Naming Wednesdays (and Release Date!)
Hi, it’s me again, wondering why I haven’t thought of a recurring intro line for this newsletter instead of struggling to write a new one every single time.
Today, I have some great news for you, but first, let’s talk about Wednesdays’ title and how it came to be!
(You can scroll directly to the bottom to check the release date, I won’t mind)
Naming Wednesdays
Naming a video game is a bit like naming a child…
Or is it?
Well I don’t know, I never named a child… OK, scratch that. Let’s say naming a video game is a very difficult yet crucial task:
A video game title has to be unique, which is not an easy task when there are already hundreds of thousands of games out there.
It has to be easily findable on search engines
It has to say something about the game, while remaining short and memorable.
It generally has to be in English, but also be understandable and easy to spell if English isn’t your first language.
Of course, I did not have all these considerations in mind when I started working on this project, and in order to pitch it to publisher and to potential future team members, I gave it a simple placeholder title:
Wednesdays
You already know how the story ends, but what you don’t know are the numerous twists it took to get there.
The first one of them occurred in November 2022, when a certain TV serie was released on a certain streaming service and took the internet by storm:
I haven’t watched the series, I don’t know if it’s good or bad, but I can tell you I hated it.
Wednesday the TV show was too big, it would have crushed my poor Wednesdays the weird indie game in people’s mind. I had to find another name, but I was also convinced it was for the better. After all, Wednesdays wasn’t very evocative, didn’t tell much about the game, was quite bad SEO wise and was a nightmare to spell/say for non-english people.
Is it Wenedsdays? Wenesdays? Wesnesdays? Wedsnedays? Wesdnedays? Come on! What those letters are even for when it’s pronounced wenzdayz?!
So I went for another title:
Circumference of a Cube
(La Circonférence du Cube in french, I think it sounds better in French).
It’s some kind of math pun on “squaring the circle” (La quadrature du cercle in French, again, sounds way better). It hints at our cube heads, it implies there is some kind of problem to solve: it wasn’t bad!
Circumference of a Cube kinda has been the official title for a few months, until I noticed something: Absolutely no-one was using it! Not me, not the team, not the publisher… It was always Wednesdays, sometimes with air quotes, sometimes with “Working Title” next to it, but never Circumference of a Cube. Maybe because it was a mouthful, maybe because it was too brainy, certainly because it was a bad title. This wouldn’t do.
So we got back to the naming board. This time, I wasn't alone. There was a production team, a co-producer and a publisher with me. Surely one of us would come up with something better, right?
Right?
During a first brainstorm, we came up with dozens of titles. Some of them were revolving around the idea of game within the game and the polysemy of “game” (The Name of the Game, Stop the Game…), some of them focused on Tim (Pieces of Tim, Little Big Tim…), some on the cube-shaped heads (Cube roots, Sharp Edges…), some on the park (Amerland, Rollercoasters…) some on childhood (Playing cubes, Child’s play…), some on silence (Shrouded Echoes, Speechless…) and some of them I still don’t really get to this day (Elephant Game, The Silenced Tree…)
We then put everything to a vote and these were the top ranking titles:
We had two clear winners : Squarehead (or Squareheads, or Cubehead or Cubeheads) and Tim Park
Many more discussions ensued.
Cubehead(s) fell because of a surprisingly famous Belgian rubix cube youtuber.
Tim Park because it should grammatically be Tim’s Park which ruined the pun a bit
And that’s how the definitive title of the game became…
Squareheads
…until april 2024 when, in doubt, I send this on the team’s discord:
I did the same on Mastodon and the results there were telling too.
Sigh…
FINE! Wednesdays it is, then!
Maybe finding a perfect title is not that important after all, or maybe Wednesdays IS the perfect title. Who knows?
Anyway, now you know how we picked Wednesdays as a title, but you might still be wondering WHY we picked Wednesdays. What does this title mean?
Well, to understand it , you’ll have to play the game by yourself, for it contains all the answers.
AND GUESS WHAT?
You’ll be able to play it as soon as March 26th!
That’s right:
Wednesdays will be released on March 26th!
That’s in only three weeks!!!
We even have an release date announcement teaser:
Now let’s hope Netflix won’t choose this very day to release their Season 2…