In conversation about the pros and cons of nouns vs. Would it have killed them to use more K’s in their words? Sheesh. I have friends who are the descendants of Vikings and are tougher than a handful of coffin nails. Norse mythology is a wonderful source of legend but all those soft F sounds and “heim” suffixes courted fears that potential customers (even our especially educated and literate customers, wink) might miss us due to an inability to spell the engine’s name correctly. “Siren” had some energy but it was more heat than light.
Gyre maelstrom trailer full#
“Chimera” would have faced a hockey sock full of competition in Google page rank. Many promising candidates that we both favoured were stricken from the list unwillingly. We went back to “the software.” “The engine.” PINE lasted a month before we accepted that it wasn’t melting our butter. PINE might technically qualify but we both agreed it lacked inspiration, something like a soul. You mounted a mermaid to your ship, dammit, not a, I don’t know, a picnic table. Figureheads were more than just hunks of wood. There’s a reason why the figureheads mounted on ships of legend were carved to inspire beauty and derring-do and to help the soul of the ship navigate to auspicious beaches. But none of our candidates seemed to have been born under a lucky sign.Ĭonfession time: one of our first candidates to have legs was the acronym “PINE.” Procedural Interactive Narrative Engine.” Right? It works! As an ex-military officer with a repugnance for square peg/round hole “backronyms,” PINE was a natural fit, right? It worked! But I’m prepared to admit that we might have pursued that unicorn on an unimaginative day. We could invent a word! Something that sounds the way we feel! Something that sounds the way it’s spelled! No good. There are worse crimes in game development than naming something new after a term found in an artificial utopian language invented to unite mankind. Latin? We’re not afraid to go there, and we did, but the fruit from that particular tree felt a little runty. The perfect may be the enemy of the good, but with funding secured and production greenlit, it was time to pull the damned trigger. Dwayne and I spent far too long referring to “the software” or “the engine” or - Heaven help us - “the plugin.” We needed a name. And to those of you without kids, this process is harder than you think, as evidenced by the legions of kids getting discharged from hospitals with placeholder names BB and BG.īut it’s tough to invest emotionally in a placeholder name. (I once met a guy named Phredd.) There is a respect for the past, pride of the present and anxiety for the future. Whether or not the kid will develop a complex from having to correct people on his name’s spelling for the rest of his life. Whether or not the name invites a cruel rhyme found exclusively among the hothouse taunts of a playground. Whether or not to reference a favoured grandfather. (Aging alternageek that I am, I still listen to a lot of The The and do you have any idea how hard it is to summon that band in iTunes on my Mac?)Īs with the naming of a child, you try to accommodate the twin governors of hope and fear. This was something new and there is magic and power in the naming of a thing and Toska merited a name with no less magic or power.įirst, there were things it could not be.
The perfect may be the enemy of the good, but we wanted to get as close as possible when it came to naming the Toska Engine.
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