Library Of Blabber: Procedural Books, Infinite Library

I like visiting libraries and bookshops in countries where I don't speak the language, as a kind of tourism of stories I will never read, experiences I will never have, knowledge I will never accrue. That's what Library of Blabber [Itch page] feels like. It's a procedural library full of procedural books you can pick up, flip through the pages of, but never read.

Created for this month's Procedural Generation Jam, Blabber has infinite corridors stretching off in all directions for you to wander through. Stop in one of its rooms and you'll find bookshelves full of books with nonsense titles. Pick them up and you'll find that they're 70-100 pages of nonsense long. From the game's Itch page:

"Inspired by Jorge Luis Borges' story The Library of Babel, and Jonathan Basile's libraryofbabel.info project, this 'little' game is focused on exploration and the fun of meaningful discoveries in the noise of random data. Although it does not posses the mathematical correctness and 'purity' of the original story, it still does contain enough pages of nonsense worthy of several hundred lifetimes..."

"The fun of meaningful discoveries" is the key, You won't find a readable book anywhere in the library. In my time browsing through dozens of generated novels, I didn't find a readable sentence. Instead it was about hunting for individual words, or maybe the occasional string. I found a book called "Hi Hi Wit" and another called "No". I flipped through the pages till a few words caught my eye; "the hates", "had youth not".

The greater randomness means that it's never as sublime as Secret Habitat, which procedurally generates art with distinct styles and places them within procedural art galleries. But it's worth your time.

Thanks, Free Game Planet.