I also want to use a custom name that the player enters earlier on in the game. I have a string value for that name. It is located in playergui.
You probably want to use _G variables for this
To declare one, you just put _G. followed by a name
so you'd probably just need to use a table that contains all the players names, and declare it as a _G variable so you can access it from anywhere
_G.playerList = {}