Разработчик: North Side
Описание
Bot Colony ( is unique in that it's currently the ONLY game on the planet relying on AI-based conversation as the main game mechanic. You speak in English with robots (or type) in order to advance in the game. Bot Colony will appeal to players interested in genre-defining games with novel mechanics. If you enjoy figuring out how to get through to robots, command them through actions and investigate - you'll enjoy Bot Colony. The game is played in an eerie South Pacitic setting where modern architecture and robots contrast with the jungle environment. It integrates adventure, simulation, RPG and puzzles into a unique language-based gameplay with a great atmospheric soundtrack.
You'll get to experience Artificial Intelligence that is currently in the realm of cinematic fantasy in Her, Ex Machina, iRobot, Blade Runner, 2001 A Space Odyssey. It's a challenging and entertaining experience that will make you realize how literally machines process language, and how much we take for granted when we speak with people.
KEY FEATURES
- Type of speak freely and discover the story using your own words. The answers spoken by the robots is generated dynamically. Contrast with typical game storytelling, where canned voice acting is controlled by dialog trees.
- Experience the eerie atmosphere of a South Pacific island featuring ultra modern architecture and robots amid a lush jungle setting. The techno-romantic mood is enhanced by the original music soundtrack of the game.
- Play detective and piece together the events that took place in a house in a 48 hour period by exploring the robot's video observations.
- Work with the robots to scuttle violent sabotage attempts by robot-hating organizations.
- Game sessions are unique to each player: What you say controls how robots react and what they answer. Sessions of other players will have different dialog than your session. Every session is unique.
- Make the game your own: Teach robots new knowledge and new commands.
- Speak or type. The Microsoft Cognitive speech-to-text does an amazing job understanding what you say, irrespective of your accent. When speech-to-text makes mistakes, you can easily correct them. You can combine playing through speech or text according to your preference.
- Inspired by Bot Colony sci-fi novel, a near future industrial espionage thriller by Eugene Joseph. The novel ( available on Amazon Kindle) explores the verbal abilities of future robots and introduces the 5th law of robotics 'do as people do'.
Поддерживаемые языки: english
Системные требования
Windows
- OS *: Windows 7, 8, 10 [64-bit ]. Windows 7 has BAD speech recognition, recommed you type!
- Processor: Dual Core 3.5GHz / Quad Core 2.40 GHz greater
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVidia GTS 240 (1 GB VRAM) or greater, ATI Radeon HD 4850 (1 GB VRAM) or greater
- DirectX: Version 9.0c
- Network: Broadband Internet connection
- Storage: 4 GB available space
- Sound Card: Yes
- Additional Notes: Internet connection required. A microphone is required if you wish to play through speech.
- OS *: Windows 10 or Windows 8 [64-bit ] for Microsoft LUIS speech recognition
Отзывы пользователей
Words cant describe how terrible this game is in its current state (keep in mind 10 years in development) and I've played Payday 3. This one is actually funny bad.
Im looking forward to the updates that are coming in the future, at the moment yes the game is frustrating as the bots do some weird things while in task, and the speech is a bit hard to get the bot to understand so i end up going in circles with it, but i look forward to playing the finished version.
I bought Bot Colony a few years ago and I don't regret it even though the game is still in early access and probably will be for some time. This game is something completely different and unique. The developers of this game have succeeded in bringing to the market some completely new game mechanics that other companies are just dreaming about. They have come up with their own new AI mechanics for this game and made them part of the gameplay.
I would recommend this game for people who:
- Like games with new and unique approaches, new experiences
- Like games/genres with a bit slower gameplay (compared to fast paced action games)
- Like to support a small company that works hard to start a completely new kind of genre of video games that will bring the whole industry forward
- Are interested in AI, robotics, technology or scifi
- Are interested/prepared to play around a bit with robots and learn to communicate with them (Isn't really hard but not recommended for the most inpatient players or those that expect perfect AI that will be able to communicate with you like another human, the technology isn't really at that stage yet)
- Are interested in playing a game with a lot to offer but that is still a work in progress and rough around the edges in some parts
The game is amazing as it is but would be even more great if the devs find a new publisher who will see the real potential of this game/genre and the ambition and skills of these developers so we would be able to enjoy even more of their work in the future! There is no limit to the potential this genre and game series has with the right amount of work and money, I believe the technologies in the game will continue getting better and better with time.
