The Beginning
Most stories have a beginning, middle, and end, for this story this is the beginning. First, however, let's get some administration stuff out of the way. This is the first blog post for Wild Etchings Studio. We are a newly formed indie video game studio that was founded by ex-AAA game devs to make video games for you all to enjoy. These blog posts are meant to focus on our games, how they're developing, and disseminate information about them like release dates, playtests, or when the Steam page goes up. We're aiming for each post to be under 2,500 characters to make them easy to read and digest. Expect to see a new one of these every three weeks or so. With that out of the way, let's get started talking about project names and our first one, W1.
What is W1?
W1 is the project name for our first game. Each game will start with a temporary project name while it's under development that will follow the same naming convention. That naming convention will be the letter W, since Wild Etchings Studio starts with W, followed by the sequential number that this project is. Since this is our first game it's W1. We start with a standardized project name like this for a few reasons.
- At the start of a project's development we don't know anything about the project so we wouldn't know what to name it anyway.
- The project itself will likely change drastically throughout development so coming up with a unique project name that vaguely describes it might leave us with a weird name by the end. An example of this is Halo: Combat Evolved, it started out as a Real Time Strategy (RTS) game and eventually became a genre defining First Person Shooter (FPS). Imagine if their working title was something like Project Overhead or Project RTS.
- People can get attached to project names. When you're working on a project for multiple years, it's not hard to! Creating a standardized name makes it easier to ease into a new name since it doesn't feel personal.
- Trying to stick to a theme with project names that isn't numbers is hard. For example if we made them all fruit then we'd eventually run out of fruit, get into a debate about whether we should include Project Tomato in the list, and struggle to decide whether our second project should be Project Kiwi or Project Apple. ...now I'm hungry.
- It's what we've done and seen done at AAA studios and it's worked pretty well.
The End of the Beginning
We've passed the character limit (oops) so this will have to be the end for now. Join the newsletter (link) to be notified when the next post goes up and to be ready for any important announcements about W1. Also, let us know what you think about the blog on our socials.