Posted on February 28, 2025, 11:31:07 AM by Jubal
The Name of The Game
The Name of The Game
By Jubal
This is a short piece on naming games! A lot of people, especially in small gaming projects, need to find names for their game, and a lot of what some people come up with can be a little underwhelming.
Often, I think the trap people fall into is to try and take a name format they know from a larger game elsewhere, and then take something that sounds vaguely similar, without thinking about game names in terms of function. Game names, though, absolutely are a functional part of the game's marketing and experience.
Game names need to do one of three things, ideally more than one: they need to sound snappy and engaging, they need to tell people something about the game, or they need to give a hook people will be interested in. You don't need all of these in every game name - there are trade-offs - but these are core things to keep in mind.
Sounding snappy is the most subjective part of this setup, but it's important nonetheless. If game name ideally shouldn't be more than about 4-5 syllables. If it's longer, then it at least should have an obvious abbreviation. All the same techniques that work in poetry or marketing also apply to game titles: think for example about assonance (whether words have sounds that form a pattern) and alliteration (same sound/letter at the start of the words). Sometimes the best way to get a sense of this is to literally try saying the name out loud, or get someone else to do it: the instinct of whether it sounds right is easier to get in spoken format.
A brief note here on articles. "A" and "The" have quite different functions in titles. It often IS worth using one or the other. "A Tale of Doom" is better than "Tale of Doom", but is also different to "The Tale of Doom". Use "the" when you want the name to feel definite and singular, and "A" when you want the name to feel like part of something wider, more ephemeral, or more specific to a character rather than the whole world.
Telling people something about the game is a complex problem. It's a major part of game naming – you want to be informative but ideally without just saying a feature directly. So for example "Dungeons of Hinterberg" is a really good info-title. Dungeons bring the correct expectations of dungeon-crawling, and Hinterberg implies some kind of mountain settlement, and that's basically the game... but it doesn't tell you everything, and it implies some uniqueness to what it's doing, because Hinterberg is a place the player presumable doesn't know (providing a bit of a hook). It's also important that Hinterberg provides a bunch of signals that a more generic name might not – hinter makes us think hinterland, berg is a common root for mountains. Dungeons of Alzorgard is not nearly as good a name, because Alzorgard tells us nothing by comparison. Conversely, the game "Tactical Battles" is too blunt a name. Quite a lot of games have tactical battles, so why people should play your game which hasn't told them anything other than that it has a very common feature in it is left unclear.
The "hook" element can also be phrased as "does the title create a question the player will want an answer to". This is a less strongly used element, but it can be pretty effective. Usually hooks aren't phrased as questions, though there are exceptions: it's about creating a juxtaposition of things that inspire curiosity, or using something that's inherently mysterious. Something like "There's A Gun In The Office" is a hook title: it does tell you quite a bit about the game's setting (guns and offices) but primarily its job is to set up a literal Chekhov's gun effect, an expectation that the gun will eventually go off, but without being clear about under what circumstances.
There's a sting in the tail of all these parts, though, which is that a lot of them are easier, or suggest longer names, for games that are in larger, better known franchises. This is for two reasons. Firstly, if an abbreviation can apply to multiple things, you need to be a pretty big game to muscle others out. DAI, in gaming circles, is Dragon Age: Inquisition. So if you went and made De Administrando Imperio, a Byzantine management sim based on the text of the same name by the emperor Constantine VII, you absolutely wouldn't manage to get more than about five actual Byzantinists joining with you in calling that DAI rather than the Dragon Age title.
Also, bigger game names can be longer because the need to inform a player that a title is part of a series they like is valuable enough to take the extra syllables to do. The extra six syllables to add "The Legend of Zelda" to a game's title is more than worth it because for most buyers the single most important factor in their decision to buy is just "it's another Zelda game!". Conversely, if you're producing the first game in a planned series, calling it "The Apocalypse of Artodor: Swords of Awakening" doesn't work as well. You may have 10 Apocalypse of Artodor games planned, but having that in the title doesn't yet mean anything to anyone and is a lot of weight of syllables for something which doesn't have a strong pull factor. It's also notable that a lot of bigger game series start with a simpler title rather than a long one with a colon: for example, the first Zelda game is just "The Legend of Zelda".
