Project: Fantasy Name Generator (Part 1)

For my first post of actual content, I thought I’d write about a recent small C++ project I took on.

For a bit of background, I play a lot of fantasy RPGs.  The identity of my characters is very important to me — not always from a roleplaying perspective (though sometimes that too), but more the combination of name and appearance.  I spend a lot of time in character generation honing those two aspects.  I’ve gotten booted out of games for “inactivity” timeouts because they didn’t feel that character generation counted as doing things.

This project dealt specifically with names.  I have a decent sized stable of names which I’m fond of and use frequently, but sometimes for one reason or another, that option isn’t available to me and I get to think up new names.  Usually this involves thinking of names I’ve liked in the past, combining, swapping vowels, reordering syllables, and just generally playing with letters like Lego bricks until I come up with something that’s both aesthetically appealing, and available for my use in the game in question.

One recent time in particular, I wanted to move away from my long-held personal quirk of using names beginning in K, so that invalidated my entire stable of regulars and necessitated that I do a lot of name mangling.  To get some name seeds to play with, I ended up using some online name generator websites.  Most work pretty well, but every now and again I’d run across one and just scratch my head going “Man, I could write a better namegen than that.”

Famous last words.

First Post

Welcome to my personal development blog.  I plan to use this space to write primarily about my work on the MUD Astaria, but also sometimes about other code projects and other code-related and technical issues which are of interest to me.

I welcome questions about specific or general technical issues as well as suggestions for future posts or articles, though of course there are some confidentiality concerns surrounding disclosure of actual code from both Astaria and from work.

As for me — who am I?  Well, I’m just a guy who’s worked in technology kind of a lot.  Most of my work credentials won’t mean anything.  But for the Astarians, it’s a lot easier to point out what I’ve done to the game:

• I’ve been an active wizard for six years.  I was at one time an admin, but resigned, and was talked into coming back afterward only on the condition that I get to step down and stay at Elder indefinitely.  There’s a lot of complexity to that decision, but essentially it comes down to shirking the more frustrating parts of responsibility.
• I’m approximately one-third of the creative power behind the Druid’s Guild.
• I did a lot more behind-the-scenes work generating some awesome new functionality that nobody ever uses for the Cat and Fiddle Tavern in Astaria City than any of you realise.
• I coded some infamous mayhem monsters hard enough that they often despawn from inactivity rather than being killed — and they do so despite my personal standard that challenge comes from complex mechanical interactions, not just big damage numbers.  Dagoyel the Deathjester and Anise, if you’re curious.
• I’ve been proudly sending Astarians on snipe hunts for five years now.

For a slightly more comprehensive view of individual projects and personal history, I recommend you check out my Astaria wiki page (which redirects to my old name, Kalder.)

Anyway, thanks for stopping by and welcome!  I hope to have enough content to keep people interested in dropping by from time to time.