Two Games One Name

I’ve had this idea kicking around for a while, and now seems as good a time as ever to pursue it.

The title of a game is extremely important in terms of setting tone for the game and the expectations of your potential audience. Not only is it identification of your work, it encapsulates it. Not to mention that a good title is good marketing.

I’m interested in seeing what happens when a game is inspired primarily by the title itself.

Structure

This contest is in four parts.

The first is simple: propose a name for a game. There will be a post on the blog where you can use the comments to do so, or you can post to this thread. Name proposals will be open for a week. Feel free to propose more than one name, but I would strongly encourage you not to submit a long list. If you need a cap, how about try to keep it to three solid names.

The second is the tap-in phase. Email me a list of the top 4 names for a game that inspire you. I will assemble a list of names, each with two designers attached to it. I will also post a list of the unused titles, which I think can still be useful to you (see below). Finally, each pair of designers will have a set of binary guidance choices that I will develop and assign to them. Between themselves, the designers work out which they will pick to include in their game.

For example, Jon and Shreyas are both assigned to “In Search of Glory.” I decide to give them the choices “Solo game or group game” and “Fortune-based resolution or drama-based resolution”. Maybe Jon wants to do a solo game with drama-based resolution (challenge!), so he emails Shreyas and they work it out.

The third: Write a game! Guided by the title and your pick of the guidelines, write a game. The guidelines are there to give some additional inspiration and force the two games into difference courses, but if they end up being not useful to you, you can still do well in the contest without using them. For extra credit, somehow include entries off of the “unused” list in your game in meaningful ways. There will be about a month for this. I give no guidance whatever to what “write a game” means. Just do it!

The fourth: Submit. There will be a submission process (email me a PDF, really). Send me your game by the deadline. I will read them all and give critical feedback. I will also be choosing winners! These are the categories that I’ll be judging in:

* Best Game Overall – what blows me away the most and makes me excited to play
* Best Extra Credit – what uses the unused titles in the most meaningful way
* Best Pair – what two games of the same name would best be packaged together as a set
* Best Outside The Box – which game surprises me the most
* Best Presentation – yes, for better or for worse, I think appropriate presentation is important. Make it pretty!

I plan on not awarding a game more than one of these, by the way. If there are enough entries, there may be runners-up though.

There will be prizes – right now the winner of each category will have their choice of any PDF I publish. I will work on getting some other prizes lined up as well. Also, if I end up playing any of these I will of course give playtesting feedback.

I’m looking forwards to seeing what happens!

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Question/comments/etc? There's a blog that will be the locus of the challenge - same one I used for the BibliOdyssey challenge, back in the day. Two Games One Name Blog. Check there for more details, announcements, assignments, etc.

Thanks E, I think it'll be neat. I would encourage you only to submit really juicy titles, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's a loooong list of "extra credit" material.

I have a couple things to think about, but I'm planning to open up for title's tomorrow sometime. Note that submitting titles does not oblige you to participate in the rest of the contest! Nor is it a requirement to have submitted a title in order to tap in!

There may be some kind of synergistic integration/stealing/use of Kevin's "images of games you want to see" thread in guidance choices, by the by.

(This is a great idea, Nathan)

GAME TITLE*: Bad Asses and Thieves

*With thanks to timber baron Jackson Tegu

I like the step of choosing the top 4 names that inspire you. I remember with the reverse engineer game design contest, some people got character sheets that were too specific and didn't inspire them, so they were unable to design well. Being able to choose names is a good safety valve, I think. So without further ado:

GAME TITLE: The Hunter S Thompson Role Playing Game
GAME TITLE: Balthazar Mercury in: Voyage to the Great Red Spot

Edit: The instructions are a bit ambiguous. Am I allowed to propose two titles? If I'm only allowed to propose 1 title, then the first one stands.

GAME TITLE: And My Axe

Posted By: Jason Morningstar

Finally, each pair of designers will have a set of binary guidance choices that I will develop and assign to them. Between themselves, the designers work out which they will pick to include in their game.

Nathan, can these preferences overlap? Can Graham and I both pick "epidural-based resolution" from the provided constraints? Or do we have to choose different constraints? Or does it not matter? This isn't clear to me.

Sorry - you two pick different ones. So if you and Graham are both working on "And My Axe" and one of your constraints is "epidural-based resolution or hugging it out resolution" one of you should go with one and one with the other.

Game Title: Celestiana

Game Title: Fortune's Child

Titles!

Love in Winter
Oh Pure and Ageless Song
A Bucket of Blood in My Foyer

Game titles:

• Swords!
• Atlantis 2037
• What Is A Heart But A Sweet Bit of Offal For My Dark Master?

GAME TITLE: Curare.

Graham

GAME TITLES:

1. This Little Piggy


2. Grandpa's War


3. Masks & Revolutions

titles:

• Sunday's Best
• Distant Relatives
• I Love The Dead

Titles:
Never Forget
Naked Trade

GAME TITLES:
Fuck you, Sorensen
Piper at the Gates of Dawn
Twilight's Last Gleaming


It would help if you, as sole arbiter, gave some indication of your tastes.

Title: Two Games One Name.

It's meta.

• Cellophane Smackdown
• Hammer of the Overlord
• Renegade Nuns on Wheels (source: Steve Martin)

TITLE: The Fall Of The United States

Graham

Arbiters of Zodiac
Iron Soldiers: Maim frame
Eyes in the Night

Incidentally
Renegade Nuns on Wheels already exists, its an expansion for Macho Women with Guns (alongside Bat-Winged Bimbos from Hell).

