A lesser god who hoped to establish dominion over the island by kicking the nature spirit off. This went really poorly, with the nature spirit bringing it to the verge of death.
As a last-ditch effort to survive, the nature spirit blew itself apart into hundreds of smaller versions of itself, hoping to achieve its goal to create life in this form. The nature spirit quickly rounded up these fragments and sealed them deep underground to keep them from spreading.
The wizard civilization had been established for a while and they saw the whole thing happen. Their curiosity got the better of them. In secrecy, unbeknownst to the nature spirit, they located the underground chambers where the fragments had been sealed and performed experiments on them to try and learn more about the nature of gods. They discovered a way to combine two fragments of the clay spirit into a slightly more powerful fragment, and managed to construct a chamber that could (potentially) reform the spirit to its original unfragmented form. But then the sea devil showed up and screwed things up before they could act.
Without the nature spirit around, more and more clay fragments gradually broke free from the underground chambers and made their way towards the surface. You encounter quite a few of them during the game.
Notes + Personality
Every god has its own method for creating life, and the clay spirit does this by splitting off smaller chunks of itself into human-sized fragments that are weaker, but capable of thinking for themselves and going their own direction.
The clay spirit doesn’t really think things through and tends to overestimate its abilities (hence why it got beat down by the nature spirit - it just kind of pulled up one day after getting the idea to take over the island). This also fits well with its fragments being really basic fodder enemies: Every time you encounter one the overconfidence kicks in, and they feel certain they can beat you (even though they don’t pose much of a threat at all).
Like the other gods, the clay spirit should be represented as a model in its completed form - still keeping the general design of the small versions, but with a more detailed “clay golem” kind of feel to it. The fragments are more on the power level of a human, and are represented as sprites to compensate.
Some of the fragments / horde develop their own personalities after being left on their own for so long (as the clay spirit intended). One NPC I was thinking of adding was a single horde guy who has no desire to fight you and wants to be buddies with some of the castaways. You get him an undersized sweater to wear so he can fit in with them.
A very awkward first encounter ensues, looking something like this (maybe taking place offscreen). They almost instantly accept him as one of their own.
Reference images https://pin.it/5icsjlF53
- Design basically already in place so more references aren’t too important - mostly there for envisioning how it would look as a more detailed 3D model