Hi, Ojutai! Demonurg here again with another question about cards design process. I have already asked about Xenos' card names. Now I want to ask about card names in general. How do you design them? Do you arrange some kind of brainstorm? Is it only storywriters' task or developers participate this process as well? Do you take a look at cards first before giving them names? Do you have a list of do's and donot's? Do you use some tools to prevent repeating?
Hey Demonurg!Typically this is something that only the designers work on, though if there is one that we really want to get right (like a new very special character or very important card) we sometimes bring in designers of the other games to discuss, although that doesn’t happen too frequently. In normal card design the process consists of taking the art, finding inspiration, and then taking that inspiration to find a good name. Its not a standardized process by any means so I can talk about how I typically approach it but others likely differ.If the art is already available, which most of the time it is (though in the past there were times this was not the case), I will look at the art and try to find something about it that resonates with me. If I am unable to find something very interesting about it (let me tell you how many times I have named a tank), I’ll try to think of how it integrates with the world/story. What is this thing, and why is it here? This can be challenging, and sometimes necessitates creating design space for it to exist - such as referencing characters or places currently lightly or not referenced elsewhere. As mentioned previously we take a lot of inspiration from popular culture, lore, and mythos. Depending on the faction I may spend some time looking into interesting characters from different ancient mythologies (Greek, Norse, Japanese, Sumerian, anything really!) and finding something that feels good there as a base. Other times I may be trying to tie a card to a specific character or event in the game already. It really depends on the significance of the card and the detail of the art.We try to find our own original takes on things generally, our only real donot’s is don’t directly reference copywritten media (although light references are okay so long as we’re not using other people’s properties), avoid words that would be considered inappropriate for the game’s age rating (Hellwing is okay but Fuckwing is a definite no). Aside from that try not repeat the name - which we do by simply searching for the name in our database. We’re okay repeating some of the secondary words, usually more descriptive, whereas we try to not duplicate what I would call the core word (if there is one such as a pronoun) So like we could have “Strong Hansel”, and “Strong Gretel”, but we wouldn’t want to have two different Hansel or Gretel cards. Hopefully that makes sense.Overall our best tools for naming cards are thesauruses and literary references, I typically spend a lot of time on wikipedia.There are times we just completely make up words though. (Yaw’oth’rugo is a great example of something I completely made up, though there was still inspiration in Cthulhu sounding words... or some of the weird ones like Baughe. Don’t ask, that one wasn’t me, and there is no right way to say it).
