Generative Text in p5.js
Led by Hyacinth Nil
May 10, 2020
Imagine you're making a video game and you have dozens or hundreds of items, or characters, or locations all with names, descriptions, and relatively equal narrative and mechanic weight. Also, imagine that you either don't want to come up with that much hand authored text, or want to introduce some variance and randomness into your game. A solution you might want to think about is writing generative text system to put together these names and descriptions for you.
In this workshop, narrative designer and game developer Hyacinth Ramsay will show you how to think about (and write) a system that generates text using a pre-designed grammar in the p5.js javascript library. You will be able to utilize this system for videogames, bots, or whatever else you might want, and the techniques described can be applied in whatever framework you’d like. Some programming knowledge will be assumed, but it will all be made as approachable as possible.
Hyacinth Nil is a game designer with a fascination with monsters, haunted houses, and places that people once were but aren't anymore. They make games consisting of lots of words.
Links
Itch: @hyacinthnil
Twitter: @synodai
Bandcamp: luciform
Soundcloud: @luciform