Platypotamus

Main Purpose

Again, the main purpose of this title generator was to give important monsters titles, and give them a sense of grandeur and threat beyond that of their more mundane counterparts. I can't just give any monster any title though. The titles will need to somehow have a bit of a semantic analysis occur, so that if I am titling a fire-wielding monster, I can give it an appropriate fire based title, and if I'm titling an archer, perhaps an archery focused title would be nice. As I'm currently not generating monsters at all, this is something that will have to come later.

A Reversal

On the other hand, it would be a lot more interesting if the titles were part of the procedural monster generation process as a cause, rather than an effect. This is my current plan for titles: Titles are going to tie into the actual gameplay creation process. While I have nothing set in stone yet as far as the specific effects of specific words, something like, "Steve the Demonic Instructor," might work like this. "Demonic" perhaps could grant Steve the ability to summon demons (or some other demon related power). "Instructor" might actually be something you want to see on a monster, as battling instructors might give you bonus XP. Thus, each of the large number of titles generated would also be generating semi-unique gameplay.

Justice for All

Of course, it wouldn't be very fair for the player to go around battling a bunch of people with badass titles, and not give the player a chance to earn them as well. So that's going to have to happen too. Similarly, it wouldn't be fair if titles provided monsters powers, but did not do so for the player, so the player will be able to earn neat powers by earning a title.

More Mundane Stuff

There's obviously some problems with the title generator. While I honestly don't mind that it generates some fairly nonsensical titles, and don't think that's a completely solvable problem anyway, some improvements could be made on that front. I could certainly use some subcategories of verbs. Certain title formats really are asking for an aggressive verb, and when they get one of the less aggressive verbs, they aren't awesome.

I also will need to do a fair amount of data entry growing the word database (primarily) and the format list (less important). A lot of this is going to happen organically as I get to the point of creating the actual gameplay that these titles are applied to. An easy example: I have a category of nouns for "races". Right now, this is populated only with the couple that happened to come up in Outlaws of the Marsh (Elf, Dwarf, Demon, Devil, and Giant, IIRC). As actual races get added to the game, that list will grow.

I also want to fix ordinals. For some silly reason, I chose to actually enter them into the database as words (first, second, etc). I plan on scrapping that at some point, and just generating a number like I do for actual numbers, and appending the appropriate suffix onto it (1st, 2nd, etc).