Bot Colony cover
Bot Colony screenshot
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Genre: Role-playing (RPG), Simulator, Strategy, Adventure, Indie

Bot Colony

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Upcoming Bot Colony on Unreal - another sneak peek

Grabbing objects in Unreal 5


Bot Colony was released on Early Access in June 2014. It was built on top of the Havok Vision engine. To get a character to grab an object, we had to start with an FK ( Forward Kinematics, like extend arm to reach the vase) animation and switch to IK (Inverse Kinematics, like grab the vase ) in the middle of the motion. Fast forward 7 years, and now Unreal 5 features FBIK (full-body Inverse Kinematics). FBIK means that when you reach for something, the whole body adjusts (like bending your knees and leaning forward to grab an object that's a bit far). Here's a developer-generated video of finger placement tests in Unreal 5 - there was not much of that in Vision. Placing the fingers on something you grab is a more difficult detail in IK implementations. In this video, Jimmy breaks his wrist when he grabs an object (we'll fix that!), but finger placement looks really good.

[previewyoutube="-vc5B3Svj2Q;leftthumb"]
If you played Bot Colony on Vision (do it while there's still a chance!) you can see that movement is WAY smoother in Unreal.

The Sandbox


Here's a peek at our upcoming Sandbox which is next to the Intruder house (a big thank you to fans who took the time to provide feedback!).

Many players enjoy games where you can design something. We plan for the Sandbox to be an environment where you can get creative, and where you can make cool stuff to stream (so, kind of a content creation tool where you can animate 3D characters and have them converse, based on the environment and what they're doing). One of the challenges will be to teach your character how to traverse obstacles like these in style (the real stuff is made by FitCore, they make great equipment!). All scripting will be done in simple English, in the tradition of Bot Colony, where the main game mechanic is English conversation.

Extreme Angled Overhead:



This one is the A-Frame Cargo Net:



You can see where we're going with this. Eventually, we'd like to make it easy for you to bring in your own scene and characters and get them to do whatever you want (and talk!), and stream the result to the world. You'll be able to make a your own 3D games with intelligent 3D characters that are able to converse very quickly. Deploying Intelligent, conversation-capable characters will sure put some life into the metaverse!

Bot Colony on Unreal - progress to date
We're not just porting Bot Colony to Unreal, we're developing a new, better game. Owners of Bot Colony on Vision will get access for free to the new game (Bot Colony Redux, or some other name). Bot Colony on Unreal will be crisper, faster and more responsive than on Vision. Dialogue, the key distinguishing feature of our game, is a huge challenge. The completely open dialogue in Bot Colony (say whatever you want) was a recipe for trouble - the robots often didn't understand what players said, which inspired many videos, some funnier than others. Understanding language - the key promise of this game, is also the hardest problem to solve. The Redux game will be score-based, and you'll want to be ranked higher on the ladder. We'll reward success in getting through to robots, as well as contributions of knowledge about everyday life. With the Sandbox (thanks to those who provided feedback!), we'll give you a way to play through language without being tied to a story. Actually, you will create your own content.

In the meantime, here is what arriving to Bot Colony looks like in Unreal

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1j0K6cLAVYU

Once you land, you have to go through biometric authentication

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKKevrzoL9g

If you survive Airport, you'll go on to your next adventure

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMWeUX6REMs

We started on Early Access 7 years ago. It's been a long journey that's far from over. The Bot Colony novel was published in 2010 and it attempted to forecast the verbal abilities of robots (or chatbots) in 2021. We are now in 2021, but the dialogues in the book are still in the realm of sci-fi. Keep in mind that we actually have to make these conversations actually WORK in a game: from that point of view, Bot Colony and something like Westworld would be at the two ends of the spectrum. Until next time!


Feedback on the Sandbox
You can help by answering the Questions after watching the video, thanks!



This is initial concept for the Sandbox setting (initially, next to the Intruder house) and the mood. The basic theme is a robot/android party where you can do fun things. It's a sandbox that you control (alone or with others).

[previewyoutube="z9LBlB7d8aA;leftthumb"]

We plan to start this as single-player with Jimmy and his friends, and evolve to multi-player (2-4 players). We'd appreciate hearing back - wishes, ideas, comments, any feedback you'd care to offer about how you could have fun with this Sandbox.

QUESTIONS




  • Any examples of what a character should be able to do?
  • What commands, animations and objects are needed?
  • How do you imagine the verbal interaction between the characters?
  • How should a player influence a character's performance?
  • How important to upload your own characters, objects and your own animations (all accessible through language)?
  • Would you like to extend/change the scene?
  • Anything else you'd like to offer.

