How do you name things for games?

C

Cadence

Artist
Just a curious question! I have been working on some ideas for an adoptables site and am struggling to come up with a catchy but simple name for the game. Sometimes I like to plug some words together and mix them around, write down words related to the name in a brainstorming cloud and try to match something up. Other times I just make up stuff off the top of my head. 

So how do you guys come up with names for games? Or even pet species, and things like that?

 
Actually, you just described exactly how it goes (for me at least). For foodbabs, most of the pet names are very obvious puns. A ragamuffin is a muffin-cat mix for example, but ragamuffin is also the name of an actual cat breed.

Names and stuff for wild souls were made off the top of my head. It was originally going to be named something in latin to fit the theme, but the translations were too lengthy.

 
I'm terrible at naming things. HP took me two weeks to name and I'm still not super happy with the name 8.5 years later, haha. But that's basically how I did it. I chose a base word and then just tried different combinations until I fell on something I liked.

 
I pick a bunch of names and then check if the domain is available. If it's not I go back to square one. Sometimes I also browse the expired domain list and snatch up ones that have recently expired. For things in the game, I name them realistically so people can figure out what they are without needing an explanation.

 
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For tremder and rigganmore, i find or design a word and google it. to make sure it doesn't already exist somewhere, or doesn't have any negativity associated with the word either in english or another language.

 
Sometimes I would take whatever word and see how it sounded in another language that one would consider more obscure perhaps, and then work with that until it had that certain phonetic sound, but without sounding too exotic at the same time.

 
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I do a mix. Sometimes it’s puns, sometimes I use inside jokes long forgotten. One of my items in next year’s release is called pink spaghetti, which was a meme during my senior year in high school. Sometimes it is just what the item is: a ball of yarn is called a ball of yarn.

Sometimes I play with sounds, sometimes I use generators and play from there.

 
My in development game's name, Auratus Ghoti, comes from the scientific name for goldfish (Carrasus auratus) and the joke about fish being spelled as Ghoti. Enemies are named in a way that goldfish would interpret them (herons are the Spear Faced Death, etc), but the goldfish breed names are the same because that works for the more since the "Gods" (the owners of the pond) know their goldfish breeds.

 
Thanks so much for your thoughtful replies everyone! Seems like there are a lot of different ways we come up with names.

Unfortunately, I still don't know how to name my in dev petsite. I have the concept ready-ish, but the name still eludes me...

@Noromtigel  I was able to name a startup because of a pun, but I was admittedly having a few drinks when my co-founder and I came up with it. It stuck, people liked it, I have a love/hate relationship with it, I want it changed, but doing a massive rebrand at this stage is super annoying. Oh well. We get some laughs out of it still as an inside joke.

@Design1online That's a neat way to do it, finding available domain names or ones that recently expired. I know I let a lot my domains expire, haven't had time for a lot of projects... I must imagine it is a good way to get inspiration for names, haha.

 
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Well, for me it wasn't entirely by choice. I bought a species of adoptables from someone, and they were called Sugar Foxes. I just ran with it.

 
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