#3: A Classy Acronym

Breeze Grigas

Hola! Today I’m going to talk about one of the fundamental aspects of A.E.G.I.S., and what the entire game hinges on: the name of the game. “A.E.G.I.S.” means quite a few things in context with our project, mechanically, flavorfully, and developmentally.

Building Class

A.E.G.I.S. was not called A.E.G.I.S. at first. For the first 12 or so hours, it was just a game that I knew was going to have five types of combining robot, probably represented by varying shapes and color identities. Why five? Five was the perfect number for combinations, it allowed for just enough variance without being overwhelming. I knew this since it worked for Magic: The Gathering, where its five mechanical identities were constantly mixed into “multi-class” cards which in turn had their own identities.

When mentally shaping A.E.G.I.S., I visualized that type of design with each mechanical identity(color) coming together and sharing aspects like literal building blocks, like machines. Like combining robots. In this game, the different robot types would not only be representative of play styles, but as parts of a greater “machine” that you were using in a synergistic way to win. The idea for five-robot teams came in the same thought. It felt a lot like Power Rangers and similar shows, which is still appealing to me and a whole audience of people.

This Time, with Class!

So what were these five robot subsets to be called? I don’t think I thought of that, but rather, I thought of the name of the game first. I was brushing my teeth while thinking of five letter words that contained five different letters.  Words that sounded cool and mecha-y. “AEGIS” just kind of spat out. I liked it, it sounded cool. I reverse engineered it into an acronym while walking out the door for class.

“Aerial, uhhh, Guardian, uhhhh, Sentry?”
“Assault, Guard, Support… Intel…”
“Assault, Aerial, Guard, Intel, Support… GENIUS!”

For the first two weeks or so of the game existing, E-Class was “aErial.” Terrible. I had the idea that all E’s would fly, and though I had thought of “Evasive”, I didn’t like it because then I would have to figure out what an E-Class ground robot would look like. We were mulling this over when a classmate also suggested Evasive, and I think hearing it from someone else made me realize how dumb “aErial” was. So I designed the “Esper” subtype, which has become a mainstay non-flying E-Class, three of which appear in our first release.

And that is how the current name came to be.

A Class Act

The name “A.E.G.I.S.” has been a great asset to us, not only is it simple, but it’s also proven to be memorable. There are several pronunciations of it, being that the word is 2000 years old, and that’s always a fun conversation to have with people. It’s served as an amazing name for all of our game design documentation too, since the letters are in alphabetical order.

Let’s hope the name continues to carry us further.

Next time I’ll be talking about some of the dumbest ideas we’ve ever put into the game. Stay tuned!