Creating a Title

While naming characters and locations has never been one of my stronger points as a writer, I think I’m fairly good at coming up with titles for books and games.  There’s a few characteristics of a good title.  First off, it shouldn’t be too long.  People need to be able to remember it, and that gets harder the more words it contains.  If you really feel the need to convey a lot of information, that’s what subtitles are for.  They’re prominent and can be a sentence or two in length, but allow you to have a nice short title as well.
Aside from the length, a title should convey something about the game (or book, movie, etc.), whether directly or indirectly.  If possible, it should also be kind of catchy.  Finally, easy to spell is good.  While that doesn’t matter so much if someone is browsing in a store, these days lots of people look up products online and it’s a whole lot easier to search for something on Google or Amazon if you can actually spell it.

So what about Aurora’s Nightmare?  Well, it’s short and simple to spell and remember.  Kind of catchy, at least in my opinion.  And, of course, it ties into the game.  Aurora is one of the main characters and nightmare has the double meaning of the Nightmares (the mysterious creatures in the game) and the more traditional definition of a terrifying dream or other experience.
I came up with the title very early on, though I actually went back and forth a bit between Aurora’s Nightmare and the less grammatically correct Nightmare Aurora.  In the end, I polled some people, Aurora’s Nightmare came out on top, and that was that.