Village Gamer

Bot Colony, the first game to use conversational English as the primary way to interact with characters, launches on Steam’s Early Access today together with a free browser-based mini-game, 20 Questions with Jimmy, playable now on the Bot Colony website. Montreal R&D company North Side Inc. is thrilled to premiere on Steam in Early Access with Bot Colony’s Season 1: Landfall. This package includes playable Alpha versions of the first two episodes, Intruder and Arrival, and the pre-order to Episode 3, Riot (entitling players to early access to the Riot Alpha, coming later this summer).

The initial release on Steam features improved stability, an early version of the main story path, and the introduction of RVM, or Robot Visual Memories. Perceptive players will harness RVM during their investigation to uncover interesting story elements in the form of videos recorded by a robot.

What does “conversational English” bring to an adventure game?

The team at North Side is crafting a multi-episode journey that offers players the first experience of realistic verbal communication with intelligent machines. The theme of this futuristic adventure is corporate espionage, and the setting is an exotic island operated by robots. They use a sophisticated Natural Language Understanding (NLU) pipeline to bring our robots to life, allowing players to speak or type to the game characters and to receive intelligent answers from them.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9RR2Qv-g-Q]

The free browser-based companion experience, 20 Questions with Jimmy, connects you with one of the in-game robots, in a classic guessing game featuring full dialogue. North Side urges players from around the globe to create a profile and sample this slice of Bot Colony’s fun and engaging NLU technology. You contribute to a database of knowledge about daily life which the robots will later use in conversation. Jimmy will remember you and what you taught him from session to session – like a powerful personal assistant.