Devlog · Production Notes
COGHEIM wasn't the name we opened with. Here's why it changed, what survived the change, and what it actually cost to make the new name stick everywhere it needed to.
Most devlog posts here are about systems: netcode, world scale, a class spec locking in. This one's about something less technical and just as real — the game changed its name mid-build, and that costs actual production time, not just a find-and-replace.
Early builds of this project ran under a different working title: Immortal Empires. It had a locked logo, a locked investor deck, and a live website. It also had a problem — the phrase is generic enough that it doesn't own its own search results, and it doesn't tell a genre player anything specific about what the game actually is.
The disc world this game is built around already had a name in the fiction: Cogheim. Renaming the game to match the world it's set in isn't a new trick — it's the same move Elden Ring and Skyrim make, and it means every piece of marketing from day one is also doing worldbuilding.
The call: shorter, more ownable in search, and it puts the world's name to work instead of sitting next to the game's name doing nothing. Immortal Empires is retired. It won't be reused, and it won't show up anywhere else on this site going forward — this post is the one place it's named, for the record.
Not everything starts over. The old logo's compass-gear "O" carried straight across — gold engraved lettering, black iron plate, brass gearwork, the targeting-reticle motif at the center of the wordmark. COGHEIM has an O in exactly the spot that O used to fill. The brand's visual DNA survived; only the letters around it changed.
That mattered more than it might sound. A full identity reset costs weeks. A re-lettering costs days, and everything downstream — character card frames, the site's dark iron and ember palette, the compass motif in the nav — kept working without a redesign.
The honest part: the old name was already locked into a gold logo render, a five-page website, an investor deck, and a teaser deck. None of that updates itself. Every one of those assets got rebuilt, and the site went through a full QA sweep afterward specifically checking for old-name ghosts — any leftover mention, any retired currency or class name still sitting in a footer or an alt tag.
The Master Index — the single source of truth this whole project runs on — got a version bump specifically to record the rename as permanent and retire the old name from the document for good. That's not a cosmetic edit. It's the same discipline as retiring a deprecated function instead of leaving it half-called somewhere.
Production note: a rename this late isn't free, and pretending it is would be exactly the kind of hype this devlog exists to avoid. It was the right call. It still cost real days that would've otherwise gone to systems work.
The actual lesson wasn't "don't rename" — it was "don't let a rename half-finish":
A name is just the first asset a player ever sees. Getting it right once mattered more than getting it fast twice.
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