JavaScript Fantasy Name Generator

Also in preparation for my 7-day roguelike I rewrote the RingWorks fantasy name generator in JavaScript. It’s my third implementation of this generator and this one is also the most mature by far.

Try it out by playing with the demo (GitHub).

The first implementation was written in Perl. It worked by interpreting the template string each time a name was to be generated. This was incredibly slow, partly because of the needless re-parsing, but mostly because the parser library I used had really poor performance. It’s literally millions of times slower than this new JavaScript implementation.

The second implementation I did in Emacs Lisp. I didn’t actually write a parser. Instead, an s-expression is walked and interpreted for each name generation. Much faster, but I missed having the template syntax.

The JavaScript implementation has a template compiler. There are five primitive name generator prototypes — including strings themselves, because anything with a toString() method can be a name generator — which the compiler composes into a composite generator following the template. The neatest part is that it’s an optimizing compiler, using the smallest composition of generators possible. If a template can only emit one possible pattern, the compiler will try to return a string of exactly the one possible output.

typeof NameGen.compile('(foo) (bar)');
// => "string"

Here’s the example usage I have in the documentation. On my junk laptop it can generate a million names for this template in just under a second.

var generator = NameGen.compile("sV'i");
generator.toString();  // => "entheu'loaf"
generator.toString();  // => "honi'munch"

However, in this case there aren’t actually that many possible outputs. How do I know? You can ask the generator about what it can generate. Generators know quite a bit about themselves!

generator.combinations();
// => 118910

var foobar = NameGen.compile('(foo|bar)');
foobar.combinations();
// => 2
foobar.enumerate(); // List all possible outputs.
// => ["foo", "bar"]

After some experience using it in Disc RL I found that it would be really useful to be mark parts of the output to the capitalized. Without this, capitalization is awkwardly separate metadata. So I extended the original syntax to do this. Prefix anything with an exclamation point and it gets capitalized in the output.

For example, here’s a template I find amusing. There are 5,113,130 possible output names.

!BsV (the) !i

Here are some of the interesting output names.

Quisey the Dork
Cunda the Snark
Strisia the Numb
Pustie the Dolt
Blhatau the Clown

Mostly as an exercise, I also added tilde syntax, which reverses the component that follows it. So ~(foobar) will always emit raboof. I don’t think this is particularly useful but having it opens the door for other similar syntax extensions.

If you’re making a procedurally generated game in JavaScript, consider using this library for name generation!

• javascript
• game
• interactive