2016-09-27, 13:35 - Posted in
GameMaker by
JoshuaJSlone
with comments
This isn't directly to do with using the GameMaker program, but the pre-pre-production of my current project. Before starting to use the program at all I was wondering what sort of thing I could make that would be all of interesting to me, maybe interesting to others, not just version 5000 of something very common, and actually feasible for a beginningish game project. Upon seeing that the First Game video series looked to be about Asteroids, a very simple concept came to mind: Katamari Asteroids. If you're familiar with both games you've probably already got the gist. In Asteroids you destroy asteroids into nothing and try to avoid smashing into them. In Katamari Damacy you roll around attaching smaller objects to yourself, slowly growing larger. So in Katamari Asteroids you still try to avoid smacking into big asteroids, but try to shoot them into smaller pieces you can attach to yourself.
I thought it might help my own thinking a little if I came up with a name more fun and more actually useable than Katamari Asteroids, so brought Google Translate in to help. At first I was just trying variations on Katamari Damacy. That means more or less "Clump Soul", so I was just tossing in variations and alternatives. Spirit, asteroid, mass, growth. But I wasn't coming up with anything that sounded good, wasn't a mouthful, and was still close enough to Katamari Damacy for the reference to be fairly obvious. So I went in another direction.
With a game involving changes in size it should go beyond "asteroids", so I was also trying for words that meant all, everything, entire, things like that. One such word I was already familiar with was Zenbu (全部). The first character of that, Zen (全) means more or less the same thing. While checking on that, I ran across several other Zens. It is a property of the Japanese language that many kanji characters share the same reading, so I was looking at other characters that can also be pronounced Zen, and found a few that would work well together.
Zen 漸 = Gradual progress
Zen 全 = All, entire
Zen 善 = Good, virtue
Zenzenzen 漸全善 = Gradually All Good (more or less). For something where the goal is theoretically to attach everything to yourself, works well enough.
