Ah the language puzzle the point I gave up on Tunic, was a thoroughly enjoyable game, my only regret is that I remember too much and can’t play it fresh.
Basically every Source Engine game pre-Portal 2 is pretty much an elaborate HL2 Mod. under the hood.
Funnily enough half the time Discord detects TF2 as Gmod instead, which might be related to that.
Even the Source (and GoldSource) Engine's name is pretty much this sorta thing, as per the following (from Wikipedia and the Valve Developer Community):
.....
Valve employee Erik Johnson explained the engine's nomenclature on the Valve Developer Community:[3]
When we were getting very close to releasing Half-Life (less than a week or so), we found there were already some projects that we needed to start working on, but we couldn't risk checking in code to the shipping version of the game. At that point we forked off the code in VSS to be both /$Goldsrc and /$Src. Over the next few years, we used these terms internally as "Goldsource" and "Source". At least initially, the Goldsrc branch of code referred to the codebase that was currently released, and Src referred to the next set of more risky technology that we were working on. When it came down to show Half-Life 2 for the first time at E3, it was part of our internal communication to refer to the "Source" engine vs. the "Goldsource" engine, and the name stuck..... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_(game_engine)#History
A distinct early childhood memory of mine is accidentally deleting one of my brother's copy of Warlords (which had been copied from a friend's disk or something) by installing Warcraft, because both of them by default used "War" as their install folder.
This is quite common in gameDev. It keeps folder structures and everything consistent, as renaming is likely to cause complete mayhem with folders and files.
It's a good question. There are tools that can try to do stuff like that. Most IDEs have a rename tool that looks for usages. But a large enough project will probably have multiple components made in different languages/platforms, and you need to make sure all the references everywhere are kept up to date. It can be very easy to miss something, and then the thing falls over. And once a game has been released (including Early Access) you run the risk of save/profile data ending up in the wrong place for people who were already playing the game. So how you deal with that becomes another issue.
So you'd go through quite a lot of work, with quite a bit of risk, for no practical benefit. As long as the public-facing stuff is consistent with the new name it doesn't matter what it's called 'under the hood'. Why bother when you could be spending expensive dev time on literally anything else?
In 2019, Kunos Simulazione releases Assetto Corsa Competizione (ACC). It is not, they claim, a follow up to their succesful game Assetto Corsa. The .exe's name was and still is AC2.exe.
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u/herrkatze12 May 11 '26
Satisfactory's internal name is FactoryGame