There's an unreleased version, which focuses more on how to portray characters, rather than just what they are. For example, instead of saying "energetic", they'll be pacing about a bit.
I might just pivot it into a story/plot tracker for writers, and use it to fill out the blanks rather than generating full characters from scratch. Where the community can add in their own templates and tropes. An author can decide that they have a character who is stoic, cynical, and sarcastic, and the tool will generate a background story, how to portray the character, what conflicts they get into with other characters.
I've thought about how systems like this could be used to greatly enhance the world of RPG's. Being able to generate a full back story and personality for every NPC would be fantastic, but only a start.
Then there could be an idea of 'atom' of information that uses models to spreading via NPCs.
There is just so much I know that could be done with this, but I'm guessing hasn't been because it takes more computation than I realize. Or maybe there just hasn't been the effort put into it. I'm hoping it's the latter.
Video game graphics seem to be providing diminishing returns for the game experience compared to depth of storyline/world building. Gamers will not care as much about how a game looks when it is very engaging due to the other elements. But it seems like those other elements are constantly undervalued by game makers.
I think it's more that content is hard. My random generator linked above already pulls from all the top tropes from TV Tropes, but it still seems repetitive. There's an awfully high proportion of stories starring a deadpan snarker or a stubbornly optimistic heroine, but these roles and personalities in a vacuum are not enough to make them unique.
Latest experiments show that details help a lot. Quality went up a lot when I moved from "they" to "him/her". And it went up even more when I had several different types of text describing the same feature. So maybe the missing link isn't just generating better skeletons, but rather different ways of saying the same thing. After all, there are a million fantasy worlds out there. All romances are the same archetypes. But some stand out more than others.
I’m sure you’ve probably come across it but it is worth mentioning - TVTropes (https://tvtropes.org) is a veritable smorgasbord of story tropes and character archetypes. Their catalog of examples is pulled from TV, movies, literature and history.
I donate to DF, lol. While there are plenty of epic moments in there, I think it takes a while to build up, and it comes in between a lot of mundane moments as well. And I think a lot of stories are built with a romance element in mind and there hasn't been a lot of procedurally generated games that do that well.
There's a sample at https://random-character-generator.com/
There's an unreleased version, which focuses more on how to portray characters, rather than just what they are. For example, instead of saying "energetic", they'll be pacing about a bit.
I might just pivot it into a story/plot tracker for writers, and use it to fill out the blanks rather than generating full characters from scratch. Where the community can add in their own templates and tropes. An author can decide that they have a character who is stoic, cynical, and sarcastic, and the tool will generate a background story, how to portray the character, what conflicts they get into with other characters.