VectorStorm Blog

Today I spent some time working on generating random character names for MMORPG characters.  I was getting pretty tired of “Ujkige” and similar unpronounceable names which were just generated by randomly smashing letters together.

So today I started working on a system which should do a better job of generating believable character names.

My first step was to attempt to generate vaguely plausible and pronounceable names, as you might find on a role-playing server, by smashing together rough half-syllables (which for lack of a better word, I’m calling “gloms”).  So for example, “cl” is a glom, as are “ph” and “oo”.  The theory is that by smashing together these larger gloms, we should get more believable names than I got simply by smashing together random letters.

The first name generated by the new system was “Cough”.  Following that were “Gack”, “Fineoh”, “Ety”, “Krihoep”, and “Roisrousoe”.  I’m actually a little surprised at how many double-vowels are showing up in this first sampling of names;  I tried to make double vowel constructions somewhat uncommon, but that doesn’t seem to have happened in practice.  Maybe I did the maths wrong.  There’s a little bit of tuning to be done here, but by and large, I think that it’s looking vaguely reasonable.  Certainly a lot better than the old random names.  And the new name generation is configured entirely based upon a simple text data file, so folks other than me can easily modify it, if they have a mind to.

(Actually, the last paragraph contained a slight lie:  the real first generated name was “eaai”, because I had forgotten to tell the name generator that it was allowed to use consonants once in a while.  Oops!  ”cough” was the first one it generated after I remembered to wire up the non-vowels.)

In any case, the next step in this will be generating smashed-together names, as are commonly spotted on more PVP-oriented servers.  ”BigDwarf”, “KillsYou”, and things of that sort.  I expect that this will require a pretty big dictionary of words.  Not sure how I’ll generate that.  Maybe find an old, out-of-copyright dictionary somewhere and process it through a perl script or something, to make lists of nouns, verbs, etc.

After that, the next step will be linking up character name generation to the guild system (which is only rudimentary at the moment), to get those guild prefixes that people love to smash into their character names.  But I don’t think I’ll be doing this immediately;  there are other areas that are really more important.  I was just touching names today because those terrible old names were starting to really annoy me.

I’ve also finished about half of the next “The Long View” article.  Hopefully I’ll be able to finish that up tomorrow.

For a few months, I’ve been trying to wrap my head around overarching trends in video game development, and fit them together with what’s going on right now;  perhaps to provide a bit of insight into.. well.. into whatever’s about to happen next.

I want to start with some big-picture background on the industry.  Many (most?) of you probably already know all this stuff.  But I want to write it out anyway, just to make sure I have it straight in my own head.  Please do feel free to point out anywhere that I’ve messed up.  :)

Continue reading “The Long View. Part One: History.”

I meant to mention this in the “Post-Mortem”, but forgot.  So I’m mentioning it here:

C4 Ten-Four used the “Loose, leading, ground-stabilised” camera that I showed off in the most recent “VGKnowHow” episode, with virtually no changes to the code.  Made me smile to be able to just drop that code straight into a new game and have it just work without modification!

An old-school simplistic definition would state that games are about choices;  that “gameplay” consists solely of the set of choices which can be made by a player.  You can see how someone who thought of games as being Chess or Backgammon or Go might define a game in this narrow way.

A more modern definition would also point out the role of mechanics;  that not only must the player be able to make a choice, but he must also be able to carry out that choice, as can be tricky in games like Jacks, Jenga, or Tiddlywinks.

An even more modern definition would advocate for the importance of setting;  that not only must the player be able to make a choice and to mechanically carry it out, but that the choice must exist within some external context to imbue that choice with meaning that extends beyond the boundaries of the game itself.

Today I’m going to be talking about choices.  I’ll leave mechanics and settings for another day.  Warning in advance:  this is kind of a long article, focusing on game design theory and practice, which I’ve been writing for the last few months, just trying to get it all straight in my own head.  Click through if you’re interested.

Continue reading “In praise of thresholds”

As you’ll recall, the randomly selected theme sentence for C4 Ten-Four was the following sentence:

” ‘A hundred and four.’

I will confess that when I first saw that sentence, I seriously thought about ignoring it and selecting a different topic sentence.  I suppose that by chance, I’ve actually been pretty lucky with topic sentences thus far;  most of them have been meaty and had all sorts of possibilities suggested by them.  This was the first time that I had such a short sentence;  a sentence fragment, in fact, with no obvious design hooks to start from.

Back in one of the early GiaW processes (I think it was #2?) I did modify the random selection rules after getting a bad initial sentence, and randomly selected a new sentence to use instead instead.  That’s how I ended up with the rule about disregarding any sentence which included a proper name.  (The themes are supposed to be suggesting novel gameplay concepts, not simply suggesting characters or locations, and so discarding sentences which specify those specifics seemed quite in keeping with the spirit of the Game in a Week process.)  But in this case, where the sentence just wasn’t suggesting anything particularly obviously.. well.. I had trouble justifying exactly why this wouldn’t be a legal sentence for me to use.  And so in the end, I went with it.

Continue reading “C4 Ten-Four Post-Mortem”