CheesiMoon's Dev Talks #4: Why the new name "Astropods: Starside Glaze"?
Welcome back to Dev Talks! Dev Talks will be a time to talk about my thoughts on the current game being developed and anything else that's potentially relevant. This is the 4th episode, but each episode is self-contained, like a slice-of-life show.
Recently, the name of the current game project I’m working on, previously known as “Hallegen: Starset Glaze”, was just changed to "Astropods: Starside Glaze". This is a pretty big deal, as the name of a game (or any piece of art in general) is incredibly important not only for identity's sake, but also to somehow describe the experience and vibe of the game. Keep in mind, this is very, very in-depth, so a TL;DR is at the end if you don’t wanna read through all 3000+ words, which is very understandable. I’m also gonna try to section this one into subcategories as well for the sake of readability, so bear with me.
SEGMENTS:
Why change the name to begin with?
Rules for the new name to follow
The processing process
Why a subtitle? Why this subtitle?
Kirby’s name origin, and why it mattered to me
Why change the name to begin with?
The previous name, "Hallegen: Starset Glaze," frankly made no sense. Hallegen does a very poor job of painting a picture of the game in people's heads, even for those who have seen the game before. Not only that, if someone said the name out loud, they would most likely spell it the proper way, halogen. The person talking about the game would have to specify its spelling if they wanted the other person to check the game out, which is a very annoying barrier of entry. Having a name that is annoying to search up is one of the biggest problems bad names could ever have in my opinion, so I wanted to change it pretty badly. The reason it has stuck around for as long as it has is because I like it phonetically, and it was one of the first names for a very old version of this game that might as well have been a different game (it didn't even feature the character Acro, the oldest surviving character who originated in 2019, but that is a story for another Dev Talks hehe).
Back then, the characters were made of metal, with Hallegen being a magical metal version of Fluorine (due to its flexibility in color when combined, at least from limited research that 18 year old me conducted) that conducts and releases magic, fluorine being a gas in the halogen group on the periodic table of elements. Corrupt the spelling a bit to be unique on search engines, and presto (or so I thought), a good name! That's actually where the colorful bands on each character (minus Zooka due to her lacking magic) originally come from, with them sticking around because the core concept stuck around, but now it is no longer called Hallegen. Naming things was and still is hard, but I do take it seriously, as nothing sucks more than a stupid or weird sounding name that doesn't make much sense. So Hallegen was a flawed name, why'd it take so long to change it?
This wasn't actually my first time attempting to rename the game. The initial subtitle "Starset Glaze'' came as one of the attempts at changing the name. Starset Glaze because I thought Starset was a cool name for a planet, and I really liked the word glaze, since its a sweet sounding word, also meaning some sort of shiny finish, alongside being close to the word “gaze,” with star gazing being a common phrase and all, and I initially justified it as a sort of team name Hemi self declared, but meh, I'm fine with the glaze just being a cheeky version of gaze, with some added sweetness. A big part of this project’s feel and aesthetic is one of appetizing taste, mostly in the sweet department. This is why all the worlds are food-themed, and why the colors have been slowly getting more saturated over the years, to look more appetizing. While gauging interest between friends and family, Starset Glaze replacing Hallegen wasn’t too popular, despite the flaws of the name Hallegen, because not only did Starset Glaze not make much sense either (about the game specifically), but also because it oddly felt less coherent and more generic.
Rules for the new name to follow
I also established some ground rules I had while coming up with a name for this project, as there were things I really wanted to avoid. I alluded to some of them earlier, but I want to list them all out here for comprehension’s sake. These rules being:
The name must sound phonetically pleasant and be easy to pronounce!!!! (most important rule)
It should be simple to share the game name with other people, and easy enough to search up
There should be some memorability with the name, nothing too generic
It cannot sound too serious
The first 3 rules I feel are universal concepts for naming any conventional product, at least to some degree. You want whatever product you’re making to have an easy to remember name and sound nice, while in this day and age, being simple to search up, especially for a project like this that doesn’t have an established presence. The 4th rule is more specific to this game, as an overly serious name would not fit at all in this game. I didn’t want to establish too many rules and restrict myself, so I stopped here, feeling confident that these are the rules that won’t ever change for this project.
The processing process
I also feel that coming up with a game title that consists of more than 1 word is harder to do because if you’re not an established name in the game industry, I feel you’ll need at least one word in the game title to be something more unique, or a combination of words you don’t see too often. Not only that, but they need to sound coherent together, which is something 1 word game titles don’t have to worry about as much, since they stand on their own. Notable 1 word game series I think have great names are Metroid, Tetris, Terraria, Splatoon and Pokemon. There are plenty of great names that have 2 or more words too, games like Legend of Zelda, Stardew Valley, Bug Fables and Battleblock Theater. Basically, game titles with more words have more to work with, and can create some iconic, if out there, game titles like Super Mario Bros, the sum being greater than its parts, but because you have that much more freedom, a lot more work needs to be done to keep it together and sounding at least somewhat coherent.
