Yes, not exactly “fantasy”, but it was fun to program, and I’m pleased with the results. Enjoy: Rock Band Names Generator.
Some suggestions may be more appropriate for other music genres, or for Harry Potter-like books, but variety is a good thing. 🙂
Long time no update, right? 🙂
Anyway, because at least about 20% of Fantasy Name Generator visitors do so using some sort of mobile device, and also because Google apparently favors “mobile-friendly sites” these days in their search rankings, I’ve spent some time trying to make FNG work better on mobile devices (especially ones with small screens, such as smartphones).
It’s not perfect (I’m not a web designer, after all), but I think it is far better than it was before:
Before
After
On a desktop, it should look the same as before.
Please let me know if you notice any problems.
Note: the non-English language versions haven’t been updated yet. Look for it in the next few days.
Currently on Fantasy Name Generator (the original English / international version) and Nomes de Fantasia (the Portuguese version). Other versions (Spanish, French) to come.
Also, as suggested by Katzengeist, “oriental names” were renamed “Asian names”.
As always, any questions / suggestions, please let me know.
Coincidentally, both work better with medium or long names, instead of the default short ones. This is suggested in the main site. So, enjoy the Demon names and Dragon names.
I’ve been quite lazy about porting the more recent name types to the Portuguese, Spanish and French versions of FNG, but I intend to correct that in the near future. 🙂
Since most typical races are already done, I had to choose a less common one this time. Still, rats are fun. 🙂
Examples:
Yes, I’m weird this way. After my previous post, asking for suggestions for new types on FNG, I thought of a potentially interesting type: superhero / supervillain names. This one was enjoyable to do, since I’ve been a superhero comics fan for more than 30 years; it’s fun to see suggestions for characters that sound like the ones I’ve read about since my childhood… or ones that sound completely ridiculous (which is OK, there are precedents).
A few examples:
Still, my request in the previous post remains: I’d love to hear any suggestions / ideas / questions you may have.
As of today, elf, dwarf and orc names have been greatly improved (both in terms of quality, and of variety). There have been some very small improvements to some of the other name types as well.
I hesitated about posting about this, though, as the idea was for blog posts to introduce new features, not just “hey, names X and Y are now better”. But I have a problem here, and I need your help: I need ideas for new name types.
Yes, I could visit any of the many other generators on the web, but I really don’t want to copy ideas from the “competition”. Besides, it may well be more useful to answer needs from actual FNG users, instead of just adding random types “because I can”.
So… suggestions? Any name types you’d find useful? Or other new features?
Not a huge change today, in terms of work, but I think this makes each generated list of names (instead of individual names) more interesting.
Up to now, except for some special name types (e.g. military operation names, English names, etc.), the “size” selection worked like this: “short” names had 2 syllables, “medium” names had 3, and “long” ones had 4.
As of now, the above values haven’t changed, but some variation was added: for each generated name, there’s a 10% chance of having one fewer syllable, and another 10% chance of having one more. So, a 20-name list of short names, for instance, will, on average, consist of 16 2-syllable names, 2 1-syllable ones, and 2 with 3 syllables.
One consequence of this is that, for the first time, 1-syllable names (and 5-syllable ones, if you choose “long”) appear from time to time (and some of them are even decent!). But, more importantly, each list of generated names is less uniform, and therefore less predictable. I hope you’ll agree that this is an improvement.
I also added the two most recent name types, “reptilian” and “Aztec-like”, to the Portuguese language version.
As I mentioned yesterday, I wasn’t entirely satisfied with the quality / variety of the generated reptilian names. However, I had a thought; besides usually having lots of “esses”, in several fantasy universes, reptilian races are associated, for some reason, with “Aztec-like” cultures (e.g. Warlords Battlecry 3). This has allowed me not only to improve the reptilian names, but also to add a new type, “Aztec-like” names. In fact, the former are currently a “superset” of the latter.
“Aztec-like” names examples:
Questions? Suggestions? Feel free to add a comment.
As suggested in the site itself, they’re appropriate for common fantasy races such as Lizardmen or Snakemen. A few examples (just generated by FNG):
There’s still room for improvement; I already have a few ideas to do so. Anyway, any comments / questions / suggestions?