So yes, they are similar situations on the surface. But the actual details are pretty different! 
Very good, then. Go with your gut and make this work. I certainly don't oppose that.
I appreciate it.
It sounds like you've got up a good head of steam on these two new games, and you're excited to develop them. That excitement alone should make them better games than SBR would have been if you had started right back to work on it after Starward.
Yes, definitely for sure. I've finished games before when I was in "I hate this now" mode, and the results are not what I want. I mean, sometimes you just have to power through. But if the game is not working yet, you need some kind of passion to figure out why and fix that.
i think it means we're an Emergency Raptor, not just a raptor
Indeed!
Sorry that I always sound negative, but I think you also need this feedback.
I don't recall you always being negative, and I certainly don't take someone pressing a point as a bad thing. I agree, I need feedback from people who don't just say "yes that's brilliant Mr. Lucas!" or "ehhh, whatever, sure."
Even though "Sir, You Are Being Hunted" is a good name, and I also think it is funny as a name, I also think it is one of the reasons that the game was not a hit.
I don't know. I know it got a lot of attention partly for the name and the strange style it had. I think the game's lack of hitness, if that was the case... hmm. There's not a polite way to put it. I try not to critique games by other developers. At any rate, I think the game experience was not all that it could be. I personally didn't find it very fun to play, which is about all I'll say there. And I recall a number of critics discussing how much time you spent creeping around in the grass, and how each section of the island was basically the same thing over and over again.
Which might have been fine, had the core thing been more fun in a bubble-wrap-popping sort of way. You can have something repetitive if it's darn fun to do. Or you can have something that isn't all that fun to do in a moment-to-moment sense if it's leading through some interesting progression. Ideally you wind up with both.
My opinion on that game was that... it didn't fully have either, at least not for enough people. I think that's also why Shattered Haven flopped. For some people they love it, and it's not a "bad game" any more than Sir is. But you have to have pretty specific tastes.
Bionic Dues I think actively drove people away with the name. And then the screenshots were all very dark and also did not pull people in. And then the turn-based nature of it, etc, also is not to everyone's tastes. So we really did ourselves in there.
With this particular name, I think we can get people to click in out of curiosity. I think we can make press chuckle and take a look. I think we can then intrigue them with the visuals. And then hook them with the moment-to-moment gameplay. That's the plan, anyway.
I did not know about the other Raptor games though, so you are right to not pick something that resembles my abbrevation.
Right now there are just metric tons of games coming out, and most of them have pretty samey names. They fit to a certain mold, at least.
I recall that we got a ton of attention for the esoteric A Valley Without Wind from the name alone, although that was a very different time period market-wise. I think that worked really well. What really flopped was that the execution of the first game left a lot to be desired for many people. So... that happened. Other people were happy with it, but still.
I am not saying that "In Case Of Emergency, Release Raptor" is the only possible name that could possibly work for this game. However, I do feel like the name needs to be something very unique that makes people go "what the heck?" and click in. Anything that's too short can sound campy, or bland, or like we're talking about airplanes (Raptors). Our absolute #1 enemy right now is obscurity, and that's true for all the devs. So doing whatever we can to make games that stand out in every way and at least get people to give them a glance is a big deal.
Like I said: that doesn't mean "this name goes with me to the graaaave, I will have no other."
But it's the best by a country mile that I've seen for it so far, and it makes a lot of people chuckle, and more people seem to like it than not, it passes the test with my wife, and so on. If someone has a more perfect name, I'd love to have it -- I'm down for that. But the names of our games have a lot of pretty stringent requirements just because of the way the market is.
