Dropping the code name | Indigo Nights

The game has a new name. Since Saturday it’s Indigo Nights, and the title screen says so.

The title screen on October 16: SHADOW JOG in pink pixel letters over a night skyline, a New Game menu below it, version 0.2.0-dev at the bottom left

The title screen today: INDIGO NIGHTS in the same pink pixel letters over the same skyline, with “press any key” instead of a menu and version 0.3.0-dev at the bottom left

Claude put the name Shadow Jog on the title screen on day one, and my first prompt never named the game. On October 11 I wrote down that I wouldn’t be keeping it: “I won’t be calling this game ‘Shadow Jog’ forever. It’s mostly a code name and way too similar to ‘Shadow Run’, its inspiration.”

A list in October

Claude ran a brainstorm the same day. It came back with names from the world, like Saltreach and Lantern Row, and puns on water and wire, like Wet Work and Floodlight. Its favorites were Saltreach, Wet Work and Lantern Row. I was leaning toward the blue night in the setting, the night the magic came back, so I sent twelve names of my own, from Blue Flame to Blue Flux. Blue Smoke was a pun on electronics lingo. Claude added Blue Current and Bluewake to the pile.

Nobody picked anything.

Making it a blocker

The question sat open until October 25, when I made it a blocker. Issue #196 says no release tag gets cut until the new name is chosen and applied, which includes the next release, 0.3.0. I also noted “Azure” as a direction, though no list of Azure names exists.

Saturday

I picked Indigo Nights on October 31. In the setting, indigo is the blue night of 2049 when magic came back (the city remembers it as the Blue Hour), and nights is the city after dark. The other name on the shortlist was Indigo Knights.

Nights fits the night city, and Knights doesn’t.

The obvious domain, indigonights.com, is taken (registered since 2004), so the address is indigo-nights.com.

Checks

Claude searched the web for both names, and a ChatGPT deep-research report went over the same ground. Neither found a published game called Indigo Nights or Indigo Knights on Steam, itch.io, the app and console stores, BoardGameGeek or DriveThruRPG. I searched the US trademark office myself and found nothing in the game classes.

The rename

Claude did the rename that evening on its own branch, and PR #247 merged at 10 pm. Every screen a player can see says Indigo Nights now, from the title logo to the error text. The logo is drawn letter by letter from small pixel grids, and the old name had no I, N or T, so Claude drew those three. A fresh verifier agent found no Critical or Important problems and three Minor ones.

Shadow Jog stays where nobody sees it: the repo, the engine (sje, short for Shadow Jog Engine) and the shadowjog.* storage keys, because renaming those would lose saves.

The site

Today I approved the design for the new site, a landing page and a dev blog at indigo-nights.com, and the skeleton already builds on my machine. The home page has the name in the game’s pixel style, the four crew sprites, a short pitch, and a footer that says there are no trackers and no scripts.

The top of the new site’s home page: “Indigo Nights” in large purple pixel letters above four pixel-art crew members in a row

Issue #196 closed with the rename, so release 0.3.0 no longer waits on a name.