Totally forgot this thread/forum/game, sorry!
Thanks to you two, I'm glad you enjoyed it!
Is this SillyStoryMaker something that we can play with?
Well, yes, I can give you the program, but it's really nothing great and I haven't had the time yet to make anything more sophisticated out of it.
Download it here [edit: a slightly updated* version on a more reliable server can be found
here], and you'll have a zip file containing the exe and some text files. The text files contain the items, locations and characters that may be in the game, and you can edit or replace them by other lists as long as the file names and format are the same.
Possible values for characters are divided in three lists "animals", "creatures" and "jobs", but there's no program semantics behind that, for every character one value of one of these lists is chosen at random (animals are less likely with a 20% chance, the others have 40% chance each, I don't know why I chose to do that, probably because I'm worse at drawing animals than I am at drawing people or monsters).
I've compiled these lists by searching for vocabulary lists on the internet, or wikipedia categories and articles like
"List of legendary creatures by type". Sadly, there is no such list as "real and imaginary objects of past, present and future that are small enough to be carried in an adventure game and are neither too specific nor too general" on the web, so the items list is really not good.
Now if you start the SillyStoryMaker and press the only button in the program, you'll get a one-line description of the "global situation" (name and job/species of the player character, name of the world) and some kind of "backwards walkthrough". The program essentially creates a goal and a tree of subgoals to reach these goals, and eventually all remaining subgoals in the tree are reachable from the beginning, like picking up an item in a room you can reach or talking to a character. A short sample story is this one:
Ter is a sphinx who lives in Tyxypipernia.
Ter must TALK to Daros, the painter AND GIVE the earring to Illamevomman, the flight attendant.
In order to GET the earring, Ter must USE the block with the coin.
In order to GET the block, Ter must GO to the pub.
In order to GET the coin, Ter must TALK to Dygeffafaler, the goblin.
Now you have to use your imagination on how the hell this can make any sense. Especially the "use X with Y to get Z" things are hard, in this case it's relatively easy: one could use the block to make a hole in a [gold] coin to transform it into a [golden] earring. But instead of an earring, the program could as well have chosen a car, and that's where the "silly" from the title really comes in...
One problem is: You can't give the program a minimum or maximum number of goals to create, so a game may consist of just "pick up one item and you've won" or it may become too complex - I set an arbitrary break condition of 99 or 100 goals, then the story will end with "STORY TOO COMPLEX!" in the last line. In these cases, just click on the button again until it gives a story of the desired length (or take the remaining subgoals as elementary goals, e.g. by giving inventory to the player from the beginning).[*) this problem is fixed in the updated version 1.1, you can now specify the (approximate) desired length in terms of lines/actions/goals/puzzles.]
Another problem: currently there is no check for duplicate items. you might have a goal "to get the car, you must first get a car" or even "to get the car, use the car with the car". First, I'd number the duplicate items throughout the story to avoid confusion, like "to get the car1, use the car2 with the car3". Now again, you need some imagination to make (at least a bit) sense out of this. Maybe car1 should be a working car, and you need to combine the parts of two broken cars to build one. Or in the first case, maybe you want a specific car (say, a blue car), and can interchange it with a car you don't need (say, a red car).
Well, I think that's basically it. I'd love to see other games made with this program, of course!
