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[acatalept]

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet?  Changing your name has so many downsides: this is how you've always known your game (you might as well rename your child), and worst case yet another conflict could potentially arise with another game using the new name before you release.  Or worse, after you release, another similarly named game comes along and confuses things.

I suggest you embrace your name and move forward.  I'm speaking as someone with the most common surname in the English-speaking world (Smith) -- depite the utility of a name, I don't so much identify with my name, as I identify with my characteristics, my perceived qualities.  Like this person just said:

after all it's about the game and your game is awesome as far as I can tell :)

Push your ideas, push your art, make your logo and your marketing your own.  Focus on what makes the game unique, or even go so far as to add a subtitle to enchance discoverability.  But if you spend enough time scouring Steam Greenlight, itch.io, and the rest of the game dev community, eventually you're bound to find similarities with other projects... so focus on the quality of the game, which will ultimately make or break it.

Can it hurt to reach out to the other dev team?  Maybe they're awesome people, and would be happy to try to diverge their image and marketing from yours, to make it very clear to their audience the distinction between the two games, and you can both happily coexist.  And who knows, maybe even reap the benefits of the blurred lines by sending your fans to each others' games. :D

Good luck!

[Fervir]

this is now a thing I follow

[alvarop]

Wow, this is awesome! How come I never heard about this game before...

[and]

Hello everyone,

It's been a while since we last updated this thread. We went on a short hiatus due to Johan helping out on a different project for a while. However, we are back in full production mode and things are really coming into place.. except for one thing. Yesterday (30/11) a game called "Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles" was announced and since it's a rather long title, the press seems to be abbreviating the name to simply "Yonder". Honestly, we're feeling very disheartened about the whole thing and we haven't entirely grasped what this situation entails either.

How would you approach this dilemma?

Send a 'cease and desist' letter*?

You'll get a bunch of publicity! Not necessary good publicity, but hey...

Looking at the search results in Google for 'yonder game', your webpage is number 1. There's some 'wander over yonder' stuff from Disney beneath that, and then there's various press for you and other related stuff.

Can't see anything show up for the Cloud Cather Chronicles in the first couple of pages.

I don't know if this makes a difference to what you decide to do, but Google search results are usually a good indication of what's in the public conciousness. So, it suggests that 'Yonder game' is your game. Obviously that could change in time, but I've given up trying to predict the future.

I appreciate this is a situation that probably feels horrible for you, but just remember that you're creating a beautiful thing for this world. It's a thing that many people are going to love. Those people will love it, no matter what it's called.

*this is not a serious suggestion, but it may be worth getting in touch with the other developers

[Fervir]

There are actually a few things called Yonder, you might be better off just changing the name since I feel like you're pretty early on in dev in the first place. You'd need to change it to something that will both represent your game and distinguish it among others.

I'm having the same issue with my game kind of, but more on the fact that I think that my game's name doesn't really sell what it is right off the bat. "Elysis" doesn't really mean anything to anyone but me, it doesn't really tell anyone that it's an adventure game. Nobody can pronounce it either lol, so that's really bad. I just kind of picked a random name and rolled with it very early on, but I'm spending a lot of time trying to figure out a better name for it.

There is also another game called "Manifold Garden" which had its name changed pretty early on from "Relativity" and I think it worked out pretty well for them.

[jctwood]

It is a shame about the name. I saw the PSX announcement for Cloud Catcher Chronicles and thought of this immediately. Hopefully you are able to resolve the issue and keep your title.

[ｂ∀ ｋｋｕｓａ]

you secured the domain of yondergame, and imo by the time you release your game is ready to be released, the other yonder game will be completely forgotten.

[kinnas]

look if you wanna go and brick their windows I'm down whenever 

[purplemonkey]

Thank you everyone for the support regarding the name dilemma, we really appreciate the input!

We've been working a lot with fixes and iterations lately. We're looking to get another good chunk of the game playable and okay looking before we make our first trailer. We could have made a trailer a while ago but since we're not under any immediate pressure (except for surviving economically) we're just going to try and get some more goodies finished to throw into the mix.

I did record a GIF of a little log ride though.

[jctwood]

Wow so beautiful!

[and]

Looking ever more beautiful every time I see it

[Pehesse]

Looks fantastic as always! :-D

[MagicJam]

Whoa! The art style for this is breathtaking.

The atmosphere in that last gif you posted is almost palpable. I love the cool and muted colors. Also I like the depth of field that you applied to the foreground trees. Looks like a feature animated film or something. Wow.  How did you do that fog effect??

[purplemonkey]

Thanks peeps, here's another one for #screenshotsaturday

Whoa! The art style for this is breathtaking.

The atmosphere in that last gif you posted is almost palpable. I love the cool and muted colors. Also I like the depth of field that you applied to the foreground trees. Looks like a feature animated film or something. Wow.  How did you do that fog effect??

No effect, we just animated the fog in Adobe After Effect using Fractal Noise and exported the frames as an animation.

[gimblll]

This looks super ninja magical extreme++ (with a cherry on top), keep up the good work!

[Anton]

this look sooo beautifull, can't wait to try the experience =)

[TheWanderingBen]

The illustrations and animations look amazing!

I used Construct 2 for the Molydeux game jam, just to see what it was like. As an experienced programmer, it seemed both easier to use and harder to use than I thought it'd be. But I'm curious to see how it'll do with a full game.

Posting to follow. Good luck!

[TitoOliveira]

Thanks peeps, here's another one for #screenshotsaturday

Whoa! The art style for this is breathtaking.

The atmosphere in that last gif you posted is almost palpable. I love the cool and muted colors. Also I like the depth of field that you applied to the foreground trees. Looks like a feature animated film or something. Wow.  How did you do that fog effect??

No effect, we just animated the fog in Adobe After Effect using Fractal Noise and exported the frames as an animation.

How are you handling these big images? I assume there's a loading screen between each level, or are you streaming the game as the player progresses? Have you measured the impact on video memory of using big images like that for animation and whatnot?

[Krucho]

following, great stuff

It reminds me of a flash game I played recently called Nevermore 3 (platformer focused on ambiance/environments)

[purplemonkey]

This looks super ninja magical extreme++ (with a cherry on top), keep up the good work!

this look sooo beautifull, can't wait to try the experience =)

The illustrations and animations look amazing!

I used Construct 2 for the Molydeux game jam, just to see what it was like. As an experienced programmer, it seemed both easier to use and harder to use than I thought it'd be. But I'm curious to see how it'll do with a full game.

Posting to follow. Good luck!

Thank you, everyone!

How are you handling these big images? I assume there's a loading screen between each level, or are you streaming the game as the

player progresses? Have you measured the impact on video memory of using big images like that for animation and whatnot?

We try to crop assets as much as we can, wherever we can, and fill gaps with small coloured sprites.

Regarding loading, Construct 2 only loads assets from current layout into memory. Whenever it changes layout, all images that are currently loaded (but not used in next layout) are released from memory. We pre-load (kind of) next layout in the current layout so whenever it does switch, the transition is smoother. We are hoping to make it as seamless a transition as possible without any loading or fade scene.

It does currently work however there's still a small hiccup upon switching which we are looking to alleviate. Since we weren't entirely sure that layout switches would be completely hiccup-free we designed these specific parts of the layouts with that in mind. At the moment, our layouts are at around 250-450mb image memory depending on the scene (this number might grow slightly when production is finished).

following, great stuff

It reminds me of a flash game I played recently called Nevermore 3 (platformer

focused on ambiance/environments)

Thank you! Oh yes, ambience and environments are definitely a big part of the experience.