Project Amble Devlog #2: names
This is an early devlog for an unannounced game in progress from Choice of Games, nicknamed Project Amble. A lot of the details are under wraps for the moment because very little of it is set in stone but I'm sharing a few tidbits as I go: I often get asked about this kind of detail, but because it's easy to forget over time, it tends to lost in the shuffle when the time comes around for more formal retrospectives.
Last week, I described how some ideas originated and germinated, and grew into a broad-strokes real story with a collection of loosely-defined major characters. Today I looked at names and stats.
Naming Names
First up, names.
Linguistic Inspiration
Before I start thinking up names, I need to know the feel of the languages in the setting. Queen Terezinha, Chief Beatriz Mendes, and Mayor Tomas Ferro of Dalaan in Blood Money have different linguistic roots to Freddie Crawford, Max Van Meyer, and Laurie Beaumont in Westerlin in the Creme de la Creme series, and have a different feel again to Fiore Roldan, Valentina Morarre, and Raffi Claudian in Teran.
I don't cleave exactly to real-world names or linguistics, and I don't always use real-world names: for me, that's part of the fun of working in a fantasy setting.
When I'm thinking about major character names, I often start with something pretty arbitrary—like if they were very loosely based on my TTRPG character Cassidy (they're not) I might look at lists of person- or place-names starting with C as a starting point. I drift away from any initial kick-off point fairly quickly but it's helpful to have something to begin with as it's such an open thing.
Things I think about
I spend a lot of time putting letters and syllables together when making up fantasy names. I focus on:
- Names that fit (or don't fit) the character's personality. Do they have a nickname? Do they use their birth name? Do they use their surname for professional or personal reasons? In Royal Affairs, the anti-monarchy activist Estell Trevelyan is named after the Queen regardless of their gender. They go by Trevelyan.
- Names that say something about a character's family or heritage. That could be related to ethnicity, heritage, or any other kind of ancestry or connection. One of the Project Amble characters is named after their parent.
- Names that are distinct from each other. Especially with a small cast, I avoid names beginning with the same letter, have similar patterns, or all have similar sounds. The TTRPG campaign I'm playing in has NPCs called Aari, Alvis, Alessandro, and Angelico. Don't do this in a game unless it's on purpose! This also applies more subtly than the multiple-A situation: I avoid having multiple characters called things like Doran, Rowan, and Erin because for me they blur together.
And I avoid:
- Names that sound recognisable or silly (unless they're meant to). I say them out loud to myself and to my wife. For one of the prospective Project Amble names, she said "gonads?!" to one she misheard. Needless to say, I changed it.
- Names, or combinations of names, that are the same as those belonging to prominent real people. I've changed multiple minor character names because they happened to coincide with current news headlines and I didn't want it to seem like a deliberate reference. It's not always possible to cover all the bases here: there will be people I'm not aware of. But saying names out loud can help me realise when a name sounds like a real-world reference even if namesearching didn't reveal anything.
Gender-selectable characters
In my first Choice of Games project, Blood Money, all the characters have fixed genders while the PC can play as any gender.
In my subsequent projects, I decided to allow players to be able to select the genders of major romanceable characters. Part of this is about allowing flexibility for romantic tastes, part taking advantage of the fact that I don't have to worry about art or voice budget so can do it, part making a point about settings that don't care about people's genders, part allowing for a whole cast of nonbinary characters in a way that might be hard to sell otherwise (maybe that's just a personal treat for me).
I've been going back and forth about how I want to do it for this project and have been getting interesting feedback about it regarding pros and cons for either way.
When writing gender-variable characters there's always some consideration to be had about names. Should a character have the same name no matter their gender? (Fiore Roldan, Patrice Delacroix, Dominique de Saint Martel) Should they go by a shortened name where the longer version changes? (Max Van Meyer's full name can be Maxim, Maxine, or Maxime) Should they have completely different names but go by a single other name? (Karson is the character's surname and they're usually referred to that way, but their first name is Emily, Emile, or Emil)
So that's something to consider too.
Stats
In Choice of Games projects, the house style involves a selection of primary stats. Some are skills, such as Alchemy, Poise, Combat, or Politics. Some are on a continuum, such as Hot-Headed/Cold-Blooded, Introvert/Extrovert, or Rebellious/Obedient.
Success and failure when challenging these primary stats affects your secondary stats, which describe environmental state (eg faction strengths, public opinion on state matters, demon proximity, suspicion levels), reputation and relationships, resources (eg health, money), or narrative goals (eg how much of your book is written, how well you're proving your innocence, how good you are at your job).
Stats in ChoiceScript games are valuable not only for driving mechanical progress through the game, but also telling players what the game is concerned with at a glance.
Right now I know what some of my secondary stats are: what the player is aiming towards and what will be causing them problems. Because Project Amble is going to involve physical danger, I want to include things like health and equipment quality, though I'm not sure how exactly I'm going to express that.
I do not know what my primary stats are going to be. I have a couple of different vague bullet-point lists but they are… very much not complete and I'm going to take some time to boil down what I want the PC to be able to do, and what skills the PC can develop, over the course of the game.
What I have right now
- A PC with a lot of problems to handle
- The events and problems that kick off the plot
- Some nebulous thoughts about stats and mechanics
- A setting, story-essential historical events, details about exactly where the PC starts out, named major entities, named major locations, and a variety of problems going on
- A very broad-strokes idea of what happens in each chapter, and a slightly less broad-strokes idea of what the first chapter will involve
- A list of named major characters with formalised personality, drives, and loyalties
Next up
A lot more stat work, along with clarifying and pinning down some more about the setting (I did a bit of this alongside the names and character notes, but the stats will inform some of the setting because they show what's relevant/useful to the PC). With this, I hope to sketch out some more of the plot progression.