thank you kindly u.u Hmmm, to explain the process of creating things like Gold Cloud species...!

I would say I work from a springboard of dissecting individual evolutionary traits, rather than a particular species... and I think about adaptations in oddball scenarios, environments, or starting points. For a real-life example, pterosaurs are what happens when lizards evolutionarily attempt to fulfill the coveted flying vertebrate niche... compare how they achieve this, VS how birds and bats achieve this... what did they use to get that outcome, what part of the body did they exploit into flighted-ness? How efficient did it have to be to get there? And how do all of these flying vertebrates converge, what do they have in common? How do they achieve something like, becoming lightweight enough... and how else could we get there?

I'll start at something like, "I would like to see what would happen if a mustelid managed to evolve into a tall, leaf-eating animal like a giraffe, specialized in tallness/reach". Fun, fun fun. But then we have that animal, we could say, "ok, what if it got that far, became so long, but then this factor in its environment changed crucially. How would they evolve again to solve that? How can this body be contorted to suit a new condition?" eventually, you could be 20 layers deep in this, creating both the ancient condition for a species, and then it's aquatic offshoot, and its megafauna offshoot, and its bizarre island offshoot, and its domesticated offshoot, etc.

If you're worldbuilding, it is super inspiring to set certain rules for the entire world; like, for Gold Cloud, digestion being very easy & very few materials 'difficult' to digest, so few animals need something like a 'stomach' or 'intestines' for internal composting (a condition we see in some animals on earth, but from what I understand only a few fish ?! agastric) ... this influences virtually all base body types & centers of gravity, even for Large animals. A lot of our Earth animals are Huge to make room for a big big gut or many chambers of stomach. This can't be true of Gold Cloud. Now this I would say is also fueled by Lust. I love Earth, but I'm not attracted to every aspect of biology... but what if I was lol? What if I didn't have to think about Poop ever, what would need to be true about the body to allow no disgust to ever enter my mind? Gold Cloud also doesn't have 'smell' like Earth does, it doesn't function the same way. There is a different system of sense/communication animals and plants use. So I'm also always designing for that. Why? Because I'm really overstimulated by a lot of smells, and the sinus is kind of an agony in many ways even passively existing in the head, even though I love a lot of scents, I would gladly do away with it if I could invent something else ... I want to dream of a different system entirely. So suddenly, that means nothing can have a 'nose' in the same way many Earth animals do.

Another element where worldbuilding begets design-sense is, obviously 'camouflage' depends on the appearance of the environment. I think a lot of what is well-camouflaged on Gold Cloud, would be poison dark frog levels aposematism on our Earth. But Gold Cloud has different color, vegetation, textures and density to foliage in its nature. So the animals reflect that, and look right at home in their environment. I like to think of Pokemon for this example... if I imagine a Tangela in an environment, I would think, OK, so there must be tangles of blue vines in this forest, for Tangela to not stand out, I'd want to design that. If a Cherrim is going to exist, I'll imagine fruit of similar size and shape in their glade. If Pikachu is going to inhabit this field, I'll want to imagine some other aspect of the environment as large and yellow, for them to be hidden amongst. But this logic works in both directions... if I wanted to imagine a beautiful environment filled with large, 2-foot wide yellow flowers and bright purple bushes, I would then have to ask, what would live here?

Sometimes you invent a beautiful environment, and then a beautiful animal to inhabit it... or vise versa... if one is proving too difficult, it may be fun to try to inverse... and to also think of pleasure, what you want to experience, in excess. What sensation do you want to dream of being steeped in, what creatures should exemplify that? What would you cut off, if you could, what part of the body? Do you like having a stomach, a heart, do you like having bones? Maybe you don't. What if you didn't have them? What would you prefer to have?

Many creatures on Gold Cloud, penetration in sex goes all the way through the chest, the cavity of the pussy extends so farrrrr, cock and heart adjacent. Because I want and like this. So anatomy must work with this at times. So they look like weird aliens, so they can have crazy sex like I want to imagine in my head, and the sensations of it. Gyah...

It's a form of problem-solving to me!

If we stack a bunch of obligatory conditions on top of one another, eventually we'll get something that doesn't quite resemble any Earth animal, just by nature... though some may convergent look so much like an Earth animal, and I find this funny/cute/interesting too, so I don't fight it.

I hope that made sense....