Now, let's look at examples!
Dragon Age: Origins. OK, I know it's the first game in a series. The Dragon reference also tells me it's probably fantasy. Solid title all round.
Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time. This seems a fairly long one – but most of the name is there to tell me things. First, the game tells me that it's a Legend of Zelda game, which is an already established franchise. The Ocarina of Time bit is more a hook than information, in that it makes us question "what does an Ocarina have to do with Time" and in many cases "hang on what's an Ocarina". So, informative and raises questions.
The Exile Princes. This tells me it's likely to involve rulers, maybe strategy or RPG elements, maybe exploration elements given the 'exile' element. All of which are correct.
Roadwarden. This is snappy and tells me who my character will be, really good informative title.
Wildermyth. Also snappy and tells me that a) there'll be a mythos/fantasy element and b) that there'll be some focus on the wilderness. Again, informative but the portmanteau saves on syllables, making it much cleaner than "Mythos of the Wilderness" would have been.
Rome: Total War. This tells me it's a Total War game. Even if I've not played one, Total War is a strategy concept in and of itself, so the franchise title works even if you're unfamiliar with the franchise. Also, it's about Rome. And the whole thing is done in four syllables.
Deponia. Actually one of the weaker examples here in that it tells me absolutely nothing. However, it sounds kinda cool, so fits the snappy criterion.
Under The Yoke. This is a really good one. It's short (four syllables) and it provides multiple meanings which both apply to the game. It's a game about medieval agriculture so animals will literally be yoked to plough fields, but the phrase "under the yoke" is often used for someone working excessively hard for someone else, as was the case with medieval peasants.
Tyranny. A three syllable, single word title that also gets across the overarching theme of the game, how you survive and create your own space under – while taking part in – a tyrannical overlordship.
Hopefully this illustrated some problems and possible solutions when it comes to game naming. Thinking through the three principles we had at the start – what does it tell the player, what questions does it raise, and does it sound good and do so efficiently – is a good basic framework that you can come back to.
Hope you found this useful! If you have any questions, comments, or things you think I've neglected to mention, please say so in the comments below. Or post your own game naming question/problem and I'm happy to see if I can advise at all!
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Posted on February 15, 2025, 10:13:56 PM by Jubal
The Exilian Romantasy Blurb Generator
Symbolic of your tale? Hit the button to find out!
The Exilian Romantasy Blurb Generator
By Jubal
This is not so much an article as a generator: I decided that with the advent of all the LLM slop I was actually somewhat wistful for the days of JavaScript generators - the sort of thing where you hit a button and it actually random-numbered through a bunch of possibilities that had been curated by an actual person. Is the result any better or worse than GPT? That's probably for you to decide. It's certainly less damaging to the environment.
And the topic of this generator? Well, it's been a running joke with some Exilian friends that there really are a lot of romance fantasy books with titles in the form "An X of Y and Z" these days. So many so, in fact, that one could almost... get the titles and blurbs to write themselves? As such, behold the EXILIAN ROMANTASY BLURB GENERATOR, your one stop engine for creating fantasy romance plot ideas.
Do post your favourites below and let us know if this created anything useful for you!
Without further ado, all that remains is for you to push the button and...
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Posted on December 31, 2024, 09:41:38 PM by Jubal
17 More Things We Came Up With Playing Word Association
17 More Things We Came Up With Playing Word Association
By Jubal
By Jubal
Yes, this is what it says on the tin. We've been playing literally the same Word Association game since 2008, it has over 37,000 words in it, and the combinations we come up with sometimes create some interesting concepts that we might not have thought of otherwise. In 2018 I wrote a list of 17 Things We Came Up With In Word Association, so we're well overdue another compilation of quirky and unusual ideas created by the word-jumbles of Exilian members. Various members contributed the original posts: definitions and writeups by yours truly. Do enjoy!
1) Pub Garden (of) Eden
This pub presumably serves the Hesperidean Cider famous from Failbetter Games' Fallen London... and wouldn't it make a lot of sense if Adam and Eve were thrown out of Eden in part for drunk and disorderly behaviour? Theologians are currently discussing what the smoking rules were.
