I’m very pleased to announce our latest upcoming game: Last Life. We’ve been working on it in secret for a while, and now it’s time to tell you a little about it.

Last Life is an action adventure game including puzzle and stealth elements, all mixed up with a heavy dose of mind bending time travel and time manipulation. As for why it’s called Last Life? That’s a mystery to be revealed at a later date…

The title of any video game is very important, particularly for a brand new IP. Many times it will be the player’s first hint of the type of game it is. Keeping the name memorable but also summing up the game can be quite tricky. Usually it will change many, many times from an initial working title up until the final release name.

Prime examples of this are some of our previous games. Car Mania started life as ‘Rush Hour’, and through most of development was simply known as ‘The Car Game’ (well, it does have cars in it…) AirBear grew from a simple stickman and trampoline mechanic. The main character came later, and to this day the project file is still named ‘Bounce’.

For an older example, check out this document for Nihilist, a PC game I worked on back in 1996. We had real trouble settling on a name for that one… guess we were lucky it didn’t end up being called ‘ChunderBuckets’, ‘Barf Thunder Toilet Water’ or even ‘Kill Zone’:

After saying all that, this has not been the case with Last Life. The name has stuck from the initial prototype until now, though it was originally for a completely different type of game (a story for another blog post). I can’t say for certain that the name will stay the same upon release, but it’s looking pretty likely.

Over the coming weeks I’ll fill you in on my thoughts on the trials and tribulations that go into creating a video game, as well as giving some insight into what the game is all about.

As always, feel free to comment. We love to hear from you and appreciate your input.

Jas