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Many Happymakers recently defended their graduate theses in the USC Interactive Media Division. I was among them. Click to hear a discussion of the problems of historiography and adaptation I encountered, and the approach I developed to solve them!

Many Happymakers recently defended their graduate theses in the USC Interactive Media Division. I was among them. Click to hear a discussion of Narrative Listening, the new adaptive narrative system hiding inside The Moonlighters.

Today, I changed the project description on —in fact, I also updated the name (formerly ). These alterations to the project’s mission occurred in the week before the winter show, and they go deep. Months of local optimization on the problem of making a fun game about Vikings had failed to produce an enjoyable experience,

Today, I changed the project description on —in fact, I also updated the name (formerly ). These alterations to the project’s mission occurred in the week before the winter show, and they go deep. Months of local optimization on the problem of making a fun game about Vikings had failed to produce an enjoyable experience,

Today, I changed the project description on . These alterations to the project’s mission occurred in the week before the winter show, and they go deep. Months of local optimization on the problem of making a fun game about Vikings had failed to produce an enjoyable experience, so at my wife’s behest I undertook a

UHM will be present at next week’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, armed with demos of exciting new games!  If you’re interested in meeting up, just email me or Teddy here at UHM.

Last year I showed Banker’s Dozen at the UCLA intermural game carnival and It looks like they recorded the talks. Here it is, for your enjoyment and edification.

Last year I showed Banker’s Dozen at the UCLA intermural game carnival and It looks like they recorded the talks. Here it is, for your enjoyment and edification.

In the midst of a large project – my graduate thesis game – I decided on a Saturday morning that it might be enlightening to take a brief step back and review some of my prior work. However, I wanted to mitigate the amount of time spent in this retrospective, so as to get back

tl;dr version: Got an iOS device? Sign up for testing at TestFlight! I vowed recently on the development log to spend two more working days on combat and then share a playtestable prototype. Well, I took a little vacation, I had to wrap up another project, and then there was the holiday, so I finally

Recently, I shared this design log with my industry advisor. His response suggested that I focus less on the intricacies of a detailed combat system and more on the important narrative goals of the project, abstracting combat as necessary. As I understand it, the concern is that if there are too many choices in and

In a whimsical mood as the endday light sweeps orange across my spartan studio, I feel inclined to reflect upon my past exercises in quixoticism. When I uploaded that game onto this esteemed site, I begat a debt of analysis, a promised post that would surely explain everything. Now, afflicted by this perverse sentimentality, I

The latest incarnation of Vikingr is on the iPad. I’m now designing from the bottom up rather than the top down, thinking about the nuts and bolts of a satisfying core combat loop rather than the abstract motivations of narrative. Combat in Vikingr is risky and in no way a default decision, just as in

Originally, I designed Vikingr as a sort of “Viking Wars”—a turn-based, asynchronous social game in the vein of BBS or text-heavy web games (e.g. Legend of the Red Dragon, Archmage) or, more recently, hybridized graphical games like Mafia Wars. This would progress at a pace of one year per day, granting players 52 turns per

The specific social, combat, and economic mechanics at the core of Vikingr were all selected for their narratively interesting and universal nature as well as their appearance in source materials such as the Icelandic family sagas. Rather than merely adapt, say, Njálssaga to a video game, I wanted to capture the rules and systems that

At one point, I had planned to produce several games for my thesis to conduct a few experiments about the Ensemble computer-aided storytelling system. In the interest of providing a more complete experience and having a stronger presentation at the winter and summer shows, however, I chose to focus on a single project. To validate

Joe Osborn A thesis project slated for completion in 2012 that explores what it’s like to be a Viking in medieval Scandinavia. Built on the Ensemble computer-aided storytelling system, it acknowledges the fact that players bring their own stories to games they play. Vikingr lets players specify elements of their characters’ backstories and can infer

Hey there, fans of Universal Happiness!  Allow me to present a new game from the Billion Bit Games imprint (i.e. Teddy and me).  Jumpkick Justice is a radical reimagining of the American legal system from two guys who grew up playing NES brawlers.  It’s a two-player competitive courtroom showdown suitable for solving any and all