Stutter Step
Season of the Witch.
Captain Supermarket.
Catwalk.

..are all from the blog so far. Thanks for collating, Jason!

I'm currently most interested in:
City of Refuge
Love in Winter
What Is A Heart But A Sweet Bit of Offal For My Dark Master?
Season of the Witch

My favourite that I put forward is Goblin Lovers.

Hrm, that is a good point. I probably should have limited title entrants to one - oh well. Maybe you'll have to select a top 10. Any other suggestions?

Perhaps two rounds of voting would be useful: Ask the entrants to pick their favourite 10 names, in no order. Any name that gets nominated (excuse the pun) by this collective survives until round two, and the rest are culled. In round two, entrants declare allegiance to a subset of the surviving titles.

Alternatively, you might try grouping. That is, place the titles in arbitrary groups and have entrants declare their favourites from each group. Limiting choices to smaller groups tends for better matching among voters, simply because of the numbers.

Posted By: Sebastian K. HickeyPerhaps two rounds of voting would be useful: Ask the entrants to pick their favourite 10 names, in no order. Any name that gets nominated (excuse the pun) by this collective survives until round two, and the rest are culled. In round two, entrants declare allegiance to a subset of the surviving titles..

I think I agree with the concept, but how does this narrow stuff down? Unless someone would have chosen something for their final choice that they don't pick for their 10, this doesn't really narrow what people are actually choosing.

But yeah, some way to narrow things down might be cool, or you could just see how it turns out and ask people for four more choices if you can't make a match from their first 4.

Posted By: sageI think I agree with the concept, but how does this narrow stuff down?

The idea is that the entrants would not vote for their own entries. The resulting set from the combined tally of entrants would only include titles that at least one entrant would like to work on (in addition to the original suggester of the title). Now Nathan would have a subset of the original list that was more valuable to the audience. Furthermore, he would not have to exercise any critical power, which would leave the competition more in the hands of the designers. Which is nice.

In round 2, the developers would be choosing from this modified, shorter list, which would increase the chance for overlap.

In retrospect, I was wrong to suggest a large set (10) for the first vote. 3 or 4 would be better.

If I had to vote for 10 (other than my own)...

And My Axe
Twilight's Last Gleaming
Hammer of the Overlord
Northern Lights and Broken Hearts: Sordid Tales of Icy Passion
Love in Winter
The Fall Of The United States
The Mars Folly
Goblin Lovers.
Sublime
Season of the Witch.

You can drop my title 'This Glorious Song' if you like, I didn't notice when I suggested it that there's already a similar one in the list.

-Ash

My favorites:

City of Refuge
Fuck You, Sorensen
Chained Souls

I tried really hard to come up with a top ten, but being honest with myself, those were the only titles I could see myself following through on a game with. I could mention more names that I like, but I'd be hard-pressed to actually USE them. So there you go.

Elizabeth, with respect, this is just another example of how you are a lamoid. You've tried to imagine using the game titles in a game. The correct way to do it is to pick titles that sound interesting, but not think about writing the game until you write the game.

I can imagine a game called "Fuck you, Sorenson" in which the PCs, who are indie game designers at GenCon, actually try to actually no I'm regretting this sentence even as I type it.

Graham

Shouldn't you add a cutesy subtitle to that? "Fuck you, Graham: In Your Dreams Shoemaker Edition".

Nathan, do stop me if this is diverting your thread in any way.

Graham

I'd be happy to choose a top ten myself. In fairness I could make an RPG out of practically any one of those titles, but most of them I wouldn't enjoy writing an RPG about, and it's got to be fun. If people aren't enjoying the contest the chance they won't turn in a finished game increases, and that kinda spoils it for them and their co-pilot too which is a bit of a shame. So I think people should just put in a 'Top X'. Write down ALL the titles that you'd be happy to write about, regardless of how many or few that might be. If you want to be picky you could always have a list of 'Loves' and one of 'Likes' so that you only go to the like list if there isn't one from the Love list available, or grade them from most favourite to least favourite.

If this sounds like it might be difficult to calculate, let me know. I could probably get the computer to pair up designers for you based on their want lists.

What do people think?

-Ash

Late entry by a new user

Title: Samurai Franchises or Franchise: Samurai
Title: DNA: Alteration which could ultimately lead to {Breakdown, Altercation, Disruption}
Title: 8 Dragon heads in a Sack (intentional movie reference)

Midnight Division

Lots of good ideas folks, thanks. I'm thinking this:

Tapping in = send me your top 5 (or less, if you're interested in less than 5 titles. Cap of 5). I'll send everyone who taps in a list derived* from those top 5's, and you pick three. If I can't make a match from everyone's top 3, I'll still have the top 5 lists. If this just plain doesn't work, I'll figure something else out!

I know it's slightly less than a week, but I'm making the deadline for name submission by whenever I wake up on Sunday. I'll post a more formal tap-in thing then with the final list.

A lot of these are really great, by the way!

*how they are derived depends on how many people tap in, but right now I'm thinking of simply ranking the titles by popularity and cutting the list off at whatever gives us twice as many titles as entrants, or something like that.

Details for tapping in on Sunday! Don't send me anything yet, I will lose it!

My picks:

In repose
Imperialist Bastards
Never Forget
Sing, O Goddess
The Martyr's Brigade

Sure, if you want! The emails aren't for secrecy, they're just so I know I get everything.

Man.

I would probably enter the contest if Shotgun Wedding was one of the titles.

yrs--
--Ben

That's a pretty sweet prize. Shame I have no real plans to make a horror game but we'll see what title I get.

-Ash