Thanks for your feedback!

First peek at upcoming Riot; The Sandbox

FIRST PEEK AT RIOT



Each Bot Colony episode is a stand-alone game with its own setting, a chapter in the story. Riot follows Intruder and Arrival. It was never released before and will be published directly on Unreal. Riot continues the Bot Colony adventure - the Hunter Bot on which you left the Airport makes an emergency landing on the Oil Rig.

The abandoned Oil Rig comes into view as you approach


As soon as you land, you encounter the natives (they haven't made it to UE4 yet :)

You'll realize you landed in the middle of a robot mutiny


You'll probably end up here and you'll have to prove you're human in order to survive

If you survive, other exciting places await you, and you'll hopefully manage to get out of them. if you do, you'll be on your way to the exciting Old Village, where robots try to 'do as people do' .

PLAYING IN THE SANDBOX



Some players complained that Intruder was about cleaning up a house. Unfortunately, finding out why the house was empty - the most exciting part of Intruder -, was not discovered by most of you as it's not accessible from a menu (you only find out about it if you follow the training text, and most folks skip it). The Unreal version fixes this problem. As many people enjoyed experimenting with commanding robots and talking to them, we plan to add a Sandbox outside the story. The Sandbox experience will be GTA-like mischief, achieved with AI's instead of cars or guns. Question for you: What fun things would you have robots (or androids) do at a party? Currently considering:

  • Playing music and dancing
  • Trashing the house.
  • Gambling.
  • Dressing funny.
  • Drinking and acting stupid.
  • Sex.

Would you be interested in designing your own character, adding new animations and deciding how it should react to events? This basically means autonomous characters, that could act by themselves at the party, talk to the other participants and do things by themselves. Would you like to control your character's every action, or would you rather train it, watch it in action, and stream it if it's fun? . The Sandbox will start single player, but will soon need to become multiplayer as a party of one is not much fun :) What features do you see for the Sandbox? We can start in this forum, and set up a Discord server when we have code we can put in your hands.

Progress on Bot Colony port to Unreal
The Bot Colony airport upper level looks nice and crisp in UE4.

We brought our Ayame character from Intruder into the airport lower level to test porting animations from the Vision version (in the previous announcement, we used Mixamo animations)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NhM-eSTK8B9roFB3jKJnQ8K7T1ZGGWiU/view?usp=sharing

We'll continue to keep you posted on our progress.

Bot Colony on the Unreal engine
As the Bot Colony original engine (Havok Vision) was discontinued, switching engine was mandatory in order to launch any new episodes. It just didn't make sense to us to make the big investment required for Riot and beyond with a discontinued engine.
We've done some tests towards continuing Bot Colony development on the Unreal engine. Below, Ayame and Masaya can be commanded in simple English to interact with their environment, similarly to how robots are commanded (for now, this is done with Mixamo animations dispatched by typing or speaking). Controlling human characters through voice or text has cool applications, see Say It, See It! on our website at http://northsideinc.com/index.php/products/

[previewyoutube="eNQo6Pu68Iw;full"]

This shows how vibrant the Intruder level looks in Unreal 4

[previewyoutube="DvQK1l8mnl0;full"]

Bot Colony developments always took long so we're can't make any schedule commitments at this point. We did get tons of feedback in Early Access (thank you!) that we need to use in the Unreal reimplementation. We're now putting the finishing touches on an improved version of Bot Colony that's a joy to play through voice (that will still be on Vision). We're excited to start Early Access all over again :) We're looking forward to reconnecting with you all on this journey.

Bot Colony Major Update
Sorry it took so long! We’ve made some significant improvements. Please read KNOWN PROBLEMS - we need your feedback! We made the call to give you something NOW, even if not all the polish we wanted is there.

NEW FEATURES





  • You no longer lose your progress in Arrival after 1 - 2 hours of play, which was frustrating. Arrival is now more playable, though it's far from where we want it to be. There are 4 checkpoints ( coded speech here to avoid spoilers): you get your Virtual Assistant, find blue, find green, 20?. This took TONS of work: we needed to save the game state, messages you receive, position of objects, events that happened – before a checkpoint. Several Known Problems come with this feature, please see below.
  • The game is faster, more responsive. However, during checkpoint save you'll think the game is frozen. It's not - wait a few seconds if you typed a command or asked question and nothing happens.
  • More contents. You can access previous robots’ conversations with passengers in Arrival. You can also investigate the background to something green ending up where it shouldn’t.
  • How do you know? after a robot answer returns source of knowledge (seeing, hearing, doing, programmed in factory with that knowledge).
  • Better question answering performance. Questions about a particular character will no longer return facts about another one if the verb and other words in a fact match your question – the character now takes absolute priority. Usually, Jimmy will assume you’re exploring events in the same time period his last answer was about. Understanding in Arrival still needs a lot of work.
  • Where was X at (Time) (on Date) is supported now, and helps you find key robot memories more easily in Intruder.
  • The experimental What do you see? question shown in an older YouTube video now works in Intruder, try it!
  • You can use your own words to refer to objects. For example, go to the scary red chair. You click on it to teach it. You can say Forget the scary red chair.
  • INTRUDER TIP We recommend you discover the robot memories before you play replacing objects in Intruder, to avoid failing because of the time limit. Find out about who lives there and what happened in the house in the last 48 hours, and discover the 14 Jimmy videos.


