Hello Everyone,
Today is a very important update for Hot Sauce Bread Studios. I would like to officially announce the new name for our game: Haste.
As you can see, we have a new title card for the name, as well as a nifty new logo to go alongside it. These logos have gone through a few iterations, but we are pretty happy with how everything turned out. Along with updating our website and social media profiles, we also snagged the URL www.hastegame.com which will redirect back to the game’s section of this site.
So please spread the word! Let everyone in your feeds know that Haste is the next big indie being developed! With such a small team like ours, this helps us out enormously and we would greatly appreciate any extra eyes on the project that we can get.
All the way back in March, we attended the Ottawa Geek Market and I wrote up a post discussing our experiences there. This marked the first time that we brought the game out as a playable demo to the general public, so we took all of our feedback very seriously. For the most part, the reactions to the game were very positive, which we were thrilled about. Moving forward though, we turned to the criticisms to see what we could improve. Skimming over some of the quality of life and bug fixes that were brought up, one major issue weighed heavy on our minds… the name.
Our title, ‘Sigils of Kairos’ was never meant to be a placeholder, but it was definitely born out of necessity and a looming deadline. Unfortunately for us, we didn’t begin titling our game until much later in the development cycle. It wasn’t until a potential opportunity came up for us to push the project out to people that we felt the pressure to slap a name on the game. As a result, we came together and came up with Sigils of Kairos. But how did we come up with that?
Jacob was leaning towards a more obscure name that would be unique on the market. Names influenced by old languages that touched on deeper meanings would be great for differentiating ourselves from other games. Game titles along this line would be ‘Terreria’ or ‘Nidhogg’. The problem with this approach is that the names were often too obscure, making it hard for our audience to latch onto.
I had a completely different philosophy, focusing in on catch words that rolled off the tongue well. Catchy titles include games like ‘Clash of Clans’, ‘League of Legends’, or ‘Battle Ragers’. The problem with these mobile-like titles was that they didn’t stand out in any way. These titles are so dime-a-dozen that you probably didn’t even question the fact that I made that last one up completely.
By looking at these two problems, one can see that Sigils of Kairos was actually the worst of both worlds. Though we thought the name ticked off the boxes of being both easy to say and unique, it managed to somehow be both obscure and bland at the same time.
This all became clear with our feedback to the game. Though it was only a few people who even mentioned it, the truth was that the name wasn’t great.
I should also mention that there were inklings that the name wasn’t the strongest. Even going into the Geek Market, I suggested using Hot Sauce Bread for the T-shirts since it was a much easier name to remember. Jacob correctly pointed out that we should be pushing the game over our company, which totally makes sense.
So what do we do now?
Was it too late to change the name now? What would be the best approach to naming the game? All of these rang through our heads as we debriefed after the Geek Market.
After a bit of back and forth, we took stock of how much we’d need to change and could take at a loss. Monetarily, we had invested a few hundred dollars in the banner, T-shirts, mousepads and the URLs for Sigils of Kairos. Even as a small company, those are relatively small costs to eat.
This unfortunately left us back at the drawing table. How would we go about finding a new name?
For weeks we began to brainstorm ideas, but were still trapped in our typical patterns laid out in the last post. As Jacob and I started bouncing ideas off of each other we started talking about our different approaches and why it wasn’t working out. We needed a new angle to the naming problem.
This is where Jacob set up a frame work which helped rethink the problem. In an ongoing email thread about this he wrote:
In my opinion there are three important things which the name needs to accomplish:
1) Be memorable - the most important thing is people remember it and associate it with our product
2) Aesthetically match the feel and atmosphere of the game - the flavor of the word... I'm not talking about the meaning of the words, but rather the look and sound of the word. Short vs long, soft vs hard sounds, strong vs weak looking characters.
3) Convey the nature of the game semantically - Aka the words can describe (through their meaning) that the game is about
So if we look at "Sigils of Kairos", I think it fails #1. I think part of the problem is both "Sigils" and more so "Kairos" aren't things people are familiar with, so it's hard to tap into pre-existing associations. Some people have never heard the word "Sigils". Almost no one has heard the word "Kairos".
For #2, I think "Sigils of Kairos" does an alright job. I think it conveys the fantasy aspect of the game well. I think it doesn't convey the feel of the game well (fast paced combat). I think it's something you mentioned earlier, that it would work well with an adventure RPG.
For #3, I think "Sigils of Kairos" does an alright job. I think the Sigils portion does somewhat align with the whole card-icon-inside-of-circle-thing. The problem with Kairos is, while you and I know a bit of the mythology, no one else does. People shouldn't have to read a wikipedia entry to get understand the allusion we are trying to convey.
And with that, we hit the ground running again. This helped us get a new approach on our naming conventions and had us narrowing down our choices to a select few. One of the front-runners, Haste, ended up being our winner. Jacob broke it down like this:
I think it nails #1 - it's short, it's a word people are familiar with. I think it would work very well.
For #2 - i think the visual aesthetics of the word are good - the lettering are all strong characters, the word is short, the letters have decent symmetry - it would be easy to make the text look strong. I think strong and short lettering work well to convey the fast paced, impactful combat. It doesn't really convey anything fantastical or strategic. On the auditory side, it's a bit weak. The "A" is good, but it lacks a strong consonant. But it's a short word, the A might carry it.
For #3 - I think it alludes to MTG, to the fast paced combat. But that's about it.
As you can see, the name Haste wasn’t perfect but it was a heck of a lot closer to what we were aiming for than anything else. Packed in there are some other concerns such as the ability to search up the game (SEO), but there are clear steps we can take in the future to make that less of an issue. Using the new SEO tools and advertising potential, we just had to ensure we grabbed hastegame for the URL and social media accounts before going live.
And that is the basic rundown of the name swap. As you can imagine, this was an issue that gnawed at us for quite a while until we made the final decision. I think that Haste is a great name for our game, and we really hope you all do as well. Please stick with us as we work through this passion project of ours and we will do our best to make Haste the best experience that we can!
~ Cedrick
