Meet Mark the Pizza Doad.
When we were sifting through test generations of Doads, it happened more than once that we would come across a particularly interesting one and one of us would say something along the lines of “Oh yeah this is definitely a ‘Bob’.” After a bit we realized that naming the Doads would not only be fun, but give them some extra personality. The next obvious question is: how do you name several thousand Doads in such a way that they have unique names that feel sufficiently personal.
First we had to come up with a name format. We decided that simply giving them first names like “John” or “Sally” was going to be too boring or repetitive, so instead we opted for the following format: “[NAME] the [ADJECTIVE] Doad”. The name could be chosen from a simple list of a bunch of common (or uncommon, for more pizzazz) names, but how would we decide what the true nature of a particular Doad was? How would we know if it was a dangerous Doad, or a sophisticated Doad, or a tasty Doad?
In our configuration file where we initially had input all of our trait information, we added some extra properties to all the traits corresponding to adjectives that could be chosen if that trait was present on a particular generated Doad. So, for example if the “Designer Glasses” trait was selected, the Doad has the potential to be called “Sophisticated”, “Designer” or “Intellectual”. Then if the space background was selected, the Doad has the potential to be called “Cosmic” or “Galactic”. After a Doad’s traits have all been chosen, the generator chooses a random name from the name list, and a random adjective from all the potential trait adjectives. The result ends up being reasonably coherent, and pretty funny in some cases.
There are definitely ways that this system could be improved upon. One way would be to recognize when certain traits appear more important to the viewer. For example if a Doad has a particularly expressive face, it’s likely that we’re going to notice that more than the platform it’s sitting on, and want to associate its personality more with the more obvious trait. Another improvement would be to leverage the conditional property system we created in order to have conditional adjectives. This would allow for some specific synergies where adjective would be used only if certain combinations of traits were present. Either way, we’re happy with all our generated Doad names, and so is Dawson the Colossal Doad:
