Generated text for letters sent by satisfied visitors

[jakmeier]

Context

After a visitor group leaves a town, it will send a thank you letter and that includes a reward which can be collected. These letters are usually called reports in the code.
At the moment, the texts for the letters are picked in the frontend, based on the report id, from a static list of possible texts.

Goal

The letter texts should be more diverse and generally more interesting for the players to read.
Probably, we will want to eventually generate a new text for each report, store it in the database and display that instead of a static text. But before implementing any of that, there should be a model for how the texts are generated.

Possible ideas to make texts more interesting:

• Use information of village, such as what kind of flowers there are, and integrate it in generated text. (E.g. "Lovely how the blue flowers are blooming!")
• Include time information ("Nice to meet you this morning")
• Add some unexpected comments in the letters every now and then to keep it interesting to read. ("Smells weird in your town", "We have a worm dinner tonight, are you coming as well?")
• ...

Implementation Advice

This could be done in different ways and it will probably be a bit of an experiment to see what works best.

It should be kept in mind that the game is available in multiple languages and that it should be possible to generate the texts in all of them. But having it just in one language would be a great start. We can worry about other languages later.

My first idea was to use a list of keywords that are selected based on the specific visitor and town. (E.g. "blue flower", "morning", "happy") Using those keywords, a full sentence could be generated either using some simple concatenation or even with some natural language processing utility. Since the sentences will most likely be formed on the server anyway, the options are quite large.

Relevant Code Sections

Letter text selection in the frontend: reports.rs