The Making of Two Nines Fine
I spent the last two days writing the documentation for our collaborative project, and since I’m really proud of the accomplishment, I want to share it with you (additionally, there is much more progress and concept stuff plus all the art).
I’ll also tell you, how we came to call our game Two Nines Fine.
Very late into the production process, actually two weeks before the final presentation, we still didn’t have a good name for our game. The working title had been “Butterfly Effect“, but it was a last resort thing and too cheesy to keep. In the intermediate presentation we created a meta-setting, in which we showed our progress, and called the project for the sake of narrative consistency “Project Hex“. But a real game name should be less obvious, that was clear to all of us. We didn’t want something unbelievably self-explanatory, something related to the topic. As it goes with the idea of a thing, it takes time to find the fitting one.
As you may see from the Corporate Identities post, I like doing chaotic, intuitive research. We had even considered calling the game “City 16″ (please no.), and we played with abbreviations like CT16 etc. I opened Wikipedia and typed in “ct”, to find out if it was an abbreviation for something.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CT
It did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fineness#Carat
And then: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fineness#Millesimal_fineness
Two Nines Fine. 990. 99% percent purity. 99% of the population sharing 50% of the world’s wealth. (http://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/oct/13/half-world-wealth-in-hands-population-inequality-report) The 99% of the population I and most probably you are a part of. Purity of gold, an element that has been mined under inhuman conditions. That is a symbol for capitalism and the idea of money.
We loved and stuck with it.
