What’s in a name?

I didn’t think I was going to post about the name “Subveillance” so soon, but after my announcement post Peter Moore said “The name makes me think of hunting for U-boats in WW2… rather than a space battle type game”. Fair point given what I’ve revealed so far.

Naming came to a head about two weeks ago because I wanted to post an announcement and “Untitled Co-op Multiplayer Space/Sci-fi Roguelite Game” was a bit of a mouthful. I’d built up a list of ideas for a name that tried to convey the key themes of the game. But what were those themes?

Rewind a month or two and I was reading some guidance on creating games. Stay true to the experience you want players to have, they said. Thankfully at least part of that experience is baked right into the original premise: A team of players collaborating across separate locations to achieve a goal. But what goal?

I started keeping a record of potential team missions as ideas occurred to me. Take something. Plant something (a bomb, a bug). Rescue someone. Dispose of something. Or someone. All of these seemed to have the element of getting in somewhere and then getting out. That felt, to me at least, very much like a heist.

In parallel, a constraint on the game I’d been considering was making it non-violent. Violence is such unconscious default in games already, I didn’t want to have it in this game if it wasn’t necessary.

Heists seem to come in two flavours, overt or covert (or sometimes both as is the case with the film Inside Man). As far as I can see, overt heists require violence or at least the threat of it. And if you’re going to threaten violence then you’re going to have to be ready to use it. So that was overt heists out of the picture.

An undeniable influence on my thinking for Subveillance is Heat Signature, which you could describe as a “spaceship heist” game. While you can play using covert tactics, it’s often just easier to blow away everything that moves, especially if something goes wrong while you’re sneaking about. So for my money a properly satisfying stealth game needs to not allow you shoot your way out (and allow you to escape sneakily too but that’s for another post).

As I circled around these ideas I reviewed my list of possible names, spending far too long leafing through the virtual thesaurus generating more options. I don’t remember the exact moment but I was looking up the origin of “surveillance” — a watching over — when it struck me that this game was about acting beneath observation and the possible substitution of “sub” for “sur” jumped out.

Subveillance. It certainly didn’t hit all the notes. No clue that this was a team game. Not particularly sci-fi. But it did resonate strongly for me with covert activity. It had something and I liked the sound of it.

Was anyone else using it already? Surprisingly only a couple of references and importantly nothing in the world of games. (As I write, just a week after the initial announcement, the game is already in fifth spot when you search for it by name.)

I ran it past my family. They didn’t hate it, which was an improvement on all the other names I’d tried out on them so far.

I needed to get my first post out, this was good enough, don’t overthink it. A co-op multiplayer sci-fi covert heist game: Subveillance.