Ask HN: What side projects are you working on?
I'm curious about some of the side projects that you guys and girls are working on.
I'm working on a VN involving time loops, which is essentially an attempt to integrate the typical completionist play style of hardcore VN players (wherein people will often try for 100% completion of all dialogue and game devs will often hide the canonical plot threads behind options that only open up when you get all the good ends or all the good & bad ends) with the narrative -- i.e., the plot only progresses when the character dies and restarts.
I also write small projects periodically. (For instance, recently I wrote a script that superimposed Jenny Holzer quotes in white-on-red on black and white images, aping Barbara Kreuger's iconic style.)
First had the idea when I stumbled upon the game called Dwarf Fortress.
NaNoGenMo has been going since, like, 2013. Every year, a bunch of us get together in the issues section of a github page and discuss attempts to generate long-form narrative. (We've been able to generate passable poetry for years, but we have yet to figure out a way to get prose that remains engaging, coherent, and human-like for more than about a chapter.) There are a lot of very different techniques being used. (For instance, a couple years ago I wrote a planner that emitted debug output in the form of a first-person hardboiled heist story; somebody else that year produced a really good simulation of bad star trek fanfiction using a mixture of templating and object-oriented state tracking; somebody else made a great comic book by picking random sentences from public domain detective novels and then finding creative commons licensed photos on flickr based on tags taken from key words in those sentences and post-processing them to make them look hand-drawn.)
Side comment, but somewhat related: I just started getting into reading and the most recent book I finished was Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami. I just started 1Q84, also by Murakami. Those books really do something to my brain when I read them. Ever since I got into it, I've had these strange desires to write a book of my own, but since I have no experience in the matter, I was thinking of clever ways to procedurally generate plot points, then let a randomizer run in a loop until it generates something interesting.
For example, in multiple arrays, you could create lists for different plot elements: ex: "main character is a " [student, engineer, pilot, detective]. You can do something for physical features as well, and personality traits, and generate completely randomized characters. Then, you could do something for the plot as well... If I were able to do this as a starting point, I could write a story by filling in the blanks, so to speak...
So, is there a popular forum or perhaps Twitter that all of these enthusiasts hang out at? =D
The story generator idea you described above is an example of templating, & it's used pretty often. It's easy to make a good looking chunk of story that way, but difficult to make a 50k word novella that's readable (the target of nanogenmo).