Glowlings is now Glødkeeper
Two renames in a month, one strange letter, and a logo that had to be typeset because image tools can't draw it. Why the game and its creatures changed their names.
If you followed this devlog over the summer you knew the game as Glowlings. It is now Glødkeeper, and its creatures are Glødkin. This is a catch-up post, the first of a few covering what happened while the devlog went quiet.
Why change a name that worked
Two reasons, a few weeks apart.
The first was the creatures. -ling is a word ending that makes things small: duckling, gosling, princeling. Every time we described a Glowling it came out tiny, and our own artwork prompts kept drawing them palm-sized when they are meant to stand about as tall as a person. The name was quietly arguing with the art. In late August the game became Glowkeeper and the creatures Glowkin.
The second was the word glow itself. It is a crowded word in games, and we wanted a name that was ours outright. In September we kept the shape and changed one letter.
The ø
Glød is Danish for the glow of a live ember, the coal that is still hot after the flames have gone. It fits better than glow ever did, because the game’s central idea is that attention keeps something alive. A Glødkeeper is the person who tends it.
A few practical rules came with it:
- Glødkin doesn’t take an s. One Glødkin, fifty Glødkin, like sheep.
- Other names followed. The card battler Glowstone is now Glødstone, and the blackjack game Glowdown is now Mechmatch.
- Say it however you like. “Glurd” is close. “Glow” is fine.
A logo that had to be typeset
The new logo is a violet plaque with a gold wordmark and a row of small game symbols under it: a die, a d-pad, a spade, a target, a heart, a domino and a memory grid. It is in the app’s own colours rather than any one region’s, because an ember-and-iron version read as a single place in the world rather than the whole game.
The Ø is set as a real letter, not drawn. Image tools are very good at gold lettering and very bad at slashed Os: ask for one and you get an umlaut, or an O with a scratch on it. So the wordmark is built as type first, and the picture is painted around it afterwards.
The row of game symbols is doing a job too. Glødkeeper is a box of mini-games, and we would rather the first thing you see says cards, dice and puzzles than promises a 3D world we aren’t making.
What didn’t change
Your account, your collection and everything you earned. A rename is words on the screen, not the game underneath. Old links to the Glowlings pages on this site still work and bring you here.