Where
Tally Road is set in a huge created sci-fi universe that might have made an interesting MMORPG. It was laid out roughly in a cube, with computer software to generate a procedural universe- I still have that software kicking around, too. The eight space-traveling species were as follows:
Aintar, brightly colored ‘primitive’ avians with a distinctly ephemeral attitude
Estrai, ‘continenal’ foxes with extraordinary flamboyance and panache
Nerre, explosive ‘asian’ felines supported and confined by deadly protocol
Resten, ‘civilized’ canines tending to look down on other species
Runge, ‘modern’ wolves expanding a postmodern industrial society
Tompar, the nomadic snake people given to nihilism and suffering
Vorsi, huge superintelligent dragons keeping apart from the others
XARNAX, the hostile race of deadly robotic AI!
All the names of these various characters come from generated lists of words put together in the ‘spirit’ of various languages, such as French (easy to spot the Nerre here!), Portuguese, even ROT-13 for XARNAX. (understandably, their names have never been used!)
When the comic got rolling, I found that so very little of this actually got into the comic, and what did get in tended to just confuse people- such as Rairate, the Nerre, speaking his language partly because he starts out somewhat intolerant and not wishing to offer translations. Siertes has been known to utter Tompar proverbs, and Perre cajoled Finn to flee a place with an Estrai saying, translated as ‘sometimes you’ve got to leave without even your socks’. It’s not so much about the words as it’s about the worldviews, which eventually come across given enough time and comic strips :)
The TallyRoad-verse is a very specific, worked out alien universe, and much of it, like the battles of the Estrai to defend Tompar from the unusually pointed attacks of Xarnax, didn’t fit in the comic- but it’s out there somewhere, waiting to be told…