2) Stack Overflow Pipe
The most important part of any automated or human programming system is the Stack Overflow Pipe for exchange with the Grand Repository of Programming Knowledge And People Who Hate The Way You Didn't Search Enough For The Answer First. Unfortunately, attempts to redirect the stack overflow pipe into AI training have led mostly to the production of sewage-quality code.
3) Sourpuss (in) Boots
Puss in Boots is a much beloved character, but these days, audiences are surely looking for the gritty anti-hero take on the fairytale. Enter Sourpuss in Boots, an alley-cat whose best days are past him, whose boots are hob-nailed and probably have too many buckles, who wields a shiv instead of a rapier and who for some reason is still a hit with the femme felines. His adventures will include rat-slaying, dog-fighting, getting stuck up a hawthorn tree for the sake of making that trope spikier, and being a tragic dad to a tabby daughter-figure thrown out from a wealthy household and finding her way in the world. However, even if we do get Henry Cavill to do the voiceover, there will be no scene in the bath.
4) Robin Red Shift
It's like a regular robin, but it's actually green and is just always moving away from you at cosmic speeds. Probably runs on the same technology as Father Christmas' sleigh, probably not often found in gardens as you'd need a very large one to be able to see it before it left again at red-shift speed. May or may not be associated with Batman.
5) Woolly Hat-Trick
If a hat-trick is a three-goal achievement, a woolly hat-trick is a three goal achievement specifically in ice hockey. Canada, get on this one!
6) Middle Earthshot
A grand endeavour to make the world more mythic and heroic OR more hobbity in some way, maybe with an award attached. Options could include ensuring global access to strawberries, throwing blockchains into a volcano, or crying in a very manly yet gentle fashion. Weird American tech bros with Tolkien-named companies for some reason probably wouldn't like the outcomes of this prize.
7) Tone Police Force
They're out there, they're probably self appointed, and they're really mad about what you're saying on the internet especially if it's literally your own life you're talking about in your own words. Actual cops don't always get on with the Tone Police because the latter set a very unrealistic expectation for exceptionally speedy response times.
8) Forge-master-mind
This idea actually has something to it. Who else but the forgemastermind to plan out how the fires of technology allow the Great Scheme to advance? If you need a secondary (or even primary) villain for a narrative of TTRPG, the forgemastermind can calculate the trajectories of automated catapults, plan maps of molten metal through a dungeon, and bait the protagonists with a mix of evil and fiendish technology in a way that definitely doesn't leave enormous potential for on-the-nose commentary and subversion of a wide range of topical issues.
(But no, the Forgemastermind did not build the cybertruck. She has standards, people. Standards.)
9) Milky Waypoint
Yup, you're here, out on the ol' spiral arm. This may be Directions are available to other stops on your journey, spacefarer! See also, Simak's Way Station.
10) Daylight Savings Bank
Welcome to the Daylight Savings Bank. It's probably where the days we lost shfting to the Gregorian calendar got stored, and it's definitely where a chunk of your sleep goes once a year. What interest do they get on our stolen time while they're storing it? Do the chronological profits get stored somewhere, and what would they do with them?
An honourable mention goes to the Savings Bank Vole, who presumably operates the Daylight Savings bank from a small burrow somewhere in rural England, near the burrow that TH White's King Arthur is residing in to await his return.
11) Mole(dy) Warp Storm
Wormholes, clearly, are created by very large worms indeed on a cosmic level. But where there are worms, there are things that want to eat the worms: and so, burrowing through the fabric of space-time, the moldy-warp storm brews, getting ever more intense as the enormous eight dimensional cosmic mole gets ever closer and ready to find its wormhole-making prey.
It may be the end of all we know, but at least the end of all we know will be kind of cute.
12) Acid Rain Main
Probably like regular rain man, except if he actually made a lot of justifiably extremely snarky comments about the poor representation and treatment of neurodiversity in films and other popular media.
13) Pillow Fight Club
The first rule of Pillow fight club: yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay pillow fight!
The second rule of Pillow club was not recorded over the sound of people hitting each other with pillows.
14) Branch Line Dancing
A dance that's kind of like line dancing but the lines split off all over the place and end up in side-rooms you didn't expect to be used for this dance. The dance ends whenever the dancemaster calls "Beeching".
