looking for some input with a cotg story companion program

[kazreturns]

I'm not even sure what to call this thing, but I'll just lay out what I'm working on.  Basically, it's going to be a random story generator for CotG and eventually, Legends.  

What I'm hoping to achieve with this is a small program that, once you type in "wrestler 1" and "wrestler 2" or whatever, it will output a short story about a potential angle between them.  Keep in mind, this is VERY early in the build and I have -25 skills in coding, but here is a sample of what I have it randomly outputting currently, also keeping in mind that I am not selecting the wrestlers involved, the program is choosing from 2087 only.





Galactic Wrestling Illustrated is reporting that The Executioner was attacked by Killer Queen, but The Executioner managed to fight off his attacker with a baseball bat and sent Killer Queen running for his life!

Inside the commissioner's office, Thantos was seeking a title shot against the Special matches champion and as the conversation was finishing up, he was attacked by Ghengis Khan, but Thantos managed to fight off his attacker with a kendo stick and sent Ghengis Khan running for his life!

While The Executioner was backstage doing an interview, he was playing up to the fans whom booed him loudly!

Galactic Wrestling Illustrated is reporting that Proteus was attacked by Comrade Terror. He was violently beaten with a steel chair by Comrade Terror over and over again.

Outside the arena, Actagon pulled up in a sky car. He stepped out of the vehicle and was talking to Massacre about wanting a match with him. Massacre told Actagon o go take a flying leap!

Massacre walked out to the ring with a microphone in hand and was attacked by Renegade. He was violently beaten with a steel chair by Renegade over and over again.

Outside the arena, Krakan pulled up in a sky car. He stepped out of the vehicle and was confronted by Wolf and a wild brawl erupted!

Inside the commissioner's office, Massif was seeking a title shot against the Heavyweight Champion and as the conversation was finishing up, he was playing up to the fans whom cheered him loudly!





These are very basic compared to what I have in mind, but like I said, I'm still learning.  Is anyone interested in something like this?  Any ideas about something you would like to see included?  

[amd]

What would the scope of this be? Is this something that would generate random jump on points or angles to maybe incorporate into a fed? Or would it just be straight up random story generation just to see what kind of "what if" scenarios come up.

I have had some somewhat similar ideas for possible experiments. One idea I was tossing around was to basically choose a characters as "you" and then have it run sim events and fights. What you have here would be one component for sure...but I was thinking even more involved to make it run more like an ongoing story. It would basically abstract the game in way where you were more the manager...similar to the existing manager sims but not so complex!

All the different what-ifs intrigue me and that seemed like a decent way to run through scenarios. Its fun to see what sort of random stuff comes up and then compare it against how the cards/dice would handle things. The one part I thought would be cool to see and implement was if you start with a character you could have a base level and then you could get skills or upgrades to organically upgrade the card. So instead of getting the clear cut upgrades at different points in the character's career you could tweak them at a more granular level. This is all more pushing into sim/RPG territory, but all my years of playing so many random games I like to extract the different mechanics I like and see if I can apply them elsewhere.

So for example, you could take a guy like Vanity who has a specific power level, but then if you play things out a certain way you could beef up certain abilities or whatever and push him in a way that made the character better for that instance of your game. It would depend what level of control you want on the action and what you are planning as the output. You could really customize it a variety of ways. If you want any help or input feel free to message me.

[kazreturns]

I'm looking at it two ways as of now. The first would be a totally random situation generator. In time, I hope to be able to select a certain year, say 2087, and all the wrestlers in that year would be randomly selectable for whatever pops out of the simulator. Such as:

"Outside the arena, Proteus pulled up in a sky car. He stepped out of the vehicle and was talking to Wolf about asking to team with him. Wolf told Proteus to go take a flying leap!"

I didn't tell the sim to pull up Proteus or Wolf, it randomly selected them.  It could give Proteus heat with Wolf, leading to some sort of conflict between the two. 

The second, which I'm still working on, would allow you to select which wrestlers you wanted to use in the sim by typing their names in.  Say I wanted an angle between Renegade and Exo King specifically, I would type in Exo King and Renegade into the blanks and:

"The Historians of the Galaxy is reporting that Renegade was attacked by Exo King. Renegade was violently beaten with a baseball bat by Exo King leaving him laying on the ground."

For now, these are very simple, short stories.  I hope to expand on that soon, but I'm more working more on the mechanics of things than the actual dialog for now. 


As for the whole thing being on a level you are talking about, I'm not quite there yet to be able to attack something of that magnitude.  If coding this were an RPG, I'm on something like level 2, but honestly, it's kind of fun.  It's a journey of discovery and  knowledge.  I used to enjoy building websites back in the day, but the coding on all that has evolved in ways I can't even understand anymore.  


Here's to expanding your knowledge base though.  I'd love any help I could get on this.  I'm learning, but having difficulty understanding the "whys" of why things do the things that they do.

[amd]

Yeah, things are quite different these days vs the early days of your very basic fan sites. I'm in a similar boat where I used to like to dabble with web stuff but then that was making simple sites and using the tools of the time. There are lots of powerful tools out there now and tons of documentation/help available. Are you trying to make this something you can run in a browser? I do a lot of brainstorming of stuff like this too so its cool you are trying it out.

Its definitely fun to poke around and try learning this type of thing and even better when you can tie in themes you enjoy.

If you'd like to get input or feedback on specifics of anything feel free to reach out via message. I'd be happy to look over any designs and offer ideas for logic to tackle any problems. From what you outline here it looks like a fair amount of string manipulation and random tables to cover different situations. I was curious what the overall flow of events you were aiming for was though as that would determine the technical design.

You could hardcode a data set by year:

2087 = {Thantos, Star Warrior, Wolf, Exo King....}

and then you could have a mechanism for random events. In a simple scheme you could have some preset number of variations (events 1-20 for example) and then pull characters from your list and run them through the logic of the event. You could then get as fancy as you want as far as the specific event with variables like (setting = outside arena, in locker room, etc) and then random actions and reactions. Probably simplest to just have it all preset as much as possible at first.

For your second scenario it would be similar to the first but you would just seed the values for the characters you want. You could use similar logic for both issues with one using variable characters and the other being predefined.

[throwingtoasters]

This is a super fun idea. I know nothing about coding but I think this is pretty cool.