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Atravir
2013-04-03, 02:33 PM
So basically, I've been home brewing a game based on finding lots of random loot, and all the current item gens out there are either specific-game based, or really... bland. :/ So I developed an engine that pulls random products off eBay based on a list of the most common 10,000 English words. Seems to work pretty well for everything except weapons and food. Here's the link:

http://kice.me/randomebay


I'd love to hear feedback, criticism, ideas to expand it, etc. Code is based on the eBay official API.

Sent from phone, apologies for misspellings.


-Atravir

Feirgon
2013-04-03, 06:13 PM
I would suggest adding a section that does a look-up at weapon shops.

More broadly, instead of just showing market place and ebay, maybe search a specific tag or department for each section. Also, I would like to see Amazon in the mix.

Atravir
2013-04-03, 11:14 PM
I would suggest adding a section that does a look-up at weapon shops.

More broadly, instead of just showing market place and ebay, maybe search a specific tag or department for each section. Also, I would like to see Amazon in the mix.

That might be good to have a drop-down selector for general item type. Having it search randomly by category would probably also help to keep the results more varied. I get way too many books right now.

Unfortunately, Amazon's API is not free like eBay's, so the best I could do is generate what might or might not be a working link to an offsite page. It wouldn't generate a list like the current one does.

AttilaTheGeek
2013-04-04, 06:41 PM
If you change it from the top 10,000 words to the top 1,000 words only, you can get some... interesting results (http://xkcd.com/1133/).

Atravir
2013-04-05, 11:02 PM
I was actually on the fence on whether or not to use common words or random 3-letter combinations. Evidently, eBay doesn't search for chunks of letters inside of larger words, so I went with the common list. If I was really productive, I'd have it do both and choose one algorithm randomly...

So now that I've made this, what do you all use as random item generators for games that aren't D&D? Like, is there anything out there in terms of a good random sci-fi junk generator? I was actually kind of surprised to not find one, especially for all of those silly rules-lite games.