TrollHammer's Story Forge

Seriously, maybe we need to get back into making things out of wood and metal by hand, when people are waiting uweeks and months to get machine parts.

Instead of opening a new thread for a tiny project, Ill track my progress here. Feel free to voice your thoughts, any input is greatly appriciated.

As many may know I have tried to make a elfquest themed game for years and failed every time. So this time, instead of trying to do the same thing over again and likely getting the same result, I figured Id mod a preexisting donothing game: Progress Quest.

Its free, open source, and most of the code is not compiled (is readable without anything special).

Its also completely pointless but fun to watch. I dont figure anyone else will be interested in it, at least ubtil I can add in some interaction, but just to get something going that works sort of how I wanted it to, I figured this might be a good place to start.

So what am I doing? Im taking the Progress Quest file set and changing the terms in the key files to be elfquest themes. This way instead of general random goofiness, itll be Elf Quest goofy randomness.

The original game lets you pick a name, a race, a class, and roll for stats, then it essentially generates a story of quests and events completely at random.

I have, so far, isolated the character, item, monster, item etc lists, as well as the random name generator. The losts will more or less take care of themselves (though the fanfic race list thread would generate the races, as well as things I see here and there, and EQ whos who.)

The plans are:
    change the "race" field to "tribe" and change the races with tribe names.
    Change the class field to Skills and add in things like "hunter, healer, finder, astral projector, etc.
    Change the monsters into things like deer, bears, squirrels, and so on. Thus will be hard to fine enough EQ esque things to defeat tastefully (even adding in the shape changed)
    Change the quests into eq themes (also going to be hard to find enough stuff, but can get creative)
Change the name generator into EQ themes (see below).

Later, I want to add in some more elaborate scripting for the quest generator, as this is persistant up to 200 lines for now and is kind of like a story. It would be nice to make it flow better. Also, I need to figure out how to change going to the store to sell off inventory to something more like returning to tribe or something.

The thing Im posting for today that Id like input on is the name generator:

Tribal names or Elfin names?

The generator is set up with first/middle/last word roots that it assembles at random. I can either put in tribal names (tree/(nothing)/stump, free/-/foot, far/(space)/touch) or elfin root names (ek/u/ar, etc). If I try to have it do both right now youd end up with mixes of both most of the time (Ek-stump, Joyuahn, etc). Later I might be able to have it toggle based on the tribe selected, but trying to figure out which would be best for now. Of course, considering trolls and wolves are probably going to be on the tribe list, the Tribal type might be better to start with?

Edit

(Looking at it closer, it might be hard to do either one, perhaps... looks like they have 3 groups, but first group is first letter(s) and constenent combos (using some empties to kick second group as first), the second group is vowel and vowel groups, and their group is end of name letter combos. Because it randomly hops back and forth between the first two groups a few times before the third group its going to be hard to implement actual "eq esque" name generation. Might have to go deep dive, so go ahead and say what youd prefer seeing, and if I should put effort into making it toggle between the two?

If I had to choose ... I'd prefer inspiration fpr tribal names.

Cool ideas, Trollhammer!
Yes, tribal names.
Isn't it possible to choose / define the name of a character in these random stories? Then you have no trouble with "Treekuar and Ekstump"-names.

Yeee wrote:

Cool ideas, Trollhammer!
Yes, tribal names.
Isn't it possible to choose / define the name of a character in these random stories? Then you have no trouble with "Treekuar and Ekstump"-names.

Yeah, it allows for someone to enter their own made-up name, but since it had a name generator built into it I figured I'd try to play with it to spit out some 'familiar' names to WoTM instead of whatever the original game was set up doing.


Holidays suck sometimes... get a few people with health issues, lingering pandemic issues floating around, and odd work stuff and you find such sporadic times to log in and do anything much at all... my laptop got a new battery last year and I think it's about half burned up from leaving my computer on standby thinking I'll get right back to something, somewhere, somehow... Oh well, it'll be what it'll be...

The Better three-quarters got me a new (to me) laptop and am now playing catch up. This new machine has a battery that actually lasts a while as long as I dont runn a buggy program with the screen brightness turned up all the way, and it still went a good 4 hours at that... anyway, hopefully this will see me do a little more again.

The young'uns got a forge for christmas, which should be a joyous thing here, but the furst one never got fired off yet, and the new one still needs assembled... but on the bright side, if we want to make a sword or something else long, they can stack together. Just need to get the lead out... er... whatever the new, lead free weight they say holds me down... (Procrastilazium doesnt show up as being known to the state of cancer to cause california yet, so that much be it.)

Hmm... that tickles my muse... lets see if I still have it...

Procrastilazium: a more stable isotope of dark matter, and just as hard to prove exists, even though every test points to its existance. Tends to adhere masses together with a higher attraction than one usually finds due to gravitational attraction only when the masses have not had any relative motion. In other words, seems to enhance Newtonian physcis concepts around the idea that bodies at rest tend to stay at rest.

The hardest part when reserching procrastilazium is that the reserchers interacting with it tend to find results harder and harder to achieve the more they work with it, with the end result being that the results never get published, and therefore the knowledge of the substance never gets as widely spread as it should.

It therefore becomes something easy to become entangled with without really realizing it. It has neurological effects as well, dulling the senses in such a way as to reduce alarm when the affected learns that they may have been exposed. But this is ok...

Just like this paper, it can be dealt with later....