demo game update

[Dan Mosedale]

Yesterday, a bunch of us working on the demo game had a call where we
decided could do something more exciting than just shooting asteroids to
demo the week starting September 12th. We came up with a concept (which
I'll only describe briefly here) of a player traversing an asteroid
field to rescue a pet space fox stranded near a black hole.

After the main call, Alan, CJ, and I triaged Pivotal
<https://www.pivotaltracker.com/projects/337777> into a state where we
think we've pretty well captured the user stories that have been defined
so far. Since that's less than three weeks away, we tweaked Pivotal to
set up week-long milestones, and we pulled the most important user
stories into the milestone that ends this Sunday. The amount of stuff
here seems aggressive, and we mostly made guesses as we were doing this,
so if stuff is wrong that you own (or should own), feel free to adjust.

After some logistics discussion this morning, Alan and I came to the
conclusion that trying to overhaul the (somewhat crufty) asteroids game
we've got is likely to be more of a pain that just whipping up something
fresh, copying over any code that we need, we've created a separate
repo: <https://github.com/mozilla/rescuefox/>. I've seeded the repo so
that everyone who I suspect wants them has read/write/admin rights.

The README describes our intended very simple process. More will appear
there soon.

Dan

[David Humphrey]

We've been discussing name changes. Currently we have:

* Paladin - "officer of the palace" (latin)
* Gladius - sword (latin)

If we want to keep with this armour/antiquity theme, how about:

* Galea - helmet (latin)
* Contus - lance (latin)

I can imagine some fun logos/characters we could make with these.

Dave

[Secret Robotron]

I still like Gladius. There are naming collisions with other properties for every name we might pick. Cortana was another idea, but that's an obvious Halo reference. I think Alan was reluctant to stand behind Gladius because it has reference to WOW. Nobody can blame him for that.

Let's just pick a name that we know will be bold enough that it won't matter if there's a collision.

[Dan Mosedale]

I'm all for being bold, but I'll admit to not being sure what it means for something to be "bold enough that it won't matter if there's a collision". 

Dan

[Secret Robotron]

Just buzz words, really.

I mean that if we choose something like "Cortana", regardless of whether or not there's a name collision with a Bungie title, people should see some meaning behind it. It should be memorable and people should know we're working on it.

The initial worry was that something like Cortana would immediately bring Halo to mind, especially because it's already a prominent name in the game space.

[David Humphrey]

I think it's important to consider that name collisions on big-ticket projects can matter.  All you need to do is look at Mozilla's Bespin web editor for an example (hint: it's no longer called Bespin).

Be bold, but keep both eyes open.  Once you begin work to build your brand, you want to keep the benefits.

Dave