Many people have called Bot Colony (www.botcolony.com) a really ambitious game - it's currently the only 'serious' conversation game on the planet. It is the first videogame to use AI-based CONVERSATION as the main gameplay mechanic - which makes it highly unique.
In Bot Colony players command robots to manipulate objects - to erase traces of an intrusion or save the world. layers can refer to thousands of objects in the environment and get robots to manipulate them. Players can also investigate a mystery using their own words, and get rewarded with videos of robot observations of events - which translate into achievements.The game supports multi-step dialogues, similar to how people speak with one another - significantly more than just a few commands and canned phrases.
The last Bot Colony trailer is at Youtube.com and the game website at www.botcolony.com relates the game backstory.
The game leverages the Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tech developed by North Side (the studio behind the game) over several years. Bot Colony was initially released on June 16, 2014 - but unfortunately North Side ran out of money shortly after the game was released. However, the game was kept alive with community help and on February 21 North Side published a major update. That was followed by another update on April 28.
On June 19, Bot Colony will get another (very) major upgrade featuring
- Highly precise voice recognition from Microsoft Cognitive Services that will totally change the game experience when played through speech. Speech recognition quality was the main criticism of Bot Colony in recent reviews, such as Rockpapershotgun.com
- In response to numerous community requests, Bot Colony will have Achievements ( Steamcommunity.com ).
- The game will better understand references to environment objects
- More content in the Arrival level
We're looking forward to community feedback on the June 19 upgrade, and we hope the improvements we've made will get Bot Colony closer to the game we meant it to be.
