Earlier, we talked about some tips and pointers to consider when you’re trying to find the right one-two combo when it comes to your app’s name and icon. For our app here at Alley Labs, the naming process is ongoing; a slow circling pattern around a target that we’ll only know we’ve hit once we’ve hit it. So we’re going to take you through the steps we’ve gone through so far to get the name for our app. Hopefully, they’ll help you in your process, too.
1.) You want your app’s name and its game play to have an inseparable bond (this goes back to the SimCity vs. Halo distinction we discussed in the previous “naming” post). So the first thing we did; we got into our game. Zipped around blasted some hunks of space rock and let some words start to pop into our heads. Words like “frenzy,” “wild,” “space,” “asteroids”… We start simple and grow from there.
2.) The next stop was the thesaurus to get that list to grow. We plugged in whatever we came up with while playing the game and got a list going – synonyms of synonyms. In the end we had a sheet of paper with about 200 nouns, verbs, adjectives, gerunds, modifiers, dangling participles… you get the idea. Next came the narrowing process.
3.) We went straight to the app store and looked through for games similar to ours that used words from our list. Those words we cut immediately (while it’s a good idea not to sound similar to a game you might be in competition with, we did keep an eye out for words that seemed to be good “gaming” words). Any words that were too long, – we took it easy on the syllables and you should too – difficult to spell, had arcane definitions… cut, cut, cut.
4.) From then on it’s that circling pattern; like flotsam and jetsam in your bathtub while the water’s headed down the drain and it just circles, circles into that little whirlpool vortex until it gets sucked down the hole. When we got to that point we had two words left: “Meteor Blitz.”
That’s where we are now. It could be we recycle this whole process another couple times with the words meteor blitz and see what we get when we come out the other side – the narrowing process is a narrowing process of its own (it’s all very metaphysical…) – but for the moment, that’s how we got our name.
