Hey everyone, I''m at the design stage for a futuristic cyberpunk style game and I was wondering how people come up with names for things like towns, and NPCs etc. Do you just use common names of places and people of the genre you are simulating? Basically, I''d like to know if there are any tricks or tips you may have to make this stage a little easier. Also, How do you come up with the titles to your games? Thanks, Mike

you could use the everchanging book of names to randomly generate names for you.

Theres also going to traditional sources, like the bible, or mythology, but these are becoming used to frequently and incorrectly (no parallel or correlation). Pick something out thats lesser known and somewhat related.

In my current project, there are a number of different kingdoms each loosely based on a ethnic group from the real world. One kingdom draws from slavic culture for example. To generate names, I created a database of various proper nouns from each ethnic group and ran a markov chain with letters as nodes to generate new names. In order for this to work you need a fairly substantial database. I gathered my sources from various atlases and online name sites.

This works better for some cultures than others. For example, the slavic culture I mentioned, it works quite well. For the Han Chinese based group it spits out unadulterated crap.

I would highly suggest using GDevs search option for this. I can think of at least three threads about this already, with some good suggestions.

in a futuristic cyberpunk style game, you would probably just directly take names from an earth-culture, and add technical names to the front. Or you could also take popular words, and change a letter or two. Or better yet just string together cool sounding pieces. IE: neo-paris, xeonimara, tetrahar, valkaraz, etc.

For my projects I take a look around the room and look at various items or objects to get names. If I can''t think of any names i look at the yello pages and swicth names from there or add two different names from two different pages or whatever.
or I would take a drive out some where and take a look at different street naemsor places and switch names in that way as well.It all depends on what the genre of game I am working on.Like for instants in the survival horror boardgame I am currently working on since 98 I used different first and last names for the characters from my work alpha roster phone list.For the buildings of corporations I used simple names like Tower , HighRise, etc.For a great way for asian names just tak a look at animation movies, toys, comics or what ever you can find and switch names from first and last and vice versa.

BullDogRacing27

take the name of a town, any town (one in asia.) take out 3 letters from the name and replace them. same goes for names. or grab a dictionary open a page and pick a word from that page.
from coly

Thanks everyone for your replies! they are all good ideas and I will be sure to make use of all of them

Thanks,

Mike