On May 1, 2026, I renamed the game I’ve been building for two years. “Manu Idle” became Tideward. The next day I filed a USPTO word mark for the new name (Serial 99800434) and started the long sweep through every screenshot, every dev post, every legal document, every Discord channel. Three weeks of cleanup work for a one-day decision.

I thought it might be useful to write down why. There’s a thin genre of “we changed our game’s name” posts on the indie game internet, and most of them are short and apologetic. This one will be longer and unapologetic, because the decision was the right one and the math behind it generalizes.

The short version

Three reasons, in order of weight:

1. App Store positioning. “Manu Idle” was a developer-facing project name. It was fine inside Xcode, on my dev machine, on Discord. It was wrong as an App Store title. The Apple editorial shelf rewards distinctive single-word brand names — Hades, Dredge, Balatro, Patterned, Crouton, Bears Gratitude. “Manu Idle” was a literal description of the game (“[my project codename] + idle”) rather than a brand. Tideward is in the right family — pronounceable, memorable, evocative without being literal.

2. Trademark clarity. “Manu Idle” had a soft conflict with at least one active App Store game (“MANU Video Game Maker” out of Hungary). A USPTO knockout search would have surfaced it; a 30-minute attorney clearance would have called it out. “Tideward” cleared both. I filed the word mark on May 2, 2026 in Classes 9 and 41 (downloadable game software + entertainment services).

3. Long-term studio architecture. Manu Games LLC is the studio. Tideward is the first product. The split between studio brand and product brand was always going to happen — I was just deferring it. The rebrand pulled it forward by 18 months. Manu Games will publish more games over time, and “Manu Games” works as a publisher umbrella in a way that “Manu Idle” never could (you’d be naming every future game “Manu [Genre],” which is the wrong shape).

The skill renames

Sixteen of Tideward’s 23 trades got new names in the same May 2026 rebrand. I think this is the part of the decision that will be most second-guessed by people who liked the old names, so let me walk through it.

The 7 unchanged skills (Attack, Strength, Ranged, Magic, Woodcutting, Fishing, Mining, Cooking, Farming — wait, that’s 9) are the universal RPG vocabulary that every game in the genre uses. There’s no trademark cluster around them. Nobody owns “Mining.”

The 16 renamed skills were a different story. The old names — Defence, Hitpoints, Slayer, Prayer, Herblore, Runecrafting, Fletching, Thieving, Firemaking, Crafting, Agility, Astrology, Summoning, Township — were either:

  • Distinctive Jagex coinages in RuneScape’s category. Slayer, Prayer, Herblore, Runecrafting, Fletching, Thieving, Firemaking, Agility, Summoning. Each of these is a Jagex-specific noun-form for a mechanic. Reusing them in the same App Store category is asking for a takedown and getting nothing in return.

  • Melvor Idle coinages. Astrology was Melvor’s coinage for the constellation-based skill. Same App Store category, same trademark cluster.

  • Active competitor trademarks. Township is a Playrix trademark — same App Store category, same genre, this was the most clear-cut “must change.”

  • Genre-overloaded. Smithing is used by Hades, Dredge, Stardew Valley, and dozens more. Hitpoints is the same — every ’90s RPG used it but the modern indie standard is “Vitality” (Hades, Hollow Knight, Dredge). Defence with a ‘c’ is the British spelling; the US App Store wants ‘Defense.’

The renames were chosen to be:

  • Genre-evocative. Forging instead of Smithing keeps the meaning. Apothecary instead of Herblore is more universally readable. Inscription instead of Runecrafting captures what the skill does without the Jagex naming convention.
  • Trademark-clear. None of the new names appear in the active App Store category trademark cluster.
  • Apple-editorial-compatible. The names work in App Store screenshots and editorial copy. “Tend the Apothecary” reads better than “train Herblore.” “Wayfaring” reads better than “Agility” when the player has no context.

The mapping is documented in the PROJECT-NOTES, and every skill page calls out its former name where applicable.

