I’m way past due coming up with a name for my game. This is a plea for help. Please send me your name ideas: smart ones, dumb ones, puns, anything. I will treasure them all.

It’s a tactics game about collaboration: the good, bad, and potential evils of it. You form RPG parties and take them on mildly roguelike adventures.

A bit of Hearthstone, a bit of Final Fantasy Tactics, and maybe a sliver of Breath of the Wild.

Some clips from across many years of meandering development:

@jonikorpi my approach to this would be to first flesh out the game world, in a fiction-writer's worldbuilding way, and *then* approach this question again

That is not in any way meant to depreciate what you've done so far, the visuals are lovely, but the name IMHO kinda needs to tie things together in a concise, memorable and introductory package and there don't seem to be enough things to tie together yet (based on what I see in the thread), any name at this stage is probably gonna be very hollow

And if you go the other way, start with a name and design other elements downstream from that, that'll probably yield results that are LLM-grade mediocre, probably not what you want at all 

Like, maybe you'll find elements bright enough to make into the name. A fancy mineral or gem, a historical/legendary (or both) figure, a fabled location, a species causing a ruckus across the world
Maybe gameplay-defining elements

What I'm saying is it might still be too early for this

@dside You are right! But indie games make this tricky. Supposed to start marketing as early as possible to offset the zero marketing budget. Difficult to do without a name.

I’m already quite late, and unfortunately won’t have the worldbuilding or overall writing locked down for a while yet.

Some people do use working titles as temp marketing names, but I’m not sure how well that works, so I’m hesitant to try.

@jonikorpi yeah… It's probably a "pick your poison" kind of situation. Because if you pick a hollow name now and commit to it, a rename down the line will probably be even more troublesome, depending on how much you manage to put into it by then: domains, community names on platforms, search presence, etc. In closed circles it's probably fine, but that's *before* marketing starts.
Still, if you anticipate a long development process, it might endure a rename just fine. A loyal community will persist, but the rest will be a fresh start either way

Creative pursuits famously have a difficult relationship with deadlines: too close ones compromise the creative work, too far ones are prone to getting the project stuck, and this here situation really feels like the "too close" kind to me

Take my musings with a massive grain of salt tho, I left the gamedev industry after the first "professional" conference, and while I brewed in the local indie gamedev scene for a bit, it really isn't much.