Naming!

(sorry this post is a day late, all 0 readers!)

When naming something like a game there are a few things that really do need to be taken account if you want people to be able to find your game.
I was reminded of this today when I saw a game in somebody's signature on the Gamemaker forums that didn't have an accompanying link! (If you're going to self-promote, do it right dude...) So naturally I Google searched it instead. What was the game's name? Blue Void. Yeah... that name was in a very open relationship. (i.e. taken by a number of people) Adding "game" to the end yielded little extra. It took the exact search Blue Void "Dragon47" (author's name in quotes) for me to finally find the post about the game.
MORAL OF THE STORY? Don't pick a wanky unrelated name for your game that's also in use by about 8 other entities.

Next up: Lone Survivor. What, again? Well, Lone Survivor and Skyscraper share something else - we both share names with high budget films that dominate Google's SEO like a fucking gimp. Perhaps calling the extended version of Lone Survivor the "Director's Cut" was tempting fate, eh? In fact, it only just occurred to me now as I write this after 5 years that the name is a reference to one of the game's characters.
As for me, the film of the name "Skyscraper" is already out - whereas Lone Survivor predates Lone Survivor (film) by several years. It's not like Skyscraper was more than a temporary name to me anyway, but I was beginning to become a little attached.

So what name do I pick? My original temporary development title was really shit, and Skyscraper is in-use and also likely to be a fabrication. Well, what name will suit our dirty needs then? Well, the whole time I've been thinking of a name like "core" or "heart" because of the story. But also there needs to be some thing like 'decent' as well because of the game's progression. So I think for now I've settled on the title "コアへ下れ", or "Alight (to the Core)." No, not alight as in on fire.
Here's an early version of the title screen with the new title:


Thanks again for reading,
～zxin