KNOWN PROBLEMS (BUGS) AND WORKAROUNDS




  • Playing through speech is no longer available due to cost! . Supporting Bot Colony ( above ) costs (WAY) more than what the game makes. Microsoft or Google charging by the hour for their speech-to-text doesn't help. PLAN: Make available high-performance speech-to-text through micro-transactions (1, 3, 5 hours for $2, $5 and $8). We're also contemplating a free Intruder level, playable through typing OR SPEECH (that will require micro-transactions). Finally, a bundle including 5 of hours of speech support (time roughly needed to finish the game ) – but that would only work for new players. We need your feedback on this!
  • You get to a saved game using CONTINUE but it takes 15 - 25 sec to retrieve it and load it , so please be patient if you’ve got a saved game!
  • After continuing a saved game, some robots can’t move any more (this doesn’t happen if you play Arrival in one shot). Both Charlie the Vacuum Bot and Cindy (the Cute Bot) are unable to move after a checkpoint. As a short term fix, we’ve made 2 endings of Arrival (one where Charlie moves if you play without checkpoints, the other he’s stationary).
  • Sometimes the Vacuum bot will open and close a certain door twice, and he'll be very insistent to play a game. You can ignore that if you don't need his help anymore.
  • You’ll sometimes see a blue sky with animated clouds after the 4th Arrival checkpoint (Charlie), just hit Escape and you’ll be in the game.
  • Teaching new commands (like ‘bring me a beer’, 'set the table') works better in Intruder than in Airport.
  • The style of Arrival is still guessing what makes sense to say in that situation and hoping the robot will understand. For players interested in the tech, we’ll need semantic frames plus a hybrid Machine Learning – rule-based approach (massive work) to improve that. Working on it.
  • Cases of a robot cutting off another (Miki and Jimmy, or Many and Mike speaking at the same time)
  • Joanna the taxi bot shows signs of dementia and repeats greetings.
  • Mary the X-ray technician asks you to respond to her previous question that you already answered - just ignore it.
  • Crash reporter appears at end of game and asks to send a Crash Report. Ignore it, hit Cancel.
  • The game menu appears when you hit ESC to close your first dialog with Tina (the receptionist in the Airport). Just click RESUME.
  • Even if you choose Jennifer Philips, the robots will still call you Mister Jennifer Philips. Sorry.
  • The baggage bot sometimes thinks you meant THE LAST briefcase you manipulated and turns to face it, or tells you it’s too far to reach. You can overcome this by moving it to another shelf before. TIP: Remember to use Up/Down Arrows to access the previous commands (you need that to save time when playing the timer game in Arrival). Also, use ‘rack’. Go the to Manila rack, Hong Kong rack etc – works. Then you can use Move Up, Move Down. NOTE Please appreciate we need to deal with subtle ambiguity, which is HARD. Imagine you have a green briefcase, put it somewhere, and THEN move to a shelf containing another green briefcase. In this situation, "Pick up the green briefcase" should refer to the latter, but "Where is the green briefcase now?", "Go back to the green briefcase", should refer to the former.
  • If you exit the console view in baggage claim before a bag is scanned, it reappears in "the claw" of Mike, but it's invisible. If you tell Mike to put it on the scanner again, it automagically reappears. Same with Jimmy game boxes in Intruder. Even if you don't see the yellow game box, Jimmy does:)
  • If you play with Charlie and he’s got to guess you’re thinking about him, you’ll see this:
    Charlie: I give up. What did you have in mind?
    player: You.
    Charlie: I haven't seen a you.
    Charlie: You have chosen something which does not exist in the airport.
    Charlie: You need to be honest.


That's about it :) We're still planning to release Riot eventually. Thanks for your support!

Bot Colony Heads Up
To react to recent posts, Bot Colony is still being developed. I'll summarize the game history for those who are new to this Community, and say a few words about our future plans.

