TheForge

I love names.

Love. Them.

There is a world of difference between a sword called Rare Sword and a sword called Oathbreaker or Apotheosis or Tyllian by the Pyre. Those names are miniature stories that we don’t have to tell. You do. You’re the ones who will sculpt geometries and append mass to these unreal things – all with the literary investment of pennies on the dollar.

This love of names germinated when I started working on TheForge in my off-time from my Masters in Fine Arts. It seemed like an easy enough idea: Make a random number generator, attach names to the numbers, cross-reference. Badda-bing Badda-boom, it’s all good.

Only, that wasn’t good enough.

You see, there is an embarrassment of Name Generators online, and why shouldn’t there be? If it’s all as simple as numbers and names, anybody could do it. I wanted something different, though I never set out to make something objectively better. By happy coincidence, focusing on the end-user allowed for the discovery of a versatile new methodology.

To get to that point required wireframing, prototyping and testing – concepts that were, at the time, nameless instincts rather than professional scaffolding. Contemporists could classify this as a flirtation with App design, and certainly, a tempestuous first night with UI.