Ideas are cheap. Clean titles are not.
Before a single symbol is drawn, every proposed name goes through an AI-assisted trademark and clash pass. It's a system, not a spot-check. It's stopped four games from being built under names we would have had to abandon.
The pattern: designer proposes a name, David runs an AI-orchestrated clearance pass across live slot catalogues, trademark registries, and domain records. Clean, we build. Contested, we go back to alternates before art starts.
Case in point: Candy Cascade Kingdom becomes Queen of Sweetietown
Late August, the game we now call Queen of Sweetietown was called Candy Cascade Kingdom. David loved it. It tested well internally. Then the clearance pass came back.
Short version: multiple existing "Candy Cascade" and "Candy Kingdom" slots in market. This one won't pass a floor clearance. Alternates?
Nugget Bonanza. Jelly Fellas. Queen of Sweetietown. I have a bunch in this link — maybe clear them all if you have time.
David ran the same pass on the alternates. Queen of Sweetietown came back clean. The studio is now registering "Sweetietown" as a trademark in the US and EU so the same problem doesn't repeat on a sequel.
Same discipline, buffalo edition
The buffalo-themed game we're now calling Big Sky Spirit had a longer alternates list. The Hold-and-Win versions were dangerous — Felix Gaming's Wild Bison Spirit Hold And Win (Aug 2025) combined the exact elements Bison + Spirit + Hold and Win in one title. Kalamba and iSoftBet both had "Spirit + Hold and Win" games in market. The two non-Hold-and-Win alternates were OK. Big Sky Spirit passed.
Hold off till tomorrow, I'm revising policy and workflow. We have a "process" now, but I think it's too harsh on some proposed names, so I'm reworking it. We need to have a process documented for aggregators.
That's the second thing about the clearance system: it evolves. When the first pass killed too many good names, we tuned it. Not every trademark clash is fatal — some are just adjacent. The current pass distinguishes between "must abandon," "adjacent, negotiate," and "clean." That distinction is what lets a three-person studio move at speed without shipping into a lawsuit.