During the stressful development process, coming up with a title for your game is just about the least tangibly productive use of time.  And because arguements rage for what seems to be forever, certainly a lot of time is spent on the subject.  Just like the thought a parent should give to naming a child who must brave the school playground, a game’s title encapsules the whole thing’s identity in just a small handful of words.  Very powerful, very evocative words.  Or not if you do it wrong.

The original name of our game when it was first pitched was “Cardinal of Zephyr.”  “Cardinal” being the name of our ship and “Zephyr” being the name of our gaseous, almost land-less planet.  People are prone to split-second, gut reactions, and sometimes all that will ever be seen of a game (or company or anything else) is just a name on a long list of many other names.  So, that name chosen has the unenviable duty of having to grab attention and tell a little something about the thing that it represents.

The other team of our classmates had diverted their attention to coming up with a clever name for their project  seemingly got a good boost in self esteem out of it.  We weren’t in the same sort of developmenrut that they were in, but it was about time to start thinking of publicity materials and setting up a web presence, so four of us producers/designers took an afternoon break and looked for a nice place in downtown Orlando to chill out while talking business.  (In truth, we’d intended on talking about a completely seperate assignment but got totally sidetracked for the majority of our break.)  We found a small vegan tea house just off the beaten path and sat down to one of their house blends.

We needed to determine what sort of imagery we needed to convey.  Firstly, was there anything wrong with the existing title?  “Cardinal” brings to mind red birds or church officials.  Birds fly, but the closest our color palette got to red was a hazy dusk orange.  “Zephyr?”  It’s an interesting word.  It means the west wind.  Or the name of a Red Hot Chili Peppers song.  This single word was the subject of enormous debate.  One of the producers present was one of the two who presented the initial pitch; this game was sort of his brainchild, and he understandingly had a lot of passion for his vision.  His big arguement for keeping the word is that it’s unique enough for someone to see on a shelf and say “Ooh, I’m curious about this, so I’ll pick it up and take a closer look.”  My personal arguement is that people are stupid and scared of big words.  They’re more likely to see the word and think that it’s too weird for them to bother with.  They like simple action and visual words like: destroy, war, army, boat, battle, rage.  Words that immediately inspire an image in someone’s head without needing a moment to search the depths of their vocabulary.  On top of that, just how many people know what the hell a zephyr is?  It’s only a clever name if you 1.) know what it means and 2.) know what our game is about.  It only becomes significant after the fact.  As masters degree candidates, we are a rare <1% of Americans, so we can’t possibly expect everyone else to be on our same level of intelligence.  The simple fact is that if you want to be accessible, you need to target a 5th grade reading comprehension level.  Now, I agreed that the word was unique, but it needed support.

What was our game about?  What did we want people to know without having to read anything else or looking at a picture.  Well, there’s the role of being the ship’s captain, of commanding a crew.  There’s the vehicle: a ship, a boat.  That flies.  In the sky.  Using wings.  There’s the element of battle, war, combat, dueling.

Jokingly, I recommended that a great, simple, straightforward title would be “Shouting Ships.”  Or “Flying Seamen.”  The kids’ll eat it up.  Eww…

Stupid as it sounds, studies show people really respond to titles that include the word “of.”  Gears of War. God of War. Army of Two.  Call of Duty.  Pirates of the Caribbean.  “Of” identifies belonging, ownership, context.  It’s a cheap shortcut to place some object within some context.

Another odd little problem that many may not think about is alphabetical sorting.  It’s a simple fact that the letter Z is 25 letters after A, and when you add more letters these become words.  When you’re in a list, it’s best to be near the top because some people may just never get far down the rest of it.  Did you know the computer company ASUS was named after the mythical winged horse Pegasus?  They truncated their name so they could be at the top of lists of computer parts manufacturers.  Think about it.  How many companies do you know or see whose names start with the letter A? Or A1? Or 123?  It’s all about placement.  Since we were going to submit our game to the Independent Games Festival, this list placement was a concern, but the fan support behind “Zephyr” was just something that could not be bucked.

One strong candidate was “Skies of Zephyr.”  It was no secret (or shouldn’t have been but somehow was) that the premise of the concept was to take the turn-based airship battles from Sega’s “Skies of Arcadia” and build a whole real-time game around it.  Many felt it was just too direct, but I personally didn’t have too much of a problem with it.  It has the components of context (“skies”) and curiosity (“zephyr”) that would catch interest, and those well-versed in games would get the allusion.  Whether they’d  appreciate or dislike the directness was another issue.

When we arrived back at school we dedicated a whiteboard to shotgunning ideas and invited everyone to contribute.

After several voting rounds and cuts, we came to “Zephyr: Tides of Combat” as one of the leading candidates.  (Our lead designer is a big Halo nut, so this was a derivative of “Halo: Combat Evolved.”)  We retained the fan-favorite word “Zephyr” as the primary title and were able to affix a “for dummies” description, well.  “Tides” alludes to water, which makes people think of boats, but partnered with some description of fighting gives the reader a sense that the power over the battlefield is ever shifting.  The great part about this particular iteration was the resulting acronym: Z-ToC–or “zee-talk.”  Get it?  It’s a voice controlled game.  I personally enjoyed that last bit because it reminded me of the abbreviated label of a game I bought long ago at Electronics Boutique: Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee (or: “God:DAMM”).  We had to revise it, though because “combat” is such a generic word.  For a short time we changed it to “battle,” but we were able to argue the same fault.  We landed at “war” because of the grander scale that the word imparts.  Rather than one little bout, this brought to mind a bigger picture.  Hence, “Zephyr: Tides of War.”