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A jam submission

Game Idea / Game Jam Theme GeneratorView project page

A game jam theme generator that generates game jam themes for game jams
Submitted by Gunnar Clovis (@GunnarClovis) — 1 hour, 13 minutes before the deadline
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Game Idea / Game Jam Theme Generator's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Audio#22.6672.667
Visuals#42.6672.667
How much do you enjoy the game overall?#52.6672.667
Gameplay#52.3332.333
How well does the game fit the theme?#51.3331.333
Overall#52.3332.333

Ranked from 3 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

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Comments

Jam Host(+1)

This is a really cool and useful project! What would a neural-network generated themes look like? I don't have any concept of this! And I agree with Jimmy, the themes there were quite fun! Please, don't tell me you wrote all of them out yourself! :D

Developer (2 edits)

Thanks! I've been putting off doing something like this for a long time, needed to put my money where my mouth is in terms of an online text generator. I'll be making more updates over time; I really love writing game themes...

The neural network themes likely wouldn't be very good on average, often being repetitive and derivative, but still fun and fascinating and occasionally it would make something quite good, similar to the stuff generated by Transformer: https://talktotransformer.com/ or anything on Janelle Shane's website: https://aiweirdness.com/post/172170729017/dungeons-and-dragons-creatures-generated-by

I've been meaning to try to integrate a neural network library into GMS2 for a long while now; it's daunting but certainly doable. I'm just not the best with external libraries and basically any code I didn't write myself...

Some hand-designed sets of procedurally-generated themes would be overall more work probably, less extensible, but easier, especially to get an MVP, and would likely be better on average. Procgen sentences that mash together game genres, for example, like this site: https://orteil.dashnet.org/gamegen

Not all of these themes popped out my head alone fully-formed, of course, but I didn't type in all 5000 of them by-hand. Well, I tried to copy-paste a handful and they were really annoying due to Excel wanting to keep the source formatting by-default, so it was just far easier to enter them all in manually. I just wrote them all into Excel, using Excel to identify and eliminate any duplicates, then I run the themes through a capitalization tool online to force Proper Case on all themes and then convert the Excel sheet into a text file for the program to read. I need to whip up a quick C-program that will do a better job enforcing the proper case, making special cases like PvP, 1v3, DNA, AI, vs., etc. and hyphenated words be capitalized correctly, but it's not a huge priority.

I got the themes from various different source lists for inspiration. A few from past game jams and Ludum Dare theme lists, but that's a small minority. I used a lot of sayings, idioms, song titles, fields of study, game genres, bible verses, sports, science topics, emerging technologies, game mechanics, song lyrics, writing tropes, psychological phenomena, etc. I really thinking up these themes and keep adding more continuously. I particularly like inversions of normal sayings.

Submitted(+1)

In all honesty the stuff generated by this so far seems to be more compelling than most online jam theme generators!

I've used a lot and don't often tend to get much from them but this is cool! Also the ability to go back to a page I generated is super helpful, I always skip past one I actually kinda liked in my haste.

Also you don't often get the type of mood this one is giving off :P I like the moody rainy vibe of it!

One really good game jam theme generator I found ages ago (and I'm not sure if I just like it because it's quite pretty to look at) is this one: http://www.ludocraft.com/gigster/index.html (You have to enable flash to run it sadly).

Developer(+1)

Thank you so much, Jimmy! Yeah, I've always found a lot of game jam generators to give kinda boring results (from a very small pool of themes), and I thought I could do better, so I wanted to try to put my money where my mouth is and do it. There's of course a vast array of different types of themes, of different "qualities" that different people will like more or less, which is why I wanted to give a bulk of themes at once so hopefully whoever is viewing is satisfied by at least one according to their personal tastes and mood.

And yeah, I've had that same experience of accidentally skipping past one I kinda liked with all online generators, as I think everyone does, so I definitely wanted that feature as that's easy and I think should really be more standard. And this generator does not repeat itself, which is a huge pet-peeve of mine with online generators. This current TriJam build will only wrap once you've clicked 90 times in a row, which I don't expect anyone to and that point why would they care haha... but I'll be updating this with way more themes soon and possibly experimenting with some true generation via procedural generation and/or neural networks as we discussed.

And thank you so much for the call-out; I love learning about new tools like that! The font is kinda hard to read, but I like that generator a lot!