Finding a new troubleless name for KSokoban

[Friedrich W. H. Kossebau]

Am Donnerstag, 25. August 2022, 11:18:56 CEST schrieb Karl Ove Hufthammer:
> Friedrich W. H. Kossebau skreiv 24.08.2022 15:53:
> > So could be KStoreKeeper, KWarehouseKeeper, KWarehouseMan (or some sex-
> > ignoring variant like KWarehousePerson). Among these KStoreKeeper would be
> > my current favourite due to shortage.
> 
> Hmm, I’m not very fond of prefixing everything with a K. And KDE has
> mostly stopped doing this, which I think is a *good* thing. IMHO, more
> natural-sounding names – like Krita, Okular, Elisa, Parley and Spectacle
> – work better. And it’s better if the name *doesn’t* start with a K, so
> that the ‘games’ category isn’t filled up with games starting with the
> same letter (we already have KBlocks, KBounce, KBreakOut,
> KFourInKGoldrunner, Kolf, Kollision, KSnakeDuel etc.).

Yes, different people, different opinions, and all based on good reasons. 
Myself am divided here: I fancy prefix-less names also for style (e.g. 
developed the name "Okteta" instead of reusing "KHexEdit" when I wrote the 
respective substitute app).
But I also see why one would use "K" + "English descriptive name", it tags the 
KDE brand into the name and also makes English speakers immediately obvious 
what an app is about. Like "KSokoban" is obvious to anyone, a (or the) KDE 
implementation of the game type sokoban. I would never have thought about 
renaming this if it was not for the legal risk (well, thinking more it is also 
a bit about fairness against those still around who drafted the original, we 
would not like others to reuse or hook up on KDE app names also).
Of course the KName pattern brings the problem what to do with a rival 
implementation done also inside the KDE community, when the name is taken ;) 
One KMediaPlayer would have blocked all the Amarok, Juk, Kaffeine, Elisa, 
Dragon, Haruna, KMPlayer, etc from taking that official name :P Unless there 
were standards and implementations could simple replace each other, and being 
chosen by quality & feature metrics... *dream*.
And often users are more interested to get something done with a tool than 
interested in just using a tool with a beautiful name? ;)
So, myself would not per se rule out KName. Just my 2 cents on the matter.
 
> I don’t have any specific suggestions. For me, Skladnik (with a capital
> S, as applications using a lowercase first letter are complicated to
> handle in sentences) is OK. 

My bad here when first mentioning it. Yes, that proposal is to use "Skladnik". 
So no special casing, also only use of US-ASCII chars [A..Za..z].

> But maybe a bit difficult to pronounce, due
> to the ‘skl’ sound?

Might depend on people's background. No clue myself about set of sounds that 
would work across the world's speakers. Could not find anything on a quick 
search also, but surely missing out respective search terms. The only related 
thing I remembered was designing the name "Kodak", but that also got me 
nowhere with related information.

> Also, it might be be an idea to base the name on something *other* than
> a warehouse worker. The metadata for the game currently *does* say that
> ‘you are a warehouse keeper trying to push crates to their proper
> locations in a warehouse’. But when I start the game, I found that I’m a
> man with no feet pushing human-sized jewels to green manhole covers. And
> it doesn’t take place in a warehouse, but in small brick rooms floating
> in space. Very confusing! :)

I see. Yes, if one does not know the game type and its original apps' graphics 
itself before, the semantics used for the name and the game description make 
less sense. But I think we should do take into account that the game type 
itself has a broader community around it, which seem to all be aware of this 
game being about the abstracted difficulties of someone shuffling things 
around in the floor of a warehouse, as also visualized by the original game 
app. And the current graphics material of KSokoban is referring to the 
original artwork, just used a gem instead of a box (which somewhere was 
explicitly pointed out as personal touch by the original KSokokan author), and 
used a "space" metaphor image for the void outside the walls, where in the 
original there is just single-color void.
So IMHO we should not cut references that much, instead try to just play 
around with them. Even more as KSokoban supports loading 3rd-party level 
datasets made in some externally standardized format. So it is part of a 
family around the original game :) (I remember there are also 3D versions, 
think Quake-style sokoban, for people with obviously great spatial memory ;))

And my long term plan also is to add theming support, so the visual character 
of the game experiences might be something more different. See e.g. some theme 
concept ideas made for Magazynier at its time:
https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-games-devel/2009-October/006473.html

I already locally secured the actual artwork done for the Ant theme at the 
time, 
https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-games-devel/2010-January/006822.html
Would find it neat if that could be finally brought to use :)

Happy to have this discussion, to reflect some more on things and to explore 
the naming options.

Cheers
Friedrich