I believe this game is ahead of it's time in many ways, in the future there will probably be more games that attempt to add similar mechanics to their games. Right now this is the best you can find and a game worth playing if you are interested in AI or games that offer new and unique experiences.
This is by far the best robot game on Steam. The second is currently Scrap Garden.
I want to clarify first two issues. The first seem to be mixed reviews, and the second is the controls.
There is currently a single developer responsible for this massive immersive title. There is only so much he could do in the way of gameplay, and because of such a shortage of resources, there is only one chapter. The introductory mission is a test to train the player - which brings me to the second issue. There is a lack of understanding for how robotics work. That has caused a lot of confusion and problems in gameplay for gamers. I recommend looking at some Fallout command line functions.
I completely 100% recommend spending $15 on his incomplete title. He's almost finished the 2/3 chapter of Landfall. If you have a problem with 21st Century robots, then don't buy the game. There is absolutely no reason to justify a negative review or recommendation. It's sad that it's happened, but we should support his line of titles. What he is doing might change the entire market of robots. It isn't just a game. It's a test. You're supporting $15 of research wheather or not he is directly involved in it. My last personal thing - this is a great game. It has problems and can be frustrating, this game is the highlight of life. Nothing will be more frustrating than arguing with a primitive robot. The potential and immersion with our near future is worth exploring. We should strive for this world.
A good Concept but far too litte to actually do in the game, feels more like a few demo's than a game.
If it interests you get it on sale but its not worth full price yet.
Bot Colony has been a rather intriguing ride into AI interaction. While certain actions are beyond the in game robot's comprehension, this would likely be true as well with a real life robot, until its programming allowed such expansion of knowledge.
The conversations I had with the robot, Jimmy, reminded quite heavily of a part in the movie "I, Robot" where the detective is interrogating a hologram. Multiple times the hologram reminds the detective that his responses aren't unlimited like a human, so he must ask the right questions. The robot interactions remind me quite heavily of this because in a way, you have to consider the robot's understanding and how it relates to the world. Asking the robot "what video did you record?" is about the same as asking your PC to open the correct steam game without further description. But if you ask the robot via date and time stamps, Jimmy instantly knows what you are looking for and he even will answer follow-up questions to the videos you watch.
While there were some minor frustrations getting the robot to "speak the same language", for an early access game this shows a great deal of promise as it progresses and becomes more fleshed out. The Dev team is also one of the most responsive ones I have interacted with in a while. Not only do they geuninely seem to care about the game development, but actively test reported glitches and review the forums for player input. This will certainly be a game I will be playing with more in the future as it continues to be polished.
This is a game I've had my eye on for quite some time. I just bought it and haven't had much time to play until now, but just the idea of the game is great.
I had the chance to talk to the robot in the first mission (or better I typed). Furthermore, I've had opportunity to try to talk to some A.I. in the past before, but this is something else. I can only imagine the work involved in making such a game.
A.I. has been fascinating to me as long as I can think (about nearly four centuries) and I am surprised how well this works. Of course, I have to pay attention to how exactly to describe things (and in how many words).
I can see that there are quite some hurdles to overcome for the developers, so I am not disappointed at all, when not everything works instantly. Humans expect quite a lot from each other when talking. For example, if I am talking about a chair and later someone asks what color that chair had – I am not sure an A.I. could reason that far. There might be other chairs around, and it just does not know which chair is meant.
This is game is some serious stuff, and I can only hope the developers get as far as they hope to. I haven't played long enough to tell you anything about the later game just now, but the potential of this game is unbelievably.
Although I might be biased because of my fascination with robots, A.I. and the like. I'd say this is a game that needs some serious support. Thumbs up for progress so far, and I am curious what else I might get from this game.
Edited because I had tons of errors in the review, but I didn't change the content of it.
For a game that purports to be a speech-enabled game, you have to:
1> Move the mouse to the bottom right of the screen
2> Click the speech icon
3> Say a line
4> Then hit enter on the keyboard
for EVERY SINGLE THING YOU WANT TO SAY.
Until you can leave the mic enabled, and it recognizes the end of sentences (you know, when you stop talking), this is not at all good speech interaction.
Review after June 18 major upgrade
Introduction
Bot Colony is an ambitious title, aiming to provide a non-scripted story by allowing you to freely converse with robots. If you enjoyed literary works like 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep', Isaac Asimov's Robot series, movies like 'Space Oddysey 2001'(not one of my favorites though) or Anime like 'Ghost in the Shell' and 'Psycho-Pass', you'll find a similar setting here.
