Games use codenames during development for various reasons: often because the real title won’t be determined until later in the project’s lifecycle, or because a sequel’s existence needs to be kept secret. Every studio I’ve worked at has had some pattern for generating new codenames: tree species, San Francisco neighborhoods, chemical elements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When I started making indie games, I didn’t have a plan for codenames. “Eldritch” was<\/em> a codename until I realized I didn’t have a better title for that game, and it stuck. NEON STRUCT<\/em> was originally titled Die Augen der Welt<\/em>, but I had picked the codename “Neon” for its target aesthetic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A lot of Eldritch<\/em>‘s C++ classes are prefixed “Eld” because it was shorter than writing “Eldritch” every time. Neon’s codebase was derived from Eldritch<\/em>‘s, and it has a mix of C++ classes prefixed “Eld” and “Neon”, which was confusing during development. When I started working on Slayer Shock<\/em>, I picked the codename “Vamp” and decided to unify all the class names with that prefix. Doing that broke a bunch of tab spacing where the additional letter changing “Eld” to “Vamp” moved a tab further to the right. I’m meticulous about tab spacing in my code, and that was annoying to fix.<\/p>\n\n\n\n