
Show HN: Eigengrau's Generator – A procedural city generator for tabletop gaming - wishingonawendy
https://github.com/ryceg/Eigengrau-s-Essential-Establishment-Generator
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v64
Have never heard of Twine [1] before, which this project uses. Very
interesting tool!

[1] [https://twinery.org/](https://twinery.org/)

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neversaydie
Yep, pretty cool - it's a very popular tool in the "interactive fiction" genre
of game development/writing. It's widely used for "choice-based IF" (also
called "CYOA" after the Choose Your Own Adventure books), with the other main
side of the genre being parser-based IF (like Colossal Cave and other PC text
adventures from back in the day). Parser IF is often built with a tool called
Inform, might also pique your interest.

Emily Short's blog is a good resource for that field in general:
[https://emshort.blog/](https://emshort.blog/) Or re tooling specifically:
[https://emshort.blog/how-to-play/writing-if/](https://emshort.blog/how-to-
play/writing-if/)

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Aeolun
I built something like this in Java in the past to generate whole
towns/cities. I have to admit that generating things as you go along is
probably more effective than generating everything up front.

It’s interesting to see what random generation comes up with.

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wishingonawendy
It definitely prevents some headaches! I admit to losing myself for hours at a
time trying to see all the different generations this thing makes.

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teeray
When I shared this story internally, a colleague posted this procedural map
generator, which I also thought was quite cool. You all might enjoy it as
well:

[https://watabou.itch.io/medieval-fantasy-city-
generator](https://watabou.itch.io/medieval-fantasy-city-generator)

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wishingonawendy
Ah yes we've seen the work from watabou! It's very good stuff. We like to
direct people there when they suggest our generator should also output maps
haha

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Impossible
This is a cool project, it reminds me of Talk of the Town
([https://github.com/james-owen-ryan/talktown](https://github.com/james-owen-
ryan/talktown)) which is the simulation used for the game/experience Bad
News([https://badnews.ai/](https://badnews.ai/)), where you play a live
adventure game in a simulated town with an actor that improvises generated
characters.

I think it'd be interesting to apply modern generative text models to stats
and random table based simulation. Normally, the text is generated by grammars
that describe world state, but they can be both hard to write and repetitive
for the reader/player. Generating flavor text from world state instead of
writing it might be an interesting avenue to explore.

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jmiskovic
That's an incredible project! Thanks for the introduction and links.

On similar track (but unrelated to original post) is the Jason Roher's Sleep
is Death game ([http://sleepisdeath.net/](http://sleepisdeath.net/)). It's
asymmetrical turn-based adventure game. One person is a player and can do
literally anything. The other person is a game master who has to come up with
appropriate responses to player's actions. There's in-game editors for
graphics, text bubbles, even the music.

I'm also toying with something like what you're describing in second
paragraph. The procedurally generated world with tables of stats modelling the
state, all rendered through styled text. All objects have defined list of
actions that can be performed on them (open, smash, drink...), mapped to
proper state responses. I'm hoping if these actions/responses are easy enough
to input by non-developers, a complex world with rich interactivity could be
built by collective effort. It's still in early stages so I don't have
anything yet to show unfortunately.

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sshagent
We are in a golden age of generators its excellent. For the campaigns i run, i
tend to use generators to help add extra details to my over arching plot. Its
invaluable.

I made some excellent use of
[https://sectorswithoutnumber.com/](https://sectorswithoutnumber.com/) for a
Star wars campaign recently. tempted to check out the system it was intended
for.

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wishingonawendy
I had not seen this generator before, but that's awesome! Yeah definitely one
of the main reasons Eigengrau's came about was to help add that extra detail
that just fleshes out the world without getting in the way.

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sshagent
I'll definitely put yours to some use. I think I've seen it before, maybe you
posted it on reddit before. For last weekends game, the players had arrived at
a new town and i vaguely recalled this generator or at least something very
similar. But could i find it amongst my MASS of links :(

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wishingonawendy
The creator u/rcgy posts links to the generator pretty often on D&D reddits so
it's very possible! In the future we'd love to hear what features you liked
most and what parts you used in your game! The hardest part of designing this
is getting live testing for what parts DM's really need. So many people tell
us they use it but so few get back to us on what parts they mainly use.

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jmiskovic
Really cool project. I saw a dozen of Twine projects, but nothing close to
this in complexity. Do you think you are pushing Twine past its capabilities?

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wishingonawendy
I think we've only scratched the surface of what we could break twine to do in
the future!

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jmiskovic
What's your take on Ink [0]? It seems to be solving the same class of problems
as your specific needs for Twine. Would it work better or worse for you?

[0] [https://github.com/inkle/ink](https://github.com/inkle/ink)

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wishingonawendy
I hadn't personally heard of it before but just from a cursory overview it
doesn't look like something that would be easily implementable in the place of
twine. If we were to do anything instead of Twine it would probably be to just
build our own front end as Twine itself is handling very very little of the
generation.

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self_awareness
"tippy is not defined"

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AllegedAlec
Yeah, it doesn't work for me in Firefox. Had to open it in Chrome for it to
work.

Other than that, it looks quite skookum. I may use this for my own campaigns.
Thanks for sharing!