The cost of the rebrand

The rebrand wasn’t free. Concretely:

  • Three days of website rewrites. Brand audit pass swept all blog body content, page titles, and meta descriptions to the new name. The slugs (URLs) were intentionally kept (e.g., /blog/why-we-are-building-manu-idle) for inbound-link continuity — only the rendered copy changed.
  • TestFlight title rebuild. Still pending; the alpha currently distributes under “Manu Idle” until the next build is submitted.
  • App Store Connect cleanup. Privacy Policy URL updated; Apple TV Privacy Policy text rebrand-in-progress; nutrition label re-verified.
  • Domain layer. Acquired tideward.app, tideward.games, tideward.co, tidewardgame.com (defensive moats). tideward.com is third-party held; sent a $500 offer May 2, 2026, no response yet. Three scheduled reminder agents set up for the bidding strategy at expiry windows.
  • Social handles. @tidewardgame reserved on X (the bare @tideward was taken). YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Threads, Reddit, Mastodon pending Cloudflare email forwarding setup.
  • USPTO filing. $700 fee, May 2, 2026, Section 1(b) Intent to Use, Standard Characters, Classes 9 + 41. Six-to-twelve-month examination window.
  • Legal docs. Privacy policy and terms of use both updated for the new brand name. Surface-tagged for App / Website / Newsletter applicability.

That’s roughly a week of focused work plus ~$1,500 in filing and domain costs. For a pre-launch indie, this is the cheap moment. After launch it gets significantly more expensive — App Store reviews, brand recognition, search-result equity, all of those are easier to migrate before they exist than after.

What I learned

A few things I wouldn’t have predicted before going through this:

The biggest cost of a bad name is the cost you don’t see. “Manu Idle” wouldn’t have failed catastrophically — it would have just consumed extra editorial bandwidth at every Apple touchpoint to explain. “Tideward, a coastal idle RPG…” is a clean editorial line. “Manu Idle, our internal codename for the game which is…” is friction in every paragraph for the rest of the project’s life.

The Apple editorial shelf has a name shape. The names that get featured share a pattern: short, distinctive, evocative, pronounceable, no spaces, no acronyms, no version numbers. Hades, Dredge, Balatro, Patterned, Tunic, Inscryption, Crouton, Mela, Bears Gratitude. “Tideward” is in that family. “Manu Idle” wasn’t.

Soft trademark conflicts are real friction. The Hungary game “MANU Video Game Maker” wasn’t going to sue me. But it was an active App Store entry under a confusingly similar name in an adjacent category. Apple’s review team flags this kind of overlap, and the burden of disambiguating is on the new entrant. Removing it now is much cheaper than removing it after a Featuring Nomination gets stuck in review for the wrong reason.

Skill renames are harder than the game name. Players bond to skill names. “Smithing” feels right because every RPG since 1990 has called it Smithing. Asking those players to learn “Forging” instead is a real cost. I think it’s worth paying — the trademark clarity story above is enough on its own — but the grumbling will happen and that’s fair.

Pre-launch is the cheap moment. Trademark filing, domain reservations, social handle reservations, brand naming decisions — all dramatically cheaper before the product is in market than after. The ~$1,500 spent during this rebrand session (USPTO $700 + domains ~$60 + 30-min attorney clearance ~$300–500) is the right order of magnitude for an indie pre-launch. After launch, every one of these costs a multiple of that.

What didn’t change

For people who played the Manu Idle alpha and might be reading this from a “wait, did I lose my character?” angle: nothing changes for you. Same TestFlight invite. Same character. Same save file synced through CloudKit. Same Discord. Same dev (me, hi). Same launch date (February 11, 2027).

The studio is still Manu Games LLC. The newsletter (The Assembly Line, on Beehiiv at blog.manugames.com) is still the publisher-level content. The dev blog is still the game-specific content, just on tideward.app/blog now.

If you want the short version of all this, I made a /manu-idle page that’s the elevator-pitch redirect explainer. Bookmark either tideward.app or tideward.app/manu-idle — both work for the next decade.

What’s next

The rebrand cleared the runway. Now the work is back to the game itself: shipping the first-hour redesign, getting through the Featuring Nomination submission in mid-September 2026, and locking the February 11, 2027 launch on the App Store.

If you’re reading this and want to be in the alpha, the TestFlight install guide has the invite link. Discord is here. The newsletter (The Assembly Line) is here, and it covers the genre broadly — Factorio, Satisfactory, Shapez 2, Melvor Idle — alongside Tideward dev posts.

Tideward. An idle almanac. New name, same patient game.