Hello, my name's D'erjimbagus, and I'm a pompous forgetful bartender

So I had the idea tonight to put together something that'll generate characters for you and, oh Gawsh, it's just awful. I've only worked on it for a few hours so there aren't many possibilities for each section but I plan to add a lot more to it - more aspects, more options, maybe make world- or plot-generators, too.

But yeah it's not supposed to be a serious thing, or anything. The main point of this topic is, I just wanna know if you guys have any suggestions on what you want one of these derpy things to accomplish? Like, if you can see this being an actual usable tool, if there's any potential in this idea, what would you add to it? Cause I wanna make a super serious one.

If you guys wanna download it here's a link. And please, screenshot and post what you get I wanna seeeee.

Download: Download
So you guys know I ain't no viiiirus thug-man: File scan 1
File scan 2

(And yes I really need to fix the thing that gives them names just ignore it for now, unless you like havin' a Coopertil Jayjay D'Pow or Manmanman Zacktongaff around. Oh, and if ya ever get all 0's I need to fix that, too, just hit enter for a new character)

EDIT: Something's wrong with the in-game screenie taker, so just print screen it if you want I guess. xD Anyway here's one of my favorites so far.

Screen Cap works fine for me.  Saves the file in "Downloads".  I get a lot of 0's though, like... every other one, several times in a row.

Instead of saving with a Screen Cap why not save it as an output file?  Smaller file, easier editing, less craziness in general from using PNG format. That and it means you can nix the Command keys and stuff.

Age seems to have a bug, two ages getting created and put together.  Unless it is your intention of have several thousand year old characters.  

What'd you use to write this?  C++, Python, etc?

https://imgur.com/idf7X4S

GM7, it's got its own language which I'm toooold is like Java. Unfortunately I'm not good enough yet in Python to know how to make something like this.

Age was meant to rarely generate really high numbers in case some of the characters are, like, immortal vampire demigod robots or something. Though I can see I need to edit the probability down, heheh!

And yeah, I'll fix the 0's tomorrow I need sleep. Not sure what you mean by output file, but it sounds awesome! How would I go about making it export one of those, do you think? o:

All my knowledge has gone out the window since it is GameMaker, I imagine there is some way to output a debug file or generate some kind of options file, that you could change to suit your needs. After all, it only needs to be a .txt file. Though I'm not sure if that's in a version other than Professional.

It'd be wiser to stick with the Screen Cap until you've got the Bugs handled for now though. Its quick and "relatively" simple.

Could I perchance coax you into porting what you've got to Twine, or something else that exports to HTML? While I trust that you act in good faith, I'm wary of adf.ly and Mediafire. Secondarily, an EXE seems like overkill for text-based output. But thanks for putting up a screenie.

From this limited sample, the output seems a little too colorful to me - that is, each aspect seems fairly cool, but they don't necessarily all go together?

It feels like a few characters got smushed together, and trying to disentangle them risks sorting out the pieces and neatly slotting them into standard molds. Or am I simply unimaginative for having trouble accepting a massive prepubescent* serial killer / master detective?

(*maybe he's an alien? I'm not sure that the rest of his sheet supports it, but I like the idea. so there's the issue of what genre(s) you want to handle in here, too.)

I'd suggest weighting the chances of different aspects, making the more exotic and character-dominating ones less likely to show up. Going further, instead of having one or several flavors of bland pop up regularly, those fields with less remarkable rolls could be omitted entirely, to avoid pelting the user with unnecessary details.

There's also the idea of filtering out contradictory aspects from the pool as the character is built up, although that takes away a chance for the user to come up with a clever explanation (or to go 'what?' and reroll).

You've already got one selling point here, with your descriptions of things. That body! That face, what even...

Moreover, I adore computer-aided exploration of combinatorial explosion, especially in things that end up being more than the sum of their parts. Hell, I roughed out a design for an aspect-based approach to character representation a year and a half ago, which I'll attach for comparison (though I never got this far with it). Coded a sentence generator loaded up to generate plots, too, last semester although it's... wonky.

blah blah blah:

Why exactly should the user take one of the outputs from this generator and adopt it as their own, though? Is the tool meant to seed ideas, or to help with fleshing them out?

Since the user will probably learn what comprises the entire database quickly enough, what kind of specifics and implications will each aspect contain, what rewards are there for slotting them into a character?

Can the plot seeds inherent to a given character be identified and highlighted most usefully by the computer or by the user?

Now I want to code an icon generator using geometric primitives, color palettes, stat boosts, and stuff. Welp.

I will check this out in like a day Mata. B ut I look forward to trying it. I aways like stuff you do.