Hi everyone,
first thing's first, you may have spotted some big changes on our page in the past few days. Don't panic! We're still making the same game we promised, just with a new name. And we took the opportunity to give our game's promo art an upgrade.
Why did we change the name?
There's a bit of backstory to that, buckle up and let us explain. But first, enjoy this timelapse of how we updated our artwork for the game.
TL;DR
Announced our upcoming incremental game The Starforge. Controversy ensued. Renamed it to The Last Mothership. Redesigned the capsule art while we were at it.
When we first announced our game a few weeks ago, we thought we had a pretty solid name: The Starforge. It sounded cool, fit our vibe, looked nice on the capsule. We ticked all the boxes right?
Turns out there’s some history with that name. More specifically the StarForge by CodeHatch from about 10 years ago. A game no one on our team had played before, so it went right over our heads.
Us as first-time game devs: “Oh nice, the name The Starforge seems available” Reddit community: “Oh sweet summer child…you couldn’t have picked a worse title”
We didn’t realize what we had stepped into. Instead of people talking about our game, the floodgates opened about negative experiences with the old StarForge.
We sat on the decision to change our name for weeks, it would mean a bunch of reworks (assets, Steam approval, trailers, social media etc). But, in the end Reddit was right. We decided to bite the bullet and find a new name:
Brain-dumped every name we could think of into a Miro board
Background-checked the names (Steam, Google, other games/studios, etc)
Sorted everything into no / maybe / finalist buckets
Began to slowly lose our minds over weeks of searching and endless name review sessions
Randomly joked about The Last Unicorn film…
…and suddenly everything clicked into place
We're happy to share our new name:
👾The Last Mothership
Phew! That was a long one, thanks for hanging in there if you made it this far. In other news:
Game Status 🚧
Closed Playtesting We're still in the closed playtesting phase and working our way thought a laundry list of wonderful feedback we've received from our playtesters. Thank you to those who already playtested our game. And we're so excited to hear from everyone still in our queue.
Coming Next 🔜
Public Playtesting Once we wrap up closed playtests we'll open the game for public playtests. This is still a few weeks out. We'll post an update here and on our socials once we have a date.
Thanks everyone! See you in the next update.
Tiny North Games