| Ok so I went through a whole thing for this with my snail simulation. Usually naming stuff is pretty easy for me but...well, it is hard to make a snail simulation sound interesting and cool (because it's not). But I sure as hell was going to try! One of my big rules was that I didn't want it to sound too _gamey_. This is a _simulation_, not a _game_. I also wanted it to sound kind of unique. The other thing is...the .com. You wouldn't think .com domain names related to snails would be very popular, but all the snail.com stuff I tried had already been snagged! My list of brainstormed names included, but was not limited to, the following: * Snails * Snail Simulator (sounded too gamey because of all the other simulator games, but I registered the domain just in case) SnailWorld.com (unavailable) * SnailTales (too gamey and cutesy sounding) * TheSnails In the end I settled on...wait for it...Gastropoda. It sounded unusual and the use of the name of the snails' taxonomic class kind of promoted the simulation over the game aspect. Ignore the fact that slugs should then also fall into this...and are not included in the simulation. But as for the .com - even gastropoda.com was already taken!! I ended up registering gastropodasim.com and learning to live with it. But it never quite felt right. I kind of resigned myself to not being 100% happy with the name - I just needed _a_ name. And then...I learned of the .life TLD. Screw the long _gastropodasim.com_! I saw that snail.life was available! And, urged by the sheer appropriateness of this name and domain name to the thing I am actually making, I learned to drop the .com and renamed the project to SnailLife. In the end availability of domains and some hard rules on the message I wanted to get across (unique, not too gamey-sounding) was what drove the naming of my simulation for me. |
Gastropodasim would never be the name of my choice.