if you just start playing with the ideas, you'll quickly find stuff. And one was, what if there were aliens that were so ugly, that were so unapproachable, that they had to find ways, if they wanted to move and work in this new galactic economy, that they had to modify themselves, they had to find some way of like almost hiding themselves or blanking themselves and relate to people on a new level? So here we have the beast with the big giant gaping mouth, but he's trying desperately to cover up this ugly form with this tiny little inadequate hood, with a little holographic face projection. So... this was a fun direction, and again, something to keep in mind for later maybe.

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Matt Rhodes: Here again is the same idea of a creature that's so alien, that they have to find some way of finding a middle ground. Rather than being ugly, this is just almost incomprehensible. It's a creature that you don't know what to look at when you're talking to it. Am I looking at an inappropriate place or am I looking at his foot or I'm-- I don't know. So, the idea of building a custom face, a face where there is no face, I really enjoyed.

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Matt Rhodes: And this ended up striking a chord with everyone. This is something that, you know, is still foreign but, in some senses it just, you know, it's got this ethereal glow. There's-- it's different but it's appealing. And when you look at it, it's like you just sit and watch it while it talks and it doesn't matter what he says because it's pretty. The technical leap of getting from this illustration to the final was a difficult one but I think, yeah, still... The hanar turned out to be a fairly magical break in the galactic crowds.