Written 2024/11/24
I wanted to share something I've had to fix a couple times over GUTGUN's development, how I fixed them, and why I needed to fix them to begin with. Today, I'm gonna talk about the names I chose for a few of the game's various ENEMIES.
Why would these matter? Well, for GUTGUN, I'm trying to translate the feeling of playing a boomer shooter into a TTRPG. One of the keys of that genre is speed. You don't stop to contemplate much, rather, you're spending the majority of your time in gunfights. A lot of a boomer shooter's gameplay is reactive, you're reacting to the situation as it unfolds, instead of standing still and formulating a plan.
How can I make a TTRPG feel fast without the ability to instantly react with moving and shooting as you would with a mouse and keyboard? Well, there's a lot of tricks— and many of those boil down to trimming the fat. Simplifying things wherever possible. Reducing mental load— the amount of Things a player has to think about or keep in their brain at any given time.
You know what can add to a player's mental load, and stop them in their bloody boots during the height of combat? Bad names!
A bad name can confuse or pause a player if it's too long, too strange (in the sense of using odd spelling or being hard to pronounce), or simply too similar to another name in the game.
For example, In E2, one of the ENEMIES I introduce is the GUTHOUND. They're fast, deadly beasts.
In E3, I throw in the GUTMOUND. These are tanky, lumbering things that take any damage meant for adjacent ENEMIES.
Perhaps you already see the problem? These names are only a single letter apart, and players could easily misread them when setting up encounters— leading to troublesome, unbalanced, unfun fights where they're fighting the wrong ENEMIES!
In isolation, their names may sound cool and play into the general motifs of GUTGUN, but it's still confusing. Even if we look at just one of these names— they're too long. What's more, they take up 2 vertical lines of text within the encounter tables (there are 4 columns for ENEMY placement), rather than 1.
Stranger yet is that, whenever I'd playtest, I'd get confused and mentally refer to the GUTHOUND as the "HOUND"— and get a bit lost for a moment when trying to reference their stats, because that's not the name they were under! HOUND is more intuitive!
So, the names were changed.
GUTHOUND > HOUND
GUTMOUND > TUMOR
You'll note that I didn't rename the GUTMOUND to "MOUND" as that'd still cause confusion! I took the opportunity to both shorten and uniqueify its name.
This wasn't the first time I've changed ENEMY names to reduce mental load, either.
Earlier, when I was developing E1, I had two ENEMIES: the GUTTER FAITHFUL, and the GUTTER INITIATE. Early playtesters found it confusing to tell these two apart. Both started with the same word, and the second? Well, "faithful" and "initiate" don't mean super different things, do they?
So I renamed them to the INITIATE and the DISCIPLE, respectively. Both shorter. Both more evocative. Both easier to remember.
That last part is very important for trimming the fat, as when players can more readily remember the names of what they're fighting— they can more easily find and potentially even memorize their stats, which can really speed up gameplay!
The point of all this is to say, hey, think about what you're naming things in your game. If players need to refer to it constantly, or remember what it does— the name should be easy to remember. If it needs to be read quickly, then the name should also be short and sweet!