How the name was chosen
The working title UOR meant nothing. How a public name was sought, why it ended up as Terminal Leave, and why it is the same in both languages.
For almost a year the project had no name: I was making the game in my spare time, for myself, and it didn’t need a public name. In documents and in code it was called UOR — a working title that meant nothing and was never intended for the public. In early July it was time to choose a real one.
The starting point
A name should grow out of what matters most in the game. Two things do: orders that both sides give in secret and carry out simultaneously, and soldiers you lose for good.
I discarded generic words like tactics, war or strike at once — there are hundreds of such titles and none is memorable. I looked for real military terms, preferably with a double meaning.
The candidates
From the orders mechanic came Sealed Orders — a sealed envelope with orders, opened only at sea — and Lockstep. From the losses came Roll Call, at which one day someone doesn’t answer, and Last Orders. There was also a set with dark humour, in the tone of a condolence letter.
Two names made the final shortlist: Terminal Leave and Two-Way Range.
Three checks
Three things were checked for every candidate: whether a game with that title exists, whether the domain is free, and whether there is a registered trademark in games.
Some options fell at the checks: good military terms are often already taken. Everything was free for Two-Way Range, but its natural abbreviation is already used in gaming by several communities.
Terminal Leave turned out clean: no games, no marks. Only the exact address in .com was taken — a site for service members leaving the military runs there. So the game’s address is terminalleavegame.com.
What Terminal Leave means
It is a real term: the leave a service member takes just before discharge — the last days of service, when he is still formally on the rolls but already on his way home.
The second meaning is in the word terminal: final, fatal. For a game in which soldiers don’t come back, the combination fitted more exactly than the others. It holds both service and its end, and it doesn’t explain too much.
The domain was registered on 6 July, the day the choice was made. A week later the first entry of this devlog came out.