Mephs
03-30-2007, 01:07 AM
Hey all,
I'm contemplating adding an element of the old party game "madlibs" into my game design. For those unfamiliar with the game, it is where you have a story with a series of blank words that need to be filled in. You choose words that match a specified category for the blank, such as "past tense verb", "noun", "plural noun", "exclamation" or "place name". The idea being to try and make the funniest story possible.
Now originally, I had planned to have players somehow choose full words via the gameplay, but then I wondered about the idea of having to create your words from a given set of letters, like scrabble, or many of the existing casual word games. In this way, players have to find a word, but the word also has to be of a given type.
I think this could be great fun. I imagine perhaps a game setting like bomberman, with letters distributed around the level and the players running around collecting letters trying to be the first to make a word of the correct type to fit into the madlib. The player could be playing against an opponent, and when any given player creates a word, the letters they use disappear and new ones respawn, making the opponents life difficult as the letters they needed to make their word may have just disappeared!! The players could compete either to finish a single madlib, or they could have one each of their own. Either that player that completes their madlib first wins, or if using a joint effort, the player who contributes the most words wins.
My problem with this is the need for a strongly categorized dictionary. I haven't been able to find any word list files that have a good portion of the english language categorised by word type. The few files I have found simply categorise words into verbs, nouns, adjective, etc. There is no provision for "past tense", "plural" or less formal categorisations such as "place names".
I appreciate that my needs are quite unique, there would not be much use for such word lists beyond a madlib game. Can anyone think of a way around this? I'm half wondering about perhaps writing some sort of dictionary parsing program to compile my own lists, but even then, I'm wondering if the categorisation, repetition of words under different categories and what not would perhaps make the files too huge and unwieldy to use in a game.
Is there anything I could change about the gameplay that might facilitate not needing these wordlists? Obviously if we don't put any restrictions on the words players choose to fill in the madlib, they will end up creating nonsense words just to win.
Any suggestions would be appreciated!
Many thanks,
Steve
I'm contemplating adding an element of the old party game "madlibs" into my game design. For those unfamiliar with the game, it is where you have a story with a series of blank words that need to be filled in. You choose words that match a specified category for the blank, such as "past tense verb", "noun", "plural noun", "exclamation" or "place name". The idea being to try and make the funniest story possible.
Now originally, I had planned to have players somehow choose full words via the gameplay, but then I wondered about the idea of having to create your words from a given set of letters, like scrabble, or many of the existing casual word games. In this way, players have to find a word, but the word also has to be of a given type.
I think this could be great fun. I imagine perhaps a game setting like bomberman, with letters distributed around the level and the players running around collecting letters trying to be the first to make a word of the correct type to fit into the madlib. The player could be playing against an opponent, and when any given player creates a word, the letters they use disappear and new ones respawn, making the opponents life difficult as the letters they needed to make their word may have just disappeared!! The players could compete either to finish a single madlib, or they could have one each of their own. Either that player that completes their madlib first wins, or if using a joint effort, the player who contributes the most words wins.
My problem with this is the need for a strongly categorized dictionary. I haven't been able to find any word list files that have a good portion of the english language categorised by word type. The few files I have found simply categorise words into verbs, nouns, adjective, etc. There is no provision for "past tense", "plural" or less formal categorisations such as "place names".
I appreciate that my needs are quite unique, there would not be much use for such word lists beyond a madlib game. Can anyone think of a way around this? I'm half wondering about perhaps writing some sort of dictionary parsing program to compile my own lists, but even then, I'm wondering if the categorisation, repetition of words under different categories and what not would perhaps make the files too huge and unwieldy to use in a game.
Is there anything I could change about the gameplay that might facilitate not needing these wordlists? Obviously if we don't put any restrictions on the words players choose to fill in the madlib, they will end up creating nonsense words just to win.
Any suggestions would be appreciated!
Many thanks,
Steve