Names, words, languages are important to the game.
We cannot have silly “cave man” names like Ug and Gug. Names like Aneha and Kaelu sound better and can be traced to later PIE words. On the flip side, we cannot have the developers spending hundreds of houses trying to create full languages. This leaves at least three options:
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Let users make names. At face, this seems like a good idea (and probably should be how tribes are named), but it becomes impracticable. What do you call a new member from exogamy, a trader or a child? Idea: Allowing players to change tribe or villagers names would be easy (button, popup, reassign name in database linked to a villager GUID).
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Static list names. You could make a list of names and word (spoken) which sound okay. Sometimes, languages like PIE could be used to make these. This what games like Age of Empires did. It works and passes, but it isn’t original and isn’t too immersive. This is the cheapest way to do it.
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Create Language. This is the best! You can make a simple hypothetical Neolithic language and draw from this. This uses something like PIE to generate word, but they are modified in a few ways to create a custom language.
If you want to create a simple language and names which a cohesive sound and feel, please let me know and I can generate them for you. It would take me a few weeks and I could deliver you a complete language and names (a few hundred).
Using the language I created for my novels, here is what my Linear Pottery Culture people sound like:
I will help you (if) you agree
Ehg wit’kik tuh - dhue ya.
Good research and significant linguistic analysis are what makes a quality hypothetical or reconstructed language. Because I spent years getting my languages correct, they took into account issues like the lack of F and V sounds described in the article below, even though I did not know this at the time (I determined this via analysis of PIE using an inductive method) \o/