Random Character Generator

MattQ86

Hey everybody,

For the longest time I've been kicking around the idea of a random character generator, something that would work like the old parlor game of Consequences or the surrealist Exquisite Corpse writing exercise. I think it could be a good tool for writers and artists. I actually found something similar to what I'm looking for but I would like something a little more flexible. Rather than clumsily try to explain what I want I decided to mock up a UI for the website that should hopefully communicate things clearly.



So, which programming language should I use? I have some experience with HTML, Javascript and a tiny amount of CS.

What techniques should I use? That is to say: what should I be learning? I'm going to need a way to call a random word from each of these lists and to toggle on and off elements.

Thanks in advance for any help.

throttlekitty

I'm not much of a coder, but JS seems like a good choice. That site you linked uses it, check the source and find your way to the wtf.js to see how that person did it. Also, I'm sure if you look a little, "Do a random X thingy" seems like it would be a popular topic in tutorials.

MattQ86

Yeah, the WTF engine is what I'm using now. The problem is that there's no way to control what parts of the template are used outside of what's written in the function. I've just basically dumped a bunch of extra words into the template they already have and the results don't always give you what you want. So the above example would be written as "@adjective @race @occupation from @place" with no way for turning on or off any of the lists or examples in those lists being called. There's no way to tag and categorize the items by genre.

Ideally I would want this to be flexible in how precise the results can be so users can specify genres like high fantasy or cyberpunk or leave it so open ended that they're just asking for one part of the sentence from any genre. I want a writer to be able to say "give me a steampunk character and describe their personality, occupation, hometown, and character quirks" just as much as I want an environment artist to be able to say "give me any setting and I'll fill in the rest."

throttlekitty

Gotcha. So looking at sample.json I think what I would try is to make a separate .json for each genre/template type, and concatenate the files based on user selection. So you could have cyberpunk_occupation.json and steampunk_occupation.json with the option to use one or the other. The start function sounds like it could be modified to read from different files since each category is being split into different variables anyway. Emailing the author might be worth a shot too.

edit: Oh you know what, he's using regExp to filter templates in the .json, so I think you could have headers like "cyberpunkOccupation": [...] and "steampunkOccupation": [...] in that file. Then set those names as variables when gathering user input for the parser/generator.

MattQ86

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHTVrIt6gcI

No but seriously thanks. I have some idea of where to start learning now. I've looked into JSON and regular expressions and I'm starting to kind of understand how this stuff could work.

throttlekitty

Sorry I can't actually detail on how to do any of that, since I understand the concepts better than execution.

cgBrad

MattQ86 said:

What techniques should I use? That is to say: what should I be learning?

Professional web developer, and amateur 3d guy here.

This is always the question, what should you use? The answer is, whatever you want. I could think of dozens of ways to build this.

However I realize that is not very helpful so I will simply outline how I would do it.

For sake of simplicity there would be almost no reason to have a server side scripting component to this. I mean you could, would probably just be a waste of time.

What you need to know is this:

• A little html.
• A little css (save your time and use something like bootstrap to help you out).
• You need some javascript. Learn a bit of jQuery  it's very handy to set click handlers and to ajax requests.
• Use JSON files to hold all the data.

Basically just create a bunch of static JSON files with the required data, and just split it up between files. It's not really important on this kind of app that you have all your data in one file. At most you're going to have maybe a dozen files. Load all these files on your application start. Put each file in it's own array.

The rest is basically just setting click handlers on your checkboxes to set the state of the application and updating your view. With each view update it's basically just randomly selecting an array element from the proper lists and displaying the results.

I hope that makes sense.