Developer Diary 22 (Patreon)

During my weekend away I had no access to my computer, so I decided to tackle an issue I had been trying to solve for a while now. Your name.

Not your actual name, but the one in game. In the very first release, you had no name at all. This was fine, kind of a non-issue. Your blood type wasn’t mentioned either, right? It kind of bothered me though so I decided to figure out a solution. I couldn’t figure out keyboard input though, so I ended up simply adding a random roll which picks a name for you from a pool of about a hundred names.

While this was a clumsy solution, it did have one major benefit in my opinion: all the names were chosen by me and so I could guarantee their ‘quality’. This is something that concerned me once I began thinking about allowing the player to choose their name. So often you see people choose goofy or narrative-breaking names, which really doesn’t fit and just messed with the narrative. So having this set of names that the game chooses from seemed nice. The forced choice, however, was not so good.

So back to this weekend, where I pondered about the possible solution. I felt like there were two options. Either the player can just input their name, or they get a list to choose from. With number one there is the freedom of choice and with number two there is the certainty that every name will fit the narrative.

I leaned more on the side of choice, simply because I would never get the pool of names big enough to the point everyone would be satisfied. I’ve been there myself. I ended up building a system which allows for some freedom, but also sets certain limits. Right now you can enter a name that is up to 10 characters long, and you only have access to the standard alphabet, with the capitalization happening automatically. Is this perfect? By no means. Silly names are still possible. I could implement a lengthy word-ban list, but I’d rather trust on the player to make the smart choice for themselves and choose a genuine sounding name.

Initially I just planned on using a QWERTY keyboard setup, but I realized that with the bigger size button I wanted to use, I wouldn’t be able to fit them all next to each other. As a solution I decided to use the alphabetical order. By no means perfect and potentially frustrating, but it does look quite clean to me. I will experiment with smaller buttons to see if a QWERTY layout isn’t viable after all, but at least I got the system working in general!

Let me know what your thoughts are and thank you for your support!

~Albatross