Calling for a name

[Tanja]

i'm in search of a proper name for my game. i would be happy to hear some suggestions from you as native speakers and witty people.
the player is a zeppelin, it drops down bags (mail or goods). there is once a great snow storm, which freezes all (including the ship) and you have to hurry for a safe place, because you are too heavy then. em, there are some floating rocks also.

i try to mess around with these words and their synonyms:
post, mail, goods, sky, frozen, gravity, zeppelin, fly, storm, drop, ice, vastness, islands, delivery, trouble, adventure

what came into my mind so far:

Goods For Glory
Postal Breakdown
Mailorder Mess
Zeppel-o-rama (Zep-o-rama)

[Goowolgo]

Very pretty picture!! How in the world do you make your tiles so nice looking? I can't quite get mine to ever line up correctly...at all.

Name suggestion: The Skyway Delivery: Rain or Shine
I dunno.  :ugly:

[Richard Kain]

"Special Delivery"
"Blimp Your Ride"
"Blimping The Trend"
"Zeppelin Express"
"Six To Eight Weeks"

[Tanja]

thank you both for your suggestions.

the flying rocks i painted as a whole.
for the other rocks, i paint a block of nine tiles. i start with the upper left tile.
i paint for a while and when i come to the border of one tile, i copy a border region a few pixels broad from another tile beside it.

i took the freedom to demonstrate it with colored bars. the pic is at 200%.
wherever a color occurs two times, you can be sure the border of this tiles must match. very important are the four corners of the middle tile. these must match with the eight tiles around it. this can be very difficult when your upper left tile is supposed to be very bright and the lower right corner very dark.

of course nine tiles are not enough. this tileset has actually 35. but this is because i was a little stupid at the beginning and didn't think about what tiles would be needed and (the most important thing) which of them would touch each other and at which point.

[Goowolgo]

Omg. I still can't believe it, when I see it. When I have the time (school started back up) I am going to attempt to do this! Do you use the graphics editor that is built in SGDK2?

[Richard Kain]

Omg. I still can't believe it, when I see it. When I have the time (school started back up) I am going to attempt to do this! Do you use the graphics editor that is built in SGDK2?

You can use the graphic editor. I gave it a spin and actually found it to be pretty darn useful. If there was anything that I would complain about, it is that it lacks a "preview" mode for tiled editing. It would be awesome if you could "preview" selected tiles to the top, left, bottom, and right of the tile that you are actually working on. These "previews" would not be editable, but simply graphical instances of graphic tiles you had already created. This would make it considerably easier to develop effectively tiling graphics. (since you would be able to line them up seamlessly with other tiles)

Aside from that, the graphics editor is very capable, and very good for sprite development specifically. It was wise to base SGDK2's graphics on the PNG format. It is the perfect graphic format for these types of 2D games. I tend to switch anti-aliasing off when I sprite draw, as having per-pixel control is very important to me. Also, I tend to zoom in to the maximum setting for individual sprite painting.

[Tanja]

i made it with photoshop. the build-in editor is quite cool, but not mighty enough. no layers. but maybe you don't need layers when you do your tiles. it is indeed a good editor.
as richard says, i turn also aa off when i use it. i wonder if it would be better to turn it off by default.

[Jam0864]

the graphics are nothing short of fantastic... but I have never been good at coming up with titles...

[Tanja]

come on guys, name this game! more suggestions please!  :clown:

and, as said in another thread:
i would be happy when as many people as possible would download the very first version of my game, to see if those mysterious graphic errors occur on their computer.
there is nothing to play, just move around and look for stripes in the background. and wether the ship is moving with constant velocity or behaves strange. you would do me a great favour. 

www.burg-halle.de/~st2210/sgdk/zeppelin.zip

for examples of the graphic errors, look into this thread: http://gamedev.comdel.net/index.php?topic=1137.msg6199

[bluemonkmn]

Favonian Freighter

Maybe the environment you're floating in could be "Favonia" -- a gentle planet "scattered to the wind" by a large asteroid impact, and while there's still some atmosphere, gravity has been dispersed.  You have to deliver goods for others to build their own escape vessels before they lose atmosphere.  Of course the extreme circumstances would yield violent weather and unpredictable winds as the atmosphere escapes.

I found Favonian at http://www.kokogiak.com/logolepsy/ow_f.html (it means "like the west wind; mild", but few people would recognize this word).  Definitions from another source: 1. of or pertaining to the west wind.
2. mild or favorable; propitious.

[Tanja]

i am impressed, bluemonk. that's quite good. i comes to my mind i has never thought of a background story for the game. this would indeed be a good one.
how did you dig out this old word?
the only thing i fear is all people  around me will get confused of the title, because it is in english, with so many Fs and with words noone knows  :laugh:
i have to deliver the translation whenever i say it ^^

scattered by an asteroid:
how cool that you had this idea, because among the early ideas for the levels was one large asteroid crashing down on earth, but so slow it would barely move. this impressive picture could have been the background of one level, while tiny burning rocks falling from the sky, endangering your ship.
but maybe this comes one day. 

btw: did anyone notice the wordplay "Goods For Glory"?
i thought "guts for glory" were quite common, as a game title and maybe some movies.

[bluemonkmn]

how did you dig out this old word?

I just searched Google for "obscure words" and then I went to a site that had a list of obscure words and looked in the "F" section for a word that looked interesting.  (I wanted to use it with "Flying" or "Freight" and titles with repeated sounds sound better, so I looked only in the "F" section.)

the only thing i fear is all people  around me will get confused of the title, because it is in english, with so many Fs and with words noone knows  :laugh:
i have to deliver the translation whenever i say it ^^

Well, "Favonian" is a word even Americans won't understand (I think an obscure word in the title is a good thing... then it can have more meaning than the player first realizes).  You think that so many "F"s in the title make it harder to understand in German?   I know German has the same letter, so I think ... das ist falsch   I have played many games whose titles I did not understand.  Then I was more interested when I found out the real meaning.  A name would be too boring if you understood it all right away.  (There's a game called Antepenult.  I didn't realize until 10+ years later that it's a real word that means the thing before "penulatimate" and that means the thing before "ultimate"... and the game was a spoof of "Ultima"... so it all made sense suddenly... 10+ years later.)

If you want to try something really interesting, you could try to make the first multi-lingual SGDK2 game -- ask the user what language to use at the beginning (German or English), then display all text in their native language.

[Tanja]

If you want to try something really interesting, you could try to make the first multi-lingual SGDK2 game -- ask the user what language to use at the beginning (German or English), then display all text in their native language.

now that sounds interesting! good idea 

[Richard Kain]

I think "Favovian Freighter" is a good title. Using words from a different language in a title is a common tactic. And in this case, I think it fits very well. A Zeppelin naturally inspires the thought of exotic locales anyway. (the word "zeppelin" has always evoked thoughts of Europe in me, for some reason) The alliteration of the title is catchy in a good way. Also, the word "Favovian" is both exotic, and calming. It is full of softer consonants. It rolls off the tongue in a pleasing fashion. And naturally, "freighter" is right in line with the gameplay you've described.

Having a title immediately understood and obvious isn't always as important as making it pleasant. Heck, most fantasy titles have completely made-up names. At least Favovian is an actual word somewhere.

[bluemonkmn]

Note, it's "Favonian" not "Favovian"