I love RANDOM GENERATORS!

[villain]

good afternoon melonland.

As a young teen I used to be obsessed with this website called Seventh Sanctum, which has hundreds of random generators. Its been online since 1999 and still going strong! I stumbled across it looking for random name generators, but it also has some that generate entire character descriptions or writing prompts. I took so much inspiration from them and loved to design characters based on the descriptions, but didn't have internet in my own room so I used to copy and paste them into text documents and print out sheets and sheets of ideas.

Flashing forward, I was working on a zine with rolltables to design a fantasy weapon for a dark RPG setting, and realised it probably wouldn't be too hard to code a simple tool that used those lists of attributes to assemble a sentence describing the weapon. I found a javascript tutorial and this became my first generator!

Since then I have also made a Sentai Name Generator and in the last week I created one with a visual component, the Rabbit Generator, as well as a much more complex one that creates a synopsis of a G.I. Joe episode based on the 80s cartoon.

Does anyone else have this kind of thing on their sites? I think they are so fun and addictive to play with! I recommend making one following that tutorial as it's a relatively simple code project!

[wygolvillage]

Random generators are so fun! I've only made some very simple ones but they're such an easy way to make the site feel more textured and interactive.

Also, I like your rabbit generator a lot, it's so cute :)

[TheFrugalGamer]

I love Seventh Sanctum! I also really like https://www.rangen.co.uk/ (I use their Planet generator a lot), and https://www.fantasynamegenerators.com/, which has so many different types of names that it's dizzying! I often use generators to get me started on ideas, because sometimes I really just need that "kickstart" to get my mind going.

The closest thing I've got to my own generator is the stuff I have on my FrugalOS web desktop page. I made a daily prompt generator that throws a color palette, some words, genres, etc. at you for your next project, and then I've got several rune and tarot generators as well. I also have a paper alien species generator:

, but I should probably go and code that one up for ease of use one of these days.

I like your generators also! I wasn't able to get the first weapon one to work for me; the console is saying that the newGeneration variable is undefined. But the others are really cool!

Edit: was not expecting the PDF preview, lol. Fixed it so that it doesn't cut out my text.

[villain]

@wygolvillage thank you!!

@TheFrugalGamer I don't think I'd seen RanGen before, but I've definitely used Fantasy Name Generators, theirs are really good! I definitely relate to the ability of these things to kickstart your inspiration. Sometimes just a name is enough for an entire character to jump out fully formed.

I love the daily prompt generator idea, that might be something to tinker with in future! The hub is smart too - definitely more glamorous than bookmarks. How are the colour palettes generated? Are they pulling from an existing list of premade palettes? You should make an online version of your species generator, it looks really cool and in-depth.

Finally, I think I fixed the weapon generator? I didn't actually work out what was wrong but I reuploaded the html and js files and cleared my cache and it seems to be alright again. Weird? Hopefully its fixed for people other than me! I will say the famous line: "well, it works on my machine..."

[xixxii]

i also used seventh sanctum a lot when i was younger!! there's something so fun about random generators, i love em too. they're so fun. i love to click a button.

i don't have one on my site at the moment, but i'd like to at some point! i do have this tarot card widget by wrender which pulls a random card, and gleepgloorp's shop stock is sort of like a random generator (presents three random images from a list every refresh). and i made some tables for randomly generating NPCs for tabletop games, but haven't coded them into actual generators yet! i should do that. your generators are fun!

[villain]

@xixxii oh i am enamoured with gleepglorp! the shop puts me in mind of old neopets shops, where they'd have a picture of the shopkeeper at the top of the page and then a bunch of weird and wonderful square items below.

[Nikodile]

I've been using a Perchance generator for one friend group I'm in to randomly vote and generate a crossover video game roster. We'd roll 4 random video game characters then vote in chat who of the four would make it in daily, it's a fun little game.

Also love name generators for dnd, really helpful to get an idea.

[villain]

@Nikodile that's a really fun idea! Have you ever played with that Hunger Games inspired toy from the people who made Cookie Clicker? One of the OC discord servers I'm in sometimes puts a bunch of our OCs in there and has them fight to the death, its very silly! (I will warn though, some of the descriptions in it are a little unnecessarily unpleasant so use your own discretion on if that would make you uncomfortable!)

[BlazingCobaltX]

Honestly, this gave me a great idea for this name generator. You made it look very easy.

[Nikodile]

@Nikodile that's a really fun idea! Have you ever played with that Hunger Games inspired toy from the people who made Cookie Clicker? One of the OC discord servers I'm in sometimes puts a bunch of our OCs in there and has them fight to the death, its very silly! (I will warn though, some of the descriptions in it are a little unnecessarily unpleasant so use your own discretion on if that would make you uncomfortable!)

I remember this! Forgot it existed for a bit. This is actually a great idea for when we have the roster filled out, love it.

[TheFrugalGamer]

I love the daily prompt generator idea, that might be something to tinker with in future! The hub is smart too - definitely more glamorous than bookmarks. How are the colour palettes generated? Are they pulling from an existing list of premade palettes? You should make an online version of your species generator, it looks really cool and in-depth.

Finally, I think I fixed the weapon generator? I didn't actually work out what was wrong but I reuploaded the html and js files and cleared my cache and it seems to be alright again. Weird? Hopefully its fixed for people other than me! I will say the famous line: "well, it works on my machine..."

The weapon generator works for me now, so whatever you did fixed it!

As for the color palettes generator, I actually generated a bunch from various color palette websites, and then weeded through and picked the ones I liked the most. They're all collected into a big array and populated the same as the others, so there's no big math trickery going on behind the scenes. It's way less impressive than it looks!

[xixxii]

a while later, i finally have a random generator on my web site! here it is. it's weird little guys

[villain]

@xixxii I love this, its a fun different take!! Being able to stick the hats on them to add extra variation is the cherry on top 
Clip art CDs fascinate me, there's a charity shop near me that has what looks like one but its actually just an empty box and it taunts me... there's probably a mirror of it online but it would have been so fun to get the physical one...