A little ago, in the game Legends & Letters a new villain was revealed. His name was The Claymaker and he was an ancient that was sealed away by the faeries.
Were the ancients (or the concept/idea of them) discussed or developed at some point (and maybe dropped later idk) ?
With this I mean, like, if the idea of an old civilization or beings that existed before neopets and had disappeared was discussed while you worked on the site or not?
And about disappearing civilizations…. I supose geraptiku and the disappearance of the inhabitants was meant to stay an eternal mystery to players, but was discussed what happened to them or everyone just went with “Let’s just say they disappeared and leave it at that” ?
Likely not ever something that was actively considered but FYI we do know that whatever the Kayannin were, they predated Neopets.
Yo, Bero!
I don’t know anything about the Legends & Letters lore so I can’t tell you if the “ancients” specifically as they exist in that game match anything we talked about. As far as I know, no one from the team I knew worked on that game so it’s not likely.
But generally, we had discussions about old Neopia, yup. Most recently as part of The Faeries’ Ruin lore planning but also here and there before that. It’s nothing that was officially canon yet though. (For example, we had plans to explain the wraiths, what they were exactly, and why they resurfaced when faerie magic was suppressed, which had to do with OLD Neopia, but since we didn’t get that far, the only thing that was actually canon when I left was that they exist.)
Geraptiku was just a trope, yeah. ? Although that’s not to say we wouldn’t have ever gone back to it in the future! A lot of that kind of stuff came up in Plot brainstorms, where someone would suggest we explain some random thing on the site that would be fun to get into. But yeah, the whole point of that land was that it was a mystery so there wasn’t a need to come up with a backstory at the time.