The idea for Zoids: Return began in 2006, when I drew the original sketch of the Geno Drake as a school art project. After coming up with its appearance and technical data, I decided it needed a background story. So I assigned it to the "Cheironyx Empire" (from Greek "cheiro-" [hand] + "-onyx" [claw], to symbolise therizinosaurs) and came up with a basic story concept, beginning with the prototype Geno Drake going berserk and causing a war. I thought up a few other Zoids to give my Empire a proper army (along with the Ammonider and Squidling, which I had drawn in 2005 without any background information), and assigned the NAR Zoids to the Helic Republic and Neo Zenebas Empire since they lacked any official backstory. My sister (Melana) and a close friend (Mavell) also had some ideas for new Zoids, so I decided to make "Zoids: The Return" (as I provisionally titled it) into a collaborative effort, with Melana providing the Zoids and characters from "Sharlith" and Mavell providing those from the "Trion Republic". Since I had recently found the Bucks vs Maya webcomic and was impressed by the semi-animated webcomic format, I thought my story should be told in the same format (despite having limited artistic skills and no experience with Flash). By mid-2007, we had designed a wide variety of Zoids and formed a rough, open-ended story outline. At this point, however, the story was entirely focused on Zoid battles and the progress of the war, without any proper characters.
For the next couple of years, aside from a couple of additional Zoid concepts and drawings, the project made very little progress. Then, in late 2009, I came up with a character loosely based on Rease, intending for her to use her powers in more creative and effective ways. This prompted me to design several other major characters, starting with the main protagonist (who was built around a major event midway through the story). Around this time, the story was heavily redesigned to focus on these core characters instead of just Zoid battles. In 2010, I began studying Japanese officially (before then, my knowledge was limited to katakana and a handful of vocab/grammar that I had picked up from Wikipedia and online dictionaries), allowing me to access a much wider range of Battle Story information and giving me a better idea of the world in which my story was to be set. I continued to think up characters and events over the next few years, forming a solid framework for the first half of the story by 2012. By this point, I had realised that creating the entire project as an animated webcomic would be impractical, and had the idea of writing different story arcs in different media depending on the importance of text or visuals in certain parts.
Since then, the concept has continued to develop, albeit at a very slow pace. I still hope to eventually develop it into a state ready for publishing online...