Speaking about other games, I noticed this while compiling the document for potential names, in that there seems to be roughly 4 main categories for game names, those being:
Main character name (Kirby, Super Mario, Crash Bandicoot)
Made up word that represent something important (Pokemon, Metroid, Terraria)
Title of character(s) or group (Elite Beat Agents, Angry Birds, God of War)
Words describing gameplay and/or setting (Battleblock Theater, Street Fighter, Stardew Valley)
There’s also a small set of games that primarily go by their acronym as well, like DOTA and PUBG, but I feel it wasn’t much of a standalone category, but it does exist.
I also noticed that most games with 1 word names are basically the “made up words” category of names. I suppose only having one word forces that word to be more creative. One word named games that are just a normal word have to be real careful, since it makes the game more annoying to search up, even if not by that much. Any inconvenience is a barrier between the player and the game, so that is something I definitely wanted to avoid.
As you can probably tell, I stuck with the “made up word” category, since I found that to be the simplest to work with. Additionally, I wrote down some words that came to mind when I think about this game. I think that’s probably a good thing to do not only for naming things, but to get a good feel of the game’s tone and feeling. Starred words were the more important things I wanted to get across, somehow.
Fast paced
*Tasty
*Multiple unique characters
*Supernatural
*Cosmic
*Magic users
*Silly
Explorative
Combat
Combo
Slapstick
The overall goal of this name is to evoke a sense of magical mystery and awe, but in a lighthearted and silly manner, with room for more serious moods as well. I jotted down many ideas, such as words that could be based on the magical material they’re born with, or even how they generate their energy. I also wrote down a lot of prefixes that could be used to make up a neat word. Interestingly enough, back with the first renaming draft, I wrote down the -pods suffix, as I thought it’d be a perfect fit not only tonally, but also because all main characters are arthropods, with the 2 playable characters being isopods specifically. It sounds cute, the plural makes it more fitting with the emphasis being on the group of characters, not just one character specifically, and can be easily adapted into the game as the species name of the magical arthropods. Prefixes should be something that was very familiar to me, since the roly poly’s naming scheme so far have all been Greek prefixes, Hemi and Acro (By the way, there wasn’t a particular reason why I chose Greek prefixes to be their naming scheme, but I thought it was charming, and there’s a wide array of prefixes to choose from). Anyways, I had a hard time choosing the right prefix for -pods because a lot of them sounded either stupid or weird, and that is one of the biggest no-nos in my book, so I scrapped it for the time being.
Over time, well after I first wrote down name ideas and continued on with Hallegen and a brand new subtitle, the project’s aesthetic and theme were becoming more cosmic and outer space oriented, which would give me more ideas about the identity of the game. Then all of a sudden, while enjoying my well-deserved summer vacation after a somewhat stressful spring semester in college, a word popped into my head: Astropods. It was either late at night, or in a dream, but regardless, as soon as I woke up the next day, I knew to write it down ASAP. Astro was a cool prefix, very fitting, and sounded nice with the pods suffix, it checked all the boxes. I was ecstatic that morning! Yet, I knew not to be too hasty about it, and seriously mulled over it for the next few days or so. Changing the name is a big commitment and a big deal, so I wanted to make sure that it was gonna benefit the game in the long run. While I was initially hesitant about sharing the new name, a bit worried about its reception, eventually, I consulted my friends and family about it as usual, and reception was thankfully positive! Despite the fact that the name Hallegen kinda grew on all of us, I think we all knew that Hallegen was objectively not that great of a name, mostly due to its confusing and vague nature. Some still preferred Hallegen, stating that Astropods might be a bit too close to gastropods, the class of animals such as snails and slugs, and that it doesn’t really fit as these characters were not gastropods. To be fair, I did use the cheekiness of removing one letter to make a new word as a point of interest, so that was all on me, but that did bring up a good point on how important it was to establish the right context, as that point kinda soured the name for some. I eventually clarified that Astropods was supposed to be a new word, the species name for the broad selection of characters that look similar to Hemi and Acro, as I want there to be more different kinds of astropods based on the wide variety of arthropods in our world, while still underneath the umbrella if you will, and that did clarify some misconceptions. I also noted that the accuracy of the character’s real life animal equivalent is not too important to their identity, since this fantasy world that is being made is very distant from our real world, and I wanted to highlight the fantasy world’s differences rather than its similarity. Also I felt being too scientific with categorization doesn’t really fit the vibe, but nonetheless, I was very grateful that they brought up those points, as there will always be downsides to new names.
