Fall 2020
GitHub Repository
Project Description
This program takes two text files, an alphabet file and a word list. It then returns words that follow the guidlines set by the word list with a given number of letters.
Development
The main reason I started this project was my struggle to come up with a unique name for my D&D character. My goal was to create a program that would take a certain list of words and generate words that sounded similar to them. There are websites like fantasynamegenerators.com, but I needed something more customizable.
In order to make my generated words sound like it belonged in the list, I read through each
word in the list and created a nested ArrayList of all pairs of letters found. This
allowed me to start with one of those pairs and then randomly select another pair that starts with
the ending letter of the first pair. I then repeat this process until I have enough letters or there
are no pairs to choose from.
I decided afterwards to increase the amount of letters from 2 to 3. This caused the words to become
more similar because there are more complete syllables. This added a lot of complexity to the
ArrayList, which now required 3 layers.
I typically use this program as a guide to find interesting sounds, rather than finalized words. I have gotten many laughs from the funny words it can come up with, and many useful ones too. In the end, I found a name for my D&D character that I really love: Yorgonsius.
Download
If you would like to try this out for yourself, you can download the zip folder here. Just extract the folder, put the txt file you want to use in the /src folder, and change the file name in the program's window. If you are using letters not included in the given alphabet, you can add them to basic-alphabet.txt.