Name, logo and versioning

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Topic General / General / Name, logo and versioning

Poll Move this into public board? (Closed)

Yes	3	60%
No	2	40%

By Newton

Date 2010-05-14 16:19

After Matthes said that he does not like to have something like "Back to Clonk" with a logo that looks similar to the original logo and a changing sub-title, we had another name brainstorm session in the forum. The self-evident suggestion to just name our game "OpenClonk" and (perhaps) give it subtitles for the subsequent releases seemed to be very popular. Specifically the name "OpenClonk - Ride on a rocket"

Spell also made a quite appealing logo for "OpenClonk"

Other suggestions from the ideas thread (I especially liked) included "OpenClonk - Boom!", "OpenClonk - Roots", "OpenClonk - Reborn", "OpenClonk (without subtitles)" and "OpenClonk - Reboot".

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In this thread, lets decide about three things:

OpenClonk game name and first subtitle

then: OpenClonk logo

Versioning

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As a point to start the discussion from, I suggest the following:
Use "OpenClonk - Boom!" as the name of the first release (and OpenClonk as the name of the game). This project is known as OpenClonk, it just will be less confusing to name the game like the project - we don't need to make a special distinction between the project and the game (as in "The Furzel Project is a project that develops the game 'Henziportchen' " - err... aha?). But to make the name look less generic (as in OpenWhatever), we'll have a different subtitle for each major release. Boom! sounds cool and is not too long while it fits to the boompack theme which is already reflected in the new icon. "Ride on a rocket" is not bad either, also because of the funny acronym ROAR - however the acronym itself does not really fit and is not as cool as BOOM!
Because "OpenClonk - Ride on a rocket" would rather be known and adressed as "OpenClonk - ROAR", I like Boom! better.
Regarding the logo, I'd take and modify Spells logo to accomodate a red "Boom!" writing and give the background less contrast. Otherwise, the logo is already very good, imo.
I suggest the versioning to be OpenClonk 1, 2, 3 etc. for the major releases. 1.X for the minor releases (while X can also be greater than 10).

By Clonk-Karl [de]

Date 2010-05-14 16:28

I think ROAR is much cooler than BOOM :). Also I really think these kind of discussions should be public.

By Newton

Date 2010-05-14 17:04

The discussion was (and is) public. This topic is about the decision. I don't think a public vote on name, logo and theme would be wise.

By Clonk-Karl [de]

Date 2010-05-15 12:22

If this is not supposed to be a discussion, then why do you say you want to "start the discussion" in your initial post? I think pretty much everything should be public, especially decision procedures.

By Newton

Date 2010-05-15 16:17 Edited 2010-05-15 16:20

Well it seems we have different opinions there. I'd say we make a vote amongst the devs whether we move this to a public board or not.

By Newton

Date 2010-07-17 16:48

Didn't have a look here for a while but the vote says 2:3, so I moved it.

By AlteredARMOR [ua]

Date 2010-05-14 19:52

Something like "Brought our own meaning?" :-)

I like the title. As well as suggested OpenClonk - Something naming "convention" (well, of cource we can not avoid "An OpenClonk project" issue but we can make font size realy tiny).

I suggest we should work more thoroughly on the OpenClonk logo for it will stay mostly the same from one release to another and thus will be the most recognizable thing about the game (I kinda like the way original Clonk logos were developed). I remember not everyone was happy about the logo Spell suggested (If you ask me, I also have some thoughts in mind). I know we can not satisfy everyone but we should definitely try hard because we will not be able to change the main part of the logo later (after the first release comes) without a significant loss of recognition.

As for the versioning... I do not like the idea of having versions 1.12.18.4048 (or whatever) anywhere aside from the development process. Instead (I think) we should give our first release the 1 number, second release - the 2 number and so on (like a whole bunch of developers do - ask for examples if you do not believe me). And even with this we should avoid showind this version to gamers (every big release will have its own name, small releases... will be just an upgrage for big releases - no separate source_tarbals/installers/deb_packages). That does not mean that we should not have versioning in our development process (in fact we do have it already - our changesets numbering) but seeing 4.10.0.0 ... and (Oh my God!) [002] Beta after game startup is not something the end-user would like to experience.

Anyway, this is only my own opinion.

By Clonk-Karl [de]

Date 2010-05-15 12:20

I pretty much agree with you except for this one:

> small releases... will be just an upgrage for big releases - no separate source_tarbals/installers/deb_packages

There should be separate tarballs, installers and packages to make sure people get the latest version. Note that the exact same version is required for network games to work. The Linux builds to be included in rpms/debs should probably disable the auto-update feature (since the user running clonk won't have the rights to update the installation anyway) but it should update via the respective package manager (as all other programs on Linux do).

By AlteredARMOR [ua]

Date 2010-05-15 14:39

You know... After I slept a bit I thought I was mistaken about this issue as well :-). People should definitely be able to download some fresh game content without waiting for the next big release.

EDIT: And yeah, I suppose we should make this discussion public (or continue the previous one if we already had it)

By Newton

Date 2010-05-15 20:11

>As for the versioning... I do not like the idea of having versions 1.12.18.4048 (or whatever) anywhere aside from the development process. Instead (I think) we should give our first release the 1 number, second release - the 2 number and so on

That is basically what I was proposing. What I meant with 1.X was that we don't go any deeper than that with the versioning. First number is the release (first release, settlement aspect release, ...) and second number is Xth update for that release, no more numbers. E.g. "version 1.45".

Topic General / General / Name, logo and versioning

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