My Game’s Name Was Already Taken

Discovering that a long-term creative project has been wearing someone else’s clothes

The switch to landscape. I’ll talk about the reasons another time. Short version of the reasons: horizontal is more spacey, in every sense.

I’ve been building a 2D mobile game called StarDrifter in the Godot game engine, and occasionally writing about it here.

Here’s a Short showing a few seconds of a recent build:

[embed]Now with vector graphics. I’ve switched to landscape mode as the primary viewport for the game, but it still works in portrait.

I am aiming for a UI-less final result. No tutorial, no backstory, no finicky controls to learn. Just drifting and dodging through an alien ruin looking for the exit.

I’ve been working on it for years. The game has been called StarDrifter for most of that time. Somehow, I never Googled the name…

This week, a few days into a fresh sprint, I idly googled “StarDrifter” — not out of legal diligence, but out of curiosity.

I’d been doing a bit of devlogging, a bit of YouTubing, a bit of mentioning it here and there, and I wanted to see whether any of it had stuck.

Whether my game had a foothold, however small. Whether anyone, anywhere, had noticed.

What I found instead was that the name “StarDrifter” was already busy.

Oops.

Hello, StarDrifters

Image from the Star Drifter boardgame’s page on boardgamegeek.com

There’s a board game called Star Drifter, recent, with a community and a little run of Let’s Plays on YouTube. It actually looks pretty good. If I was into board games, it’d be my kind of board game.

From the Steam page for Star Drifter. I never really got into this type of arcade game in my heyday, but I can appreciate the craft on show here.

Most painfully there’s a game called Star Drifter on Steam from some years back. It doesn’t matter about the space between the words. It’s the same name.

Star Drifter on Steam is nothing like my game, but its description as “a super hard and hectic 2D space shooter” is close enough to my own game that anyone stumbling between us would simply assume we were the same kind of thing. Or even the same thing.

Book cover from Amazon listing. This kind of sci-fi is a cherished part of my sci-fi upbringing. A startling thing about the cover image: the ship is eerily like the ship in my game.

There’s a 1981 sci-fi novel, Stardrifter — holding the one-word spelling in book listings, but with a two-word split on the cover image. This was done specifically to annoy me, probably.

And around all of those hits are a load of near-misses: Star Drift, Starlight Drifter, Drifter Star…

The naming conventions for media about stars and drifting and drifting among stars, it turns out, have been thoroughly mined.

The legal question in all this is the least important one.

I haven’t even bothered checking any trademark databases. Not important.

What’s important is what people see, think and understand in everyday life. Too many StarDrifters spoil the broth.

So now the name of my game has to go.

Goodbye “StarDrifter”

First feeling: I have much regret about this. StarDrifter has occupied me, in various forms, for almost 4 years.

It’s the name of its project folder (its many project folders, across multiple versions and restarts).

It’s the game’s splash screen, its filenames, the word I often mutter to myself, mentally and out loud. Renaming it now feels like renaming a beloved pet.

My second feeling is puzzlement at myself. Why am I only discovering this now? Why only now?

The check that took me 10 seconds this week could have been done years ago.

The answer is simple and ordinary: when you’re in love with a name, you don’t actively go looking for reasons it can’t be yours.

But the third feeling is something closer to… excitement. I can revitalize the whole thing with a new name.

StarDrifter was vague — and solidly taken.

Now I get to redefine, redescribe, re-encapsulate this game with another name.

There’s a lot in a name

I spent an evening throwing new names at the wall and watching them bounce off.

The obvious move was to keep the verb “Drift”, the soul of the game design. My game is part-inspired by the arcade classic Lunar Lander. The player will have to decide when and where to execute hard thrust with limited energy. The rest of the time, they drift.

But the very words “Drift”, “Drifter” et al are a nominal bloodbath now — DRIFT, Drift Alone, Drift Survivors, DriftForce , Drifting In Space.

Worse, the word has been more or less colonized by car games. “Drift” reads as dirt roads and handbrakes to most people. That’s precisely the wrong signal for a slow, lonely, deliberate space game.

So I let the drift go, and started looking for names around game-mood instead: ruin, and silence. The ancient future. The long-dead civilization (which might be alien, or might be human) that the game is set inside.

Words like Aphelion, Quietus, Threnody, Precursor, Cairn… all rejected. Wrong feel. (Some also already taken anyway.)

Each one showed me something about what the game is and isn’t.

My touchstones for what my game wants to be are not other space shooters.

I’ve taken inspiration from a host of games about exploring a place: walking into ruins, reading a building like a text, letting architecture and exploration itself be the experience. Things like Dwarf Fortress. Atic Atac. Tomb Raider. None of those are about drifting. All of them are about somewhere.

A name that’s about a kind of motion was always going to fight a game about slow space mechanics and somber dead ruins.

I have settled on the new name. It’s pictured below. (No, it’s not “new game”, you wags.)

1st draft of the new start screen. KOSM. Alien, ancient, peculiar.