Where to find lists of first and last names?

Sewyoba

Member
Jul 22, 2018
403
328
Title. You won't be looking for most popular names and manually putting them into the game, right?
 

Sewyoba

Member
Jul 22, 2018
403
328
...and what part of googling "list of first and last names" or "random name generator" doesn't work?
Because it's unautomated manual work, so to say. It's hard to imagine that given the amount of programs and games that use those lists all of those lists were put in by hand. I was planning to do that by hand but stopped to ask
 

Catapo

Member
Jun 14, 2018
257
463
I feel like you need to clarify exactly what you want to acomplish because I fail to understand what "lists" you're talking about and what you want to automate besides just googling names for your characters.
 

79flavors

Well-Known Member
Respected User
Jun 14, 2018
1,607
2,256
Where to find lists of first and last names?

You won't be looking for most popular names and manually putting them into the game, right?
Like Catapo says... I'm not sure what your point is.

When I've put similar lists for myself together - I do exactly what you seem to be against... I google lists of the most popular names. I will tend to google " " or " " and then cherry pick (manually) the names I personally like the most from whatever lists I choose to work through.

Since I'm thinking of adult games here, I'm only looking for maybe 4 or 5 male names and maybe a dozen female names.

I'm sure other people avoid lists completely and just pick names they themselves know. Childhood friends, work colleagues, kids they went to school with... maybe even popular youtubers or porn stars.

That said, I tend to avoid the names at the very top of lists, because I find them too generic. Instead, I'll scroll down a bit and pick names I think might fit the character I have in my head.
Sometimes I'll limit the searches to names from specific years (no point naming a trailer trash female character Britney if she's over 25 years old... Britney Spears only became a household name around 20 years ago), or specific countries. Whatever random search idea is in my head at the time.

For family names / surnames .... I'd probably go with something like:
1814034181_1521849234.136.jpg
Because unlike forenames, I prefer completely generic family names.

For the MC's I play/name myself... I go for a mix of somewhat unlikely mixes. "Gupta MacDonald" being among my favorites... because who wants to be Jon Dough?

So yeah... "Where to find lists of first and last names?" ... google.
 

Sewyoba

Member
Jul 22, 2018
403
328
Are you looking for API get obtain the "lists" at runtime?
Nah, more like some name "base", "list", whatever, without the need to use wikipedia and copypaste from it. I didn't think it through, to be fair. Putting it into the game can be automated by rearranging words in txt file properly.
 

hiya02

Member
Oct 14, 2019
171
98
The game 'Female agent' had lists for first & last names, could take a look of that. But if I remember right, it only had English names.
 

obsessionau

Member
Game Developer
Sep 27, 2018
270
376
I think I did produce a RPY file that will return a random "French", "English" or "Japanese" names something like...

Python:
    firstFrList = ["Aalis", "AdélaÏde", "Adèle", "Adeline"] #etc

    lastFrList = ["Abadie", "Alarie", "Allard", "Alméras", "Anouilh"] #etc

    def randomFrName():
        nameWhole = renpy.random.choice(firstFrList) + " " + renpy.random.choice(lastFrList)
        return nameWhole
Just look for most popular baby names in [country], and most common surnames in [country]
 
Last edited:

baneini

Engaged Member
Jun 28, 2017
2,004
3,108
For maximum immersion you should force the player come up with names for each character in the game so they can more accurately pretend it's them in the game world. People fucking LOVE coming up with names for other peoples games.