Notes on Naming

2025-03-07: Names should be written backwards

Not literally backwards — conceptually backwards. Asset names in gaming often use some kind of bigGroup_smallGroup_identity_variant pattern. They refine downwards from broad labels to specific labels.

But when you sit down to make an asset, prop_furn_kitchenTable_clean begins its life as that specific variant. You make a clean kitchen table, something that fits the fullfills the descriptive portion of the name, and then you run it through your pipeline to transform it, encapsulate it, and publish it as something that fulfills the categorical potion of the name. You start with a table and end with a prop.

And just to be clear, I’m not saying that clean_kitchenTable_furn_prop is a better name than prop_furn_kitchenTable_clean — I’m saying that we should build the name prop_furn_kitchenTable_clean by prepending labels to righthand descriptive portion, the same way you build the asset itself by prepending layers of descriptive data to a payload of art.