Legacy -> Wildermyth

Wait, Wildermyth? What? I thought your game was called Legacy.

Well, Legacy was always kind of a "working title." It's a common enough word, especially in the world of games, that we always knew we were going to have to change it. And with a submission to an Indie Game Festival coming up (the cool kind of submission where the game doesn't have to be finished yet), now seemed like a good time.

But the thing is, we always thought we were going to fall back to "Yondering Lands Something Something" as the title. I dearly love the phrase Yondering Lands—it evokes ideas of exploration, a dreamscape, uncovering mysteries and creating legends. We kicked names around a little bit,* with a particularly fraught decision to be made between "Yondering Lands" and "The Yondering Lands."

Fun fact: almost all of the video games we own do not have "The" in the title, "The Legend of Zelda" being the notable exception, and that barely counts because everybody just calls it Zelda anyway. Movies however, quite often use "The." Is there a reason for this?...

The whole thing was moot though.

Because we found not one, but two other games currently in development with "Yonder" in the titles, and they were definitely comparable to ours stylistically, being whimsical RPG-types. We didn't want to wade into that particular potentially-legal swamp, so...

It was back to the drawing board. We spent a couple days all throwing potential names out onto a Slack channel and seeing if anything stuck. (I'm not going to tell you them for the same reason you don't tell people the runner-up names for your kids—somebody's going to be like, "Oh I like that other one better" and it's going to be awkward.) Storytelling was a big idea that we wanted to get across, as well as nods to exploration, fantasy and nature. "Wildermyth" ended up being a name that everyone was cool with, and a few googles and domain name checks confirmed that no video game had taken it yet, so we jumped on that.

I like it, I think. We're still planning on having Yondering Lands in a subtitle or tagline. The Yondering Lands is still the actual setting of the game, with Wildermyth being more of a... where the magic comes from? An idea? Another plane? Loremaster Doug is exploring that.

For now, the blog banner and facebook page are updated, and we've got a minimal website up for the submission:

wildermyth.com

So it's official! It'll probably take me a while to stop calling it Legacy in my head, but it feels good to not have that looming on the horizon anymore.


*- Some of the less serious ones were pretty great:

"To Infinity and Beyonder"
"Wild Blue Yondering"
"Duchess of Yonderland: the Sword Sagas"
"The Yonder Years"