WHERE ARE WE NOW AND HOW DID WE GET HERE?

When we released it in June 2014, we were 45. Now we're 7. If you go through old announcements, you'll see that the game came close to being shut down in January 2015.
Recent posts complaining about jerkiness, frame rate, sluggish graphics - are unfortunately well founded. We won't be able to do much IN THE SHORT TERM. In a nutshell, we weren't lucky with our first 2 game engine choices. First we developed our own, called Anitron, until its architect (Glen Ozymok, recipient of an Academy Award) passed away in 2011 at a very young age. It took more than a year to switch to the Havok Vision engine. Then, Microsoft acquired Havok and discontinued Vision. Autodesk, who made HumanIK used for Inverse Kinematics (to get robots to grab stuff), shut it down. Ditto for Scaleform, used for User Interface.

Bot Colony could have great potential if we had the resources to switch engines (again :) and go to Unreal 4 or Unity. However, the game never sold enough to support itself. In this situation, we need a partnership with another studio that believes in the potential of the game and wants to partner with us and help us change engines and improve gameplay. Or we need to make serious money in some other way.

WHAT'S NEXT?

We kept developing aggressively since 2014, but we focused mostly on our NLU technology, which is the unique thing about Bot Colony. It's also the technology we can control (as opposed to engine).

We DO have the major parts of Riot working, but the Hunter Bot circles the Oil Rig at a frame rate that's simply too low. We decided that it was critical for us to keep making MAJOR advances in Natural Language Understanding (NLU). We're now working on a new game called Jimmy's World (see http://northsideinc.com/index.php/videogames/ ). Jimmy's World will be a free game using our next-generation technology platform. We'll launch it first on Steam and then on mobile and tablets. This is where our efforts are focused now. The technology from JW will be used in Bot Colony - but we'd really like to switch engines to benefit from all our work. If we can't offer a smooth game experience - similar to other 3D games, the game will never make it, never mind how great the conversation is and how smart the robots are. Microsoft have kindly given us the sources to Vision - but we'd rather work with a supported engine. We'll deliver on our promise to launch Riot, even if it has to be on Vision - but we won't do it before Jimmy's World is launched.
FYI, we do have the story, assets, animations, etc for TWO episodes after Riot - one in the Old VIllage and one in the Hotel (if you read the novel), but it's premature to say more about that. Currently, Bot Colomy definitely qualifies as a labor of love.

WHY BUY AND PLAY BOT COLONY?

In spite of being rough around the edges, Bot Colony is a very unique game offering a very unique experience that simply cannot be had with another game: conversation as the main game mechanic. You can command robots through some fairly detailed actions, and you can investigate using your own words. You basically get 3 - 5 hours of gameplay in which you can have hundreds (we've seen > 400) of intelligent, relevant exchanges with robots, making progress in the game. And you can do this through SPEECH, that now works beautifully (you can also type). Is this worth fifteen bucks? Probably.

Update: Save improvements, Saved Games to be kept for 3 months
To improve realism and immersion, your conversations with various robots in Bot Colony are now saved as part of the observation database of robots and are accessible through question answering. You can ask what you told a robot, or what a robot overheard previous visitors say. This is in a quest to package Bot Colony text-to-animation technology for VR (this article on Bot Colony on our website goes on more details
http://northsideinc.com/index.php/videogames/ ).

Bot Colony has to save more than other games: not only the objects that you commanded a robot to move, but also a robot’s observations of people and their actions and what it heard them say (so, a real Big Brother : ). This was how we built the Investigation mission in Intruder, where you’re rewarded with videos of a robot's observations (generated in-engine, by the way).
As you may know, Conversation history with a robot is saved and accessible through F10. Conversations are not saved as text, but in our internal logic form in an Object-Oriented database, so you can ask questions on what was said.

With the support for checkpoints in Intruder and Arrival, you can CONTINUE from the last checkpoint and save several hours (some players have had more that 500 dialogue exchanges with robots in multi-hour sessions, which says something about engagement).

All of this functionality has an impact on the size of a saved game. You only have ONE saved game that you can continue playing from the last checkpoint. We will save your game for 3 months – and saved games older than 3 months will be deleted. This seems reasonable – if you haven’t gone back to your game for 3 months, you probably forgot about it. We can’t let these huge saves accumulate indefinitely – we learned from experience that never mind how many servers and disk we’re throwing at it, it’s never enough. When the database runs out of space, all the players suffer because checkpoints don’t work anymore. If anyone has a problem with saved games being deleted after 3 months, please speak up.

Enjoy Bot Colony and please Recommend it if you do!
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