Why a subtitle? Why this subtitle?
A subtitle, while not entirely necessary, helps further identify the game. If you were to search up this game’s name by just Astropods, it may not show up as the main thing, but if you searched up Astropods Starside Glaze, it would have a much greater chance of showing up as the main result. I sure hope it shows up as the main result. This also helps identify this specific game too when more games exist.
As an aside, yes, this is a game I would love to make sequels and spinoffs for, there are simply too many ideas to explore with these characters and world I find, so that sort of weirdly future-thinking is warranted here. I don’t normally like thinking too far ahead into hypotheticals, as they can cause me to get too caught up and rigid, when so much of the future is out of our control, but regardless of what happens, I really wanna make more Astropod games.
Anyways, for the subtitles, those are much more flexible than the main name, so I can kinda do whatever I want. As I alluded to earlier, Starside Glaze is not the most sensical of words together, but I think it fits the game quite well. I changed Starset to Starside from the transition from Hallegen to Astropods because I felt it painted a better picture in other’s heads. There are a ton of words with -side in them, like hillside, riverside… and resident, so I felt Starside was a tad more appropriate as the name of a planet. Now I know this might sound contradictory to why I chose Starside Glaze to begin with, but keep in mind I want at least a passable balance between nonsensical and logical. Something too abstract would weird people away from the game, and something too logical wouldn’t fit with this game…soo Starside Glaze. Hopefully it's not too nonsensical.
Kirby’s name origin, and why it mattered to me
Changing the name of something is always gonna be really hard, I hope that was made clear. What did motivate me to continue with the name searching process was the story of how Kirby came to be.
Disclaimer, this is my recollection of the story, do not take this as facts, but sources of this do exist out there, but can be hard to come by since it was originally all in Japanese, but was translated for people like me to read. I state this because my understanding of the story, even if it’s not 100% accurate, helped motivate me to continue, so I’ll share it anyway.
Originally, Kirby was named Popopo (King Dedede's name makes a lot more sense now), and the game’s name was roughly called “Twinkle Popo.” When they sent out interest forms in buying the game, they received very few preorders. The development studio HAL was under great financial difficulty at that time, so they managed to get Nintendo involved in the publishing department. They told HAL that they would publish the game if they renamed the game, as they thought the name, while cute, was holding them back sales wise, not only in Japan, but worldwide. They eventually landed on the name Kirby, and renamed the game to Hoshii no Kaabii, or Kirby of the Stars, being Kirby’s Dream Land internationally. Interestingly enough, one of the main reasons they chose the name Kirby was because Shigeru Miyamoto, one of the producers, was concerned that this cute character could be mistaken for a Sanrio character, so a harsher sounding name was chosen to distinguish themselves from Sanrio and their softer names. Kirby being named after John Kirby, defender of Nintendo against the lawsuit of Universal’s King Kong with Nintendo’s Donkey Kong. The contrast between the harsh sound and the cute character was appealing to the team, so the name Kirby stuck around. This game would end up selling 5+ million units in its lifetime, and would become one of my most favorite franchises.
While financial success, or even general success in terms of downloads and recognizability is not my main priority with the game (if you wanna know, it’s to have fun making my own world of characters to play around with, but just fyi, I won’t say no to recognizability and downloads hehe), a good name is still in my best interest for the sake of the game to be able to stand on its own legs, for others to interpret and understand, and for others to jump in and have fun. That, I know, is one very important factor for a game to have, and thus, I went through all of this just for a better, more fitting name. And let me tell you, it was all worth it.
TL;DR: Hallegen was too abstract and similar to halogen, wanted to have an easier to spell out name that fit the game better and was slightly more descriptive, plus a subtitle for identification, so with the help of Kirby’s naming struggle motivating me, Astropods: Starside Glaze was chosen after a grueling year-ish process.
And there you have it, why and how Hallegen: Starset Glaze became Astropods: Starside Glaze! By the way, I don’t think TL;DRs will be a commonplace occurrence, but this turned out to be at least 5 times longer than I initially thought, so I figured it was necessary here. It turns out there’s a lot of ground to cover when names are concerned, and I really wanna get as much of what I went through recorded while it’s fresh in my brain, as I’ve been getting slightly forgetful already. I wonder if some parents go through this grueling process when thinking of a name for their future kid… but anyways, thank you for reading this super duper long Dev Talks! I don’t think any other one will be nearly this long; I don’t think I’ve ever written this much in my life for one prompt, and can physically do this for most of them. Hope you all have a great day, and hopefully this may be able to help someone out there who’s struggling with naming things. Take care out there!
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