Development Update 3: How to name an Indie Game?

Hi fellow Grims!

Leene here this time!

I think it is time to tell you more about where the name of Death and Taxes came from.

Game names:

Naming an Indie Game is hard but I think that It is important to have a good name for your project if you want to put it on the virtual market. Name and logo is usually one of the first things a player sees about the game and first impressions are really important.

At first the project was named The Project of Death and I also called it Death Game sometimes. I really liked that the word Death was in the title because it communicates the main theme. But I didn’t really want to name it just “Death Game” so I had to figure out a better name.

The progress:

First, I made a list of things I wanted the name and logo to communicate and rules they had to go under. I have a background in media- and graphic design so I took some of my knowledge from my studies and from fellow game developers and made up some rules to have a HOPEFULLY well-designed brand for the game. The list could be different for different genres of games but here are some of more broad rules.

These were the “MUST HAVE” categories for a good name:

1. Easy to pronounce
2. Not too long or short
3. No other games should have it
4. Piques interest
5. Tells you something about the game
6. Isn’t too “beautiful” or “cheesy” (if not an epic fantasy game)
7. Is google-able (search engine optimization) THIS IS IMPORTANT!
8. Looks good and balanced on a logo (Some titles are really difficult to make a logo out of) And these are the “good to have categories” for a good name:
9. Have something familiar that people recognize
10. Unique, no other companies/books/bands/... should have it
11. Is funny or a pun
12. Has a cool abbreviation
13. Goes together with the logo or contrasts it

Secondly I made up some names for “a grim reaper simulation game” and asked some friends to do that as well. There were over 50 names at first and I went over them seeing if they fit into my “categories”. This is the longest list one of my really eager friend sent me :)

"Nothing is more certain than Death and Taxes."

So the name “Death and Taxes” fit almost all of my rules (except for 10 and 11). It also had the word “death” in it like I wanted.

I had to make a difficult choice because there was ONE BIG PROBLEM with the name. It is a part of a saying (yay, his is a good thing!), but some other companies have it as well (oh no, this is not a good thing!). So I found out that there was a book, documentary, movie, restaurant, many usernames and even a law firm called Death and Taxes. At that time, there were no games named Death and Taxes and I decided that we can take the risk and hope that we will get enough popularity to show up in the search engines.

A year after naming the game, Magic: The Gathering came out with a card pack called “Death and Taxes” and I knew that this could be a problem because now the name is in the virtual game market but at least it wasn’t a name for the full game. For a long time, googling or youtube searching for “Death and Taxes game” only gave information about MTG, not our game but we were lucky enough to get more popularity and now all the first results in Google are about our own game(yay!) so everything turned out well in the end.

So this is the story behind the name!

Feel free to tell me if you have some own rules for naming games or want me to go deeper in some of the rules I mentioned.

Thanks for reading!

Leene