15) Lion's Share (and) Subscribe
To the winner, the spoils – and far too much of social media works on that principle, with exponential curves such that most things barely get scene and a few things go utterly, swampingly viral. Getting the lion's share and subscribe accelerates a creator and their content up the exponential curve, but at what cost?
16) Hobbit Hole Golf
Given that Tolkien's explanation for golf was that it was invented when Bullroarer Took hit a goblin's head off with a club so hard that it bounced down a nearby hole, this is actually already essentially a thing. It could also be a solution for the endless problem in the Anglosphere of golf courses taking up prime land that could be otherwise be used for better things if we put hobbit holes under all the courses, but golfers may occasionally find their buggy tires get let down by halflings suspicious of newfangled Sarumanic machinery.
17) Solar Flare Gun
If a flare gun could knock out most of the electronics in a vast radius and indeed cook a noticeable chunk of the earth's surface, this is that flare gun! When you really need to signal distress to someone not on this planet, and are willing to gamble a lot of lives of people actually on this planet to do so, this is the technology you need.
Notably, "control" was the next word picked after "Solar Flare Gun", which was, let's be honest, probably sensible.
And that's another 17 randomly constructed concepts from the collective thoughts of Exilian! Let us know if you liked reading this, and we may leave it less than six years before doing another set. Happy New Year to all you out there, and best wishes for our next roll round the sun.
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Posted on December 31, 2024, 12:23:04 AM by Jubal
This Dungeon Could Have Been An Encounter
This Dungeon Could Have Been An Encounter
By Jubal
Dare you enter? We have *checks notes* some rooms with orcs and stuff.
Some dungeons, in short, are just too long for the purpose they were given. Especially in certain computer RPGs, they can become a hack-fest where numerous rooms of generic enemies just need to be plodded through in order to gain experience, loot, or some singular end-point encounter or item. There are of course ways to spruce up that experience – better pathing design that interlocks between levels, more complex intra-dungeon ecology and politics, more of a mixture of puzzles and story encounters to break up dungeoneering – but this isn't an article about how to do dungeons better per se.
This, instead, is an article that seeks to pose an alternative question, which is whether a dungeon always needs to be there in the first place. Time spent dungeoneering in a game is subject to narrative opportunity cost the same as anything else in a game: in general, that time shouldn't just be expended as a way to jump through hoops, and combat and puzzles ideally shouldn't just be "plot locks" that need to be passed through to get to the next bit of actual story.
So when should your dungeon just be an encounter? There are various parameters to consider.
First, consider how much story your dungeon needs to tell. This is perhaps the most important element for RPGs. The dungeon – whether as part of a wider core plot, or on its own terms – has a story to tell, and everything in the dungeon should help tell that story. That can include a variety of types of content or encounter, but it should all fit with the wider theming.
If the whole point of the dungeon is to have an enemy encounter at the end, could you just... skip the dungeon? Even if the enemy has a mighty fortress, you could give the player a stealth mission, entry point, or catching a villain unawares if that avoids a slog through thirty arbitrary rooms full of guards who inexplicably don't attempt to attack the player en masse or do anything else useful.
A real smallish castle's floor plan. Not actually many rooms per level!
The same might be true of finding a special item: sometimes items might be behind many many guards and traps, but sometimes it's a case of finding and talking to the right person, or items can be guarded in ways that aren't a single dungeon location. They could for example be moved around regularly, making the problem more a case of identifying who has the item and making the environment much more dynamic. They could equally kept in a location that is singular but hard to access. In general, if something is kept very high up a mountain or in the bottom of a mine, it may well not have a very wide sprawling base of operations because it's really hard to supply such a place.
If a game has exploring and dungeoneering as a core gameplay element in and of itself, that's a good reason per se to spend more time in dungeons. But – and this is where a lot of games falter – dungeoneering isn't the same as combat. Dungeoneering includes puzzles, survival, tactics, navigation, and other such challenges and toolkits. For many people, much of the time, a sequence of combat encounters per se won't necessarily be highly rewarding.
Yet another room like this containing d6 bugbears! My favourite!
This can also be used narratively: if you want a dungeon's ending to be a unique villain or encounter, having the dungeon build up to that can be important for introducing suspense and explaining who the villain is, or exploring the world in which they function. But if that's explained elsewhere, the dungeon might not need to be present – or might be able to be boiled down to a much smaller sequence of encounters and explorations.
