The Jackplot
A slot machine for story premises.
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Steve Paulo

The Jackplot - A slot machine for story premises.

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The Jackplot is a random story premise generator. It requires no login or account to use, but if you do log in with a simple email address (it sends a "magic link") you can save the premises you spin up, to refer back to them or download them later. It does a couple things under the hood to weight against individual results on each wheel as you spin (just during that browser session), but it never "eliminate" a word. You can also lock the wheels if you only want to "re-spin" one or two.

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Steve Paulo
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So I've picked up screenwriting as a hobby, and one of the things I've noticed is that I sometimes get bogged down looking for a "perfect story idea". Plus I just liked the idea of "random" ideas sometimes sparking a different but related one in my mind. I used to use an app called "The Brainstormer"... it was available on iOS ages ago and was a Flash app on the web, neither of them exist any longer, as far as I can tell. So I went about creating my own. I liked it so much I figured I'd open it to other folks. There are 535,709 completely unique possible combinations, 872,210 if you consider that some premise sentences can exist in multiple genres, and thus, are different stories. (E.g., the same conflict/setting/subject in a Comedy and an Action story could be very different.) The system leans "movie premise" because that's my use, but I don't think it's limiting to other media. And it tries to be completist in the basic story genres: Drama, Comedy, Action, Thriller, Horror, Romance, Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Western.