What's in a (random) name?

Continuing with my series on “indie developer flaws”, procrastinating is another one I’m very fond of! So when I get stuck I like doing things that are necessary to finish the game, but that maybe can be done at a later point in time 🙂.

And “random names generation” is one of those things. But guess what, I worked on that next! 😁.

Well, at least I didn’t spend much time on the scene itself, right? But now you can create a company with a cool name, like “Tyrell Corporation”, or maybe something less prone to lawsuits 😛.

In any case, my name generation is really simple, but effective (IMHO).

To approach the problem I first went to the magical Wikipedia and searched for a list of corporation names, which I found at “List of conglomerates”. I noticed a few patterns on the ones I deemed as valid, and created a few rules:

• Names themselves can either be: two letter with an ampersand (e.g. “R & L”), three letter with optional dots (e.g. “ABC” or “W.X.Y.”) or “full names”, optionally with either an ampersand or a dash (e.g. “Hayashi”, “Okimoto & Malak” or “Chang-Babyak”).
• “Full names” were sometimes surnames, so I choose a list of surnames of various nationalities.
• Suffixes for the company name included things like “Group” or “International”. I created a list of appropriate names for this.
• Some company names have a “The” prefixing them, depending on the suffix, so I split my suffixes into “prefixed by ‘the’” and “not prefixed by ‘the’”

So I put all those rules into code form (and adapted the percentages for every possibility), and voilà, cool looking random company names!

I’m sure this can be improved a lot, maybe for more variety using a few more rules, but for my purposes this is more than enough and I’ve spent too much time on this already!

In any case, I hope you’ve enjoyed this entry, let me know what you think!

P.D. I’ve finally setup that mailing list, so if you want to be notified of new posts you can do so by subscribing here: “The Mech League” Devlog mailing list

Until next time!