Sometimes, then, the dungeon isn't the solution. Avoiding them becoming the universal gateway to plot elements can remove quite a bit of drudgery for players, and provide some elbow room to spend more time on other parts of the plot. Rather than building everything into a static location, having encounters in different locations linked with overland travel & encounters or having an environment where the players' targets are fluid and mobile can help change the pace of game design. The result might be more variation in play – keeping your villains, protagonists, and players alike more engaged with the story.
I hope you found these thoughts useful! Let me know if this inspired you, or if you hated it and think we actually need more dungeons, or if you are stuck in a room with d6 hobgoblins and need help from an itinerant bard. Until then, have fun designing new worlds - whether or not you're heading down a dungeon door.
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Posted on December 23, 2024, 08:10:12 PM by Jubal
Two Cows in Medieval Europe
By Jubal
Welcome to a reprise of our Two Cows series, which takes the Two Cows theory and applies it. The core principle is to explain various philosophies by means of what happens to someone with two cows - often with a somewhat whimsical twist along the way. This time, welcome to the medieval world, with the European middle ages explained in the neatest, most bovine way possible!
We also have previous editions for Ancient Greece and the Byzantine Empire which you can peruse! For now, nonetheless, please enjoy discovering what a cow-centric world has in store for monks, peasants, and realms alike in the middle ages...
BENEDICTINES
You have two cows. You turn them into books.
BURGUNDY
You have two cows. They are on two different patches of land owned by different people, which you spend years trying to acquire and then join up so you can finally have your cows in the same damn place. By the time you finally succeed, the cows are on their last legs. You never get any milk.
CATHARISM
You have two cows. One embodies good, the other evil. The Albigensian crusade takes both and executes you.
CARTHUSIANS
You have two cows. You sternly forbid them to moo.
COURTLY ROMANCE
You have two cows. You leave them to find love and/or the holy grail. Your scheming relative betrays you and gets the milk.
DOMINICANS
You have two cows. You condemn them for heresy and beg for milk.
ENGLAND
You have two cows. One of them is in France for some reason.
FEUDALISM
Your lord grants you two cows in exchange for military service. You avoid providing the military service and/or steal your neighbour's cows. You keep a fortified cowshed so nobody can take your milk away.
FRANCE
You have two cows. You put them in very fancy armour. It turns out not to be longbow-proof.
FRANCISCANS
You have two cows. You give them up to the church and beg for milk.
IBERIA
You have two cows. Several other people have claims on both your cows for reasons of religion, history, etc. You have claims on several other people's cows for reasons of history, religion, etc. In the chaos nobody gets any milk.
ITALIAN CITIES
You have two cows. The commune gets one, the popolo gets the other, and you elect a cowherd from somewhere down the valley to tell you who gets the milk.
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE
You have forty cows. Each one has a different cowherd, and most of the cowherds hate you. You spend most of your time failing to persuade them to give you any milk.
MANORIALISM
You have two cows. You spend half your time tending your lord's cows. Your lord gets the milk from his cows, and half your milk as well.
NORMANDY
You have no cows. You go literally anywhere there's a break in someone else's fence and steal their milk, their cows, and their farmhouse for good measure.
THE PAPACY
You have two cows. You got them by promising people they would go to heaven if they gave you their cows. You keep doing this. Your divine right to all the milk goes unquestioned.
POLAND
You have two cows. You have to promise the Sejm half the milk to be allowed to keep them.
SCOTLAND
You have two cows. They get stolen by the bastard sassenachs.
SICILY
You have two cows. One of them is a camel. Someone from Germany, France, or Italy gets the milk for obscure dynastic reasons.
THE TEMPLARS
You have two cows: people donated them to you for things you didn't have a lot of hand in doing. The King of France takes them away and executes you.
THE TEUTONIC ORDER
You promised that you would take two cows from the pagans. There are no pagans. You try to take cows from everyone just in case they are a pagan. You end up with no cows and no milk.
VENICE
You have two boats. You put other people's cows on them, take them away, and get them to pay you for the privilege. You have no idea how to actually herd cows. You take everyone's milk in the end anyway.