It has been awhile, and I know I said I wanted to do more blog posts regarding Animals of Bering. I said this in my last post in March, and wow it is already the end of August which is much further than I anticipated!

Anyway, today I would like to shed some light on various names and how they came to be. 

Truth be told, I am actually terrible at coming up with names. I'm more of a programmer at heart than anything, so I needed a mental shortcut, perhaps an algorithm while still having some fantasy sound to them. What did I do then?

I have played Kingdom Hearts titles at various points in my life and I thought it was interesting that the nobodies had their names form an anagram off the characters that created them when turned into the heartless, while also throwing in an X. An example of this is Roxas being an anagram of Sora, while also having an additional X and Roxas was Sora's nobody that eventually spawned after he became a heartless in the original game.  

So I decided to do something similar. I decided to use close friends of mine for most of the major characters as a base and I thought it would make for an interesting easter egg to. So I wrote up a quick utility to spit out all possible string permutations (a technical way to say anagram mashups of words) with anything I threw at it. I then took the person's first name and then last initial. This produces a lot of possible combinations really fast, way more than I could reasonably sort through to pick a name that sounds good so I needed to narrow it down. I then decided I would have the last initial of a person's name be the starting letter of the character's generated name and then manually pick from there. If we take the main two protagonists Fylek and Casida, they are just anagrams of Kyle F (me) and D'Asia C (a person very close to me) respectively. As I said, most major characters follow this pattern so those who wish can possibly work out the various characters they encounter. 

I decided to make sure the characters had loose connection to the person their name was based around so that there was quite a bit of disconnect. Their personalities and backstories have little to no bearing to the person they got their name from (in most cases, but holds true for Fylek and Casida at least). 

As for location names? That one is a mixed bag. Bering Kingdom comes from the map being based around eastern Siberia and western Alaska, which houses the Bering Sea in between. Some places are based on real world areas (such as Kamchatka Village/Forest), some just take a word and reverse it (Retto Village is just Otter backwards), some are a bit of a mashup (Hamptropolis being Hampton (area in Alaska) and Metropolis), and some are just miscellaneous. 

Hope this gave you all some better insight into how some names came to be and I look forward to you all playing the eventual release of Animals of Bering in full. 

-Kyle