So I'm working on a game tentatively titled Mystery at Murder Manor. A bunch of guests show up at a house party at Murder Manor and, surpruise surprise, one of them is murdered. It is up to the player to question the guests, put together a picture of who was where during the party, who picked up what items, and the relationships between the different characters.
I plan to procedurally generate the guests and the events so each mystery will be different. I'm hoping to make adjustable difficulty by changing around some of the parameters. Who knows how that will work.
I'm working on a couple things at the same time. I need a bunch of suspects to wander around the mansion socializing, so I made a person generator. I can generate first and last names for characters of White, Black, Asian, Native American, Hispanic and Arabic descent. First names are simply divided by gender. Last names are generated from a list of the most popular last names according to census data. So that is working ok.
I also need some portraits for the interviews and to appear on cards that the player will move around the mansion to keep track of where everyone is. I need them to be pretty distinct and recognizable, but I may be generating a lot of them so I decided to combine different elements to make distinct portraits.
I plan on every portrait having the same base body. Then I drew different hair, eyes, mouths, and clothes that could appear on that body. I plumbed up all the code for body and hair and assigned them random colors just to prove out the concept and so far I'm real happy with the results.
I'll get actual skin tones for each race and select them randomly in the future.