reworked the default usernames in Downpour to be a bit nicer!
here's some usernames you now might get:
clearprimrose
gauzeglass
terrycloth91
chromiumchard
velveteencafeteria
paperflute
zincape
baboon16
foxglove20
gauze81
miraculouscarnation
goretexsalamander
bronzesousaphone
nickelbanana
surecherry
opulentmouse
ivorycantaloupe
monumentalmellotran
some notes on this:
- decided to do this after someone was enthusiastic about their given username, seemed like a nice thing to do to make them even nicer
- love the corpora repo for giving nice idiosyncratic lists of words in JSON format https://github.com/dariusk/corpora/tree/master/data
- love pruning lists of words thoughtfully over writing fancy algorithms
- i switched to actually checking for uniqueness rather than trying to make sure every username is generated uniquely
- i made a worse username generator with lots of numbers if the first one fails
- but generally it is nice to make a web thing where it has a finite number of different things it can generate, and be at peace with that. some day, i might get enough users i'll have to make worse usernames! that'll be very okay, if it does happen!
- one of the few places i've actually done a bunch of automated testing (don't tell the cops). mainly this was just trimming out some real long words so that the usernames don't go over the character limit
- the whole inspiration for Downpour making a default username for you came from seeing how Twitter optimised their sign-up process. thinking up a username is hard! don't make it a prerequisite for signing up for your thing! instead, give people a bad username and then let them change it later. of course, the thing about Twitter is that they never actually prompted people to change their usernames - this is why all the normies on Twitter had usernames like firstnamelotsofnumbers. Downpour does prompt you, but also... maybe people don't care? so give them a nicer username if so
anyway, it's all live now! go create an account and see what ya get: https://downpour.games/