Very real Itch.io games! about 2020

[dawnithan]

Ok after a lot of iteration, I've managed to come up with a project for this year.

I present to you: A Videogame Generator, based on itch.io games.

The premise is pretty simple: I scraped ~1,741 games from the itch.io Racial Justice Bundle, as I thought this would provide a varied and interesting dataset from the indie platform. Using the main site seemed like it would produce too many items of similar type, as Halloween games were very popular at the time.

From this I was able to get each game's tagline and store link. Initially, I thought to use the links to get further information from the game's store page, but ended up scrapping this idea as the quality and format of the page content was far too inconsistent.

I used markovify to pass the taglines (or "short descriptions") into a Markov chain, then produce a new tagline for each generated game. Additionally, I select a title for the game using a random format and nouns & verbs pulled from a corpus. The author is another random word, as well as random platforms (any 1-3 of Windows, Mac, and/or Linux) and a random price tag. Finally, for extra flair, I generate a random Metacritic review for the game.

Once I had this, I generated a webpage and enough fictional games to reach the 50k words goal. ^_^

Here is a sample output: https://dawn-nanogenmo2020.netlify.app/
Here is the source code for the project: https://github.com/dawnithan/NaNoGenMo-2020

[pjfpotter]

yaasss