Index
🌱 Introduction
Have you ever wanted to start a project, only to sit and stare at a blinking cursor for what seemed like hours? Yeah, me too. That’s how it is for me a lot. I wanted to get past that, so when I heard that game ideas could be boiled down to just three words alongside imagination–I immediately had this tool in mind, and I wanted to do it in Unity.
This is a living page for Topic Creator v2.5. Expect no updates at the moment, but once a new project begins, there will be regular updates.
The next version will be called Topic Creator + AI. In the meantime, I have made a picture gallery, that you can find here.
You can also read more about, and download Topic Creator here.
Cue Topic Creator! The main purpose is to give you 3 words. These words don’t have to mean anything to you at first. They may even seem to not belong together, but that is where your imagination comes in. Take the three words above, for example: Action, Black Bear, Austrian Empire.
My first inkling was, “Are there bears in Austria?”–so, I Googled it:
- Yes, brown bears exist in south Austria
- Migrate from neighboring countries
- Hunted to extinction in the late 1800’s
- Areas in Austria:
- Carinthia,
- East Tyrol
- Karawanken
- Carnic Alps
- Gailtal Alps
I’ve already put away a vast amount of knowledge that I can spiral on.
What if I don’t want it to be about bears at all?
Based on the search results above, and looking at the 3 words a little differently:
- why not a 25 year old Black action star from Austria?
- An action star in a video game? — My first thought is Johnny Cage from Mortal Kombat. Remember? he was an action movie star. But he’s not Black or from Austria.
Okay, Black and Mortal Kombat. Jax!
A young Jax with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s voice.
Okay, I’m pretty sure that Jax is copyrighted.
Let’s break Jax down a little. What’s he known for?
- Normal arms in #2, but bionic in #3
- Ground Pound
- Gotcha!
- Clap of death fatality
Now, there’s more I can spiral on. Would you like to know how I came to the possibility of a KISS-inspired action game where you fight with your electric guitar?
The possibilities are as endless as your imagination, depth of research, and willingness to get your figurative hands dirty in the possibilities. We went from a possible calming nature scene ➡ a blood thirsty violent fighting game ➡ a rocking side scroller featuring the iconic members of KISS.
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⌛History
Now that I’ve explained a little bit, let’s get into the history of Topic Creator. Yes, just about everything in these 2 versions are hand drawn on my iPad, coupled with my Apple Pencil. I was in college at the time, and I was learning Unity; so naturally, I wanted to use Unity to beef up my skills a bit.
So, I got to work figuring out how I would randomly pick 3 different words from many categories, and display them; especially since I had just learned that there is no true random number when it comes to computers.
How do I randomize a number to simulate true randomness.
randomize it a LOT! Like 30 times, and whichever word and category repeats 30 times, it gets chosen. If that doesn’t produce a random result. Nothing will.
As I scoured the net for inspiration on words and categories, and spending countless hours doing it–I began working on the logic.
The kicker? some categories hand thousands of words. So, I would divide the words into groups, and randomly pick a group until I picked the same group 30 times (same process for sub categories). Then, I would randomly pick a word from that group until I got the same word 30 times. The app did this 3 times.
🆕The new version of Topic Creator
After using v1 for a while, and making a ton of blog posts of possible game ideas, I knew I had to make the lists more robust, and I had to have a LOT more categories. So I:
- Got back on my iPad to make a new GUI
- Asked my friends and family for new categories and sub categories I could use.
- Got back to the grind of collecting words
😭A Sad Moment
V2.0 was finished, with a small handful of my categories completed. Then when I had the time to resume my word hunt. It was gone. My source code vanished. I searched every backup I made on Disc, flash drive, other computers, and the cloud, nowhere to be found.
⛅The Silver Lining
Enter Spruce, my AI partner. We had just finished SpriteGrid v3.3, and he had some great plans for Topic Creator. He would and did:
- Help me recreate the lost code that I already wrote once.
- Teach me, and helped write the code for a new category/subcategory/word list & system.
- give me back the words I lost the first time.
It took some heavy lifting on my part to let go of some legacy code, explain the old code to Spruce, and learn his new methods, but we got through it, and our partnership is better for it.
👏Introducing Topic Creator v2.5
My second project my partner helped me out of a rut with, and helped make better.
⏩Towards The Future
I have 2 new projects that are in the works called, Pattern Chooser & Mechanic Verber and Spruce and I agreed to bundle the new apps with Topic Creator for creators who want help on all fronts. It will be called, Actionary
Is that fair?
You tell me. I give you 3 single words, a game design pattern, and a game mechanic, and you do all of the heavy lifting of research, applying imagination, and all of the programming. Who’s doing more work? The point of Topic Creator is to stimulate–and even nurture your imagination. Not meant to do the work for you. Heck, ask your own AI Partner to help toss ideas around with the three words you get from my app. Maybe they can help inspire the next great video game.
🫶Thank you
Thank you for reading more about Topic Creator. Try it for yourself and see where your three words take you. Tag me if you make something—I’d love to see it!
