Sunday 14 August 2016

Cult Generator

This is a Lovecraft cult generator I made in Twine. Here are my thoughts on it, and on random generation more generally.
  1. Twine is okay for doing mockups of stuff if you don't have any other skills but, at least on my computer, it begins to massively slow down once you have a whole bunch of code on a single page. Which is not a good attribute for something that you're ostensibly supposed to make games in!
  2. The part of this that generates names works super well. The part that generates adventures works pretty well but not necessarily better than the other way of generating adventures, which is to pick a location, go to Wikipedia and find some piece of local history that could concievably involve a spookens ghost. Name generators are good because names are basically randmo anywhere. Adventure generators are harder because adventures need to be governed by coherent internal logic . Like, you need to establish what the overall narrative conceit is, then use that as a framework to decide on individual story components. Generators pick from a list of individual story components and ask you to reverse-engineer a narrative conceit from them. Not every set of components works as well as every other set, so it's often not totally fluid.
  3. This took me a few days. I probably could have written a single proper story in that time. One of the big limitations on generation is that you have to come up with a hundred different good ideas instead of just one. Though this can be appealing if, like me, you're better at having ideas at fleshing them out.

1 comment:

  1. Yeah, that does look pretty complicated code for what the generator does. You might want to try Abulafia: http://www.random-generator.com/index.php?title=Main_Page You could probably get that coded in an hour or two.

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