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
Viewing post in Game Idea / Game Jam Theme Generator jam comments
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.