How Can I Think Of Unique, Not Filtered, Names?

Help and Feedback Game Design Support
#1

A problem I came upon on a recent project was making random names for in-game, fictional companies. To ensure people of any age could effectively communicate in-game, I tested if the company names would be filtered on an account with an age of a week.

The problem is, no matter what name I think of, it either:

  • Gets filtered if you have safe chat
  • Is the name of an actual company
  • Makes zero sense (E.g., it wouldn’t make sense if a company was named “AAAAAAAA”)
  • Is unpronounceable

A good example of a name would be “Strcuid”. It is not filtered with safe chat, it is not the name of an actual company, it is a realistic name, and it is unpronounceable. I, of course, cannot actually use the name Strucid.

I have also considered altering the in-game chat to filter chat normally unless you say the name of a company, in which case the filter is bypassed, but I feel that could be exploited and is almost definitely against TOS.

#2

I have no idea if this is possible, but u can disable default chat and create your own, that way it is not the default Roblox chat that is getting “exploited”

#3

Yes, but my concern is that the default filter has been tweaked and optimized for years, so me including words that shouldn’t be filtered might get exploited.

And my main concern is that changing what words can be filtered is against TOS.

#4

Here are a couple things you can try.

Let players name their own companies. This will take some of the burden off of you. Just filter the name they put in and you’re good.

If that doesn’t go with your project, consider stringing together a sequence of real words and then making an acronym.

#5

With no doubt not the best option ever
but you could make a name generator that has a set of rules and procedures.

For example, generate each name character by character and have rules as to which character can be followed by which and which cannot follow up.

Example (using the name you had already provided just to give you the idea).

First character: “S”.

Which characters can follow up?
Possible follow ups: A, E, I, R, T, O, U, Y

Name generator chooses “T” as the next character.

Which characters can follow up now?
Possible follow ups: A, E, I, R, U, Y

Generator chooses “R”, you now have “Str”.

this goes on until you have the full name “Strucid” for example, length of names can be randomized too and you may want to add a small system so it doesn’t give incomplete names like “Struc”, for example, tell your code to not stop generating until said name ends with a certain character (a list of characters the name can and cannot end with).

It may sometimes generate unpronouncable names and in some cases you may want to filter it and re-generate if it accidentally generates a bad word though, but I think that this would work.

If it doesn’t work with single characters, try 2 or 3 characters like “Stru” and “cid”.

Have a table containing beginning/starter characters like “Stru” and then create a hierarchy that goes down and which words could follow up next.

What I also see as a possible option is literally look up a word book or dictionary, pick out a bunch of words and cut them all into pieces, then assemble them randomly in appropiate ways (like I said above, using a hierarchy of which words can and cannot be assembled/connected) but you may also want to add a length limit so it doesn’t generate endlessly until it has figured out with which character to end the name (chance is rare that this happens though, but it’s possible to get names with like 200 characters lol).

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#6

That might be the best option. It’s certainly better then making a list of hundreds of possible names only to see none of them are usable.

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#7

I mean making a separate chat like in ruddev’s battle royale