One generic tip:
How to come up with catchy, easy-to-remember words? The easiest way I know of is to combine two well known words into one. Observe:
- Skyrim
- BioShock
- Half-Life (although than term obviously existed before the game)
- Mass Effect
- Silent Hill
- Final Fantasy
- Minecraft
- ... etc ...
Rules:
- short words
- 'power' words
- at least one of them alludes to the genre / theme
One particularly good 'recipe' is to have one word represent something 'real' (SKYrim, MASS effect, silent HILL) and the other one something abstract (skyRIM, mass EFFECT, SILENT hill). But that's just one approach.
For example, let's say you're trying to come up with a name for a fantasy game. You build two lists of words. The first one will contain things like 'sword', 'rain', 'winter', or 'sky'. The second one will have words like 'rim', 'fall', or 'scape'. Then you make permutations of the two lists. You can either use scripting (Python itertools is your friend) or you can just paste it into online tools like
http://mergewords.com/ (which I just found 2 minutes ago, can't vouch for it).
Then, you read the resulting list. 90% will be crap. 9% will be so-so or already taken. You're looking for that one percent that sounds great, isn't taken, and hopefully has a free domain
.
Even with just these seven words I mentioned above, you get this:
sky rim
sky fall
sky scape
rain rim
rain fall
rain scape
winter rim
winter fall
winter scape
sword rim
sword fall
sword scape
I know this might go against the main idea of this thread — namely, that the title of the game should convey something about how it is unique, or even the game mechanics. I think it's great when a game can do that, but I personally don't think it's a requirement. I mean, of course, as an indie developer you should
not assume that because Bethesda can pull 'Skyrim' out of their asses, it will also work for you. But unless you're doing some me-too game ("Final Fantasy, but with changeable gravity!"), you shouldn't force yourself to convey your USP in the game title.
By the way, the proposed method also works with parts of words, such as castle-vania, psycho-nauts, etc. For example, if you know that the first name should be either 'psycho' or 'cortex' (because the game is about kids visiting people's minds), you can build the second list out of greek/latin/english
affixes such as '-nauts', '-cians', '-hood', '-ids', '-oids'. Just experiment.
And of course, this doesn't only apply for game titles. Sometimes, you just need a name for something in-game, like a city, country, item, etc.