In addition to typography, heraldry is another of my hobbies. I had this idea for a coat of arms generator. You click a button and you get a randomly generated heraldic shield with blazon. I’m creating it in Flash using Actionscript 3. It’s pretty basic so far, but coming along nicely.

Version 6 features:

• many field divisions
• all of the common tinctures, colors and metals
• several uncommon colors (stains and colors particular to certain countries or regions)
• five furs
• all of the common honorable ordinaries
• all of the above weighted to rarity—for example, common colors appear a certain percentage more often than rare colors
• a blazon for the arms that is working … pretty well

I need to add more charges, but I haven’t quite figured out how to manage multiples of a charge or how to determine whether those charges are within an ordinary or over it, etc. I also need to add subordinates. Sigh … so far this is still fun. The presentation also looks leaves a lot to be desired, but that can be fixed later.

UPDATE!!

I’m posting a functional version 8 on here, even though it isn’t really finished. by not finished, I mean not every design generated will look very good or even be “right” according to the rules of blazoning. the blazon is pretty good except for the stupid a/an article determination. Oh and it doesn’t have a pre-loader, so just be patient.

If you are wondering what happened to version 7, I had added some textures, but it was too much. Version 8 has the proper font embedded and I fixed the ermine texture. Still not happy with the vair however. I think I’m going to start over and do this a little differently and give the user some control, not just randomly generate the arms. I’m working on the flow but it’s kind of a bitch; field divisions, line decorations, ordinaries charged or not, etc. Stay tuned.

Without further ado: