A bit about Hysteria In Howlsbend

Here is a link to the project website to read more: https://projects.etc.cmu.edu/chatbot-ai/

Me and my team worked to create Hysteria in Howlsbend, a witch trial interrogation game utilizing freeform user input and real-time AI generated text. The players took on the role of an interrogator questioning three suspected witches in a town racked by hysteria in 1666. Each NPC had full AI generated dialogue powered by GPT-3.5 Turbo. I was the Technical Designer, Game Designer, UI Designer, and one of three writers on the project.

We had to work through a lot of new challenges with this one

First, we were designing for Chat GPT in January of 2023, we had no precedent to work on for how generative AI text should be used in games and had to make an entirely new framework and process from scratch in order to do it. We also had to account for our lack of control over what the NPCs would say in our game design in a way that no one had to before.

We had to teach players how to play a game with completely freeform input. How to make them stay in character, how to deal with running out of questions to ask, how to teach them to be a good(more likely just decent) interrogator.

And we had to do all this over the course of a 15 week long semester project, so we did not have very long to figure this out

We found out how important typical game design practice is for making AI NPCs work, AI is no magic bullet

We also found out that the key to generating good, consistent, dialogue from AI NPCs was lots of prewritten example dialogue (so writer’s are not going anywhere in the industry, just their role on teams that use this tech are different)

And we found at least one new genre of game that was enabled by this tech in the form of freeform interrogation

There were many, many more learnings, but we can’t go on forever here

Here is the games trailer:

I also try to take on learning a new skill for every project I do

In the case of this project it was working with generative AI text

I also took on the role of UI design and implementation to a larger degree then I had before

After the semester we put the game on the Epic Store: https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/p/hysteria-in-howlsbend-bfaf38
And we got over 30,000 downloads

We also had some news coverage about the game: https://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2023/may/good-design-is-the-magic-behind-ai-game