An important remark is that most of the gameplay is text (or speech) conversations, which at times can be both agitating and humorous, and that might not appeal to everyone.
Currently, the game is made of 2 episodes: Intruder and Arrival.
Intruder
You have 2 objectives. The first one is erasing evidence of a thief breaking into the house, by commanding a robot (Jimmy). The other one is an investigation mission, which you can do at the same time, in which you question Jimmy about what happened at the house in the last 48 hrs. Jimmy will be saying some of his remarks/facts while moving around the house, which can be used as hints to what to ask. Although it might be a struggle at first, once you get used to commanding Jimmy (i recommend reading through the Robot Manual Guide).
Arrival
This is the first "real mission". it consists of multiple objectives that you'll discover while playing, talking with the receptionist, finding your luggage, finding a bag containing a bomb, within a time limit, getting a ride to your next location. A memorable moment was the talk with Charlie, a cleaner bot who'll help you with getting your ride. After 30 minutes of aggravation by asking all the bots about getting clearance for the ride, I was seriously amused when I realized the correct question line on how to get to the ride
Summary
I enjoyed my playtime with BotColony and I'll be waiting for any further updates. If you have any interest on how the robots operate and your interaction with them, I'm sure you'll also enjoy it. While if you're only focused on 'the result' or why the robot isn't doing what you 'clearly' are telling it, you might have a rough ride. Keep also in mind that the game is an early access title, and not everything is polished yet.
P.S.
I played mostly through typing, Voice recognition is pretty decent with the new Microsoft API, but i find it more convenient to type. That said, voice recognition is not made by the developers and is one of the best available on the market. Also the devs like to hear community feedback, so feel free to drop your thoughts on the forums.
Hugely interesting and hilarious game that I recommend to everyone. I have had some problems with the game on my side but Eugene from the Bot Colony team has been super nice to me and tried as hard as he could to help me so that I could play the game properly. I have been able to play the game despite my problems and the game has a very interesting concept of being able to talk to robots. And like any "text-to-speech" software or game, it can lead to some absolutely hilarious situations.
So, despite the clunkiness of the game, the concept of it alone has been enough to charm me and make me play though the first scene. I am not finished with it, far from it, but I will play again and again with my wife until we go through it :)
When I see a project with lots of potentials, I recognize it.
This game is the first of its kind.
There are already games that support voice commands (E.G. Binary Domain) but, this isn't about just simple commands, we are talking about interactions with in-game characters. I am the first to admit that I stayed a long time in the first part of the game talking to a small robot just to know what it can do and it was absolutely amazing.
I followed this project since when it was on Greenlight and Indie DB and I know how many efforts and sacrifices have been put on it.
I recommend this game, not only because it's amazing, but because you can help the developers make it even better and this is what this game deserve.
Just as unique as it sounds. If you're on the fence, go ahead and pick it up. You've literally never played anything like this, and the dev is small and could use all the help they can get.
Had this game for a while and came back to see if it had been improved any... NOPE!!! There are still game breaking bugs and the AI is as crippled as ever. The robot in the intro will insist objects are already closed when they are open, etc. If I could order the robot to step in the shower and turn it on, I would have. Save your money.
i purchased this game nearly a year ago and it is still in early access?
pros
graphics 7/10
sound 8/10
movement 5/10
cons:
clunky
commands are still hard to get through to your bot
still in early access
funds are low so no updates in a very long time
personal thoughts:
i keep hearing they are going to debunk the game and take down the servers....idk what to think...i have not played this in a long time because of all the issues the company is having.
p.s. i cannot in good faith recommend this game at this time...untill or if this game ever gets completed and all the bugs have been addressed.
also have never been able to even complete the tutorial...kept getting caught lol.
i would be very careful buying early access games...follow them 1st see how often updates are occuring b4 buying....i learned the hard way :/
A next Generation game with Speech Recognition Skills, where you can talk or write to characters to command or just do some small talk. Nice futuristic music nice atmosphere, beautiful level and character design. In the tutorial you learn how to command robots and interact with them. Sometimes you will find really funny sentences. Narrative, it's a good sci-fi thriller about industrial espionage and a bot colony where the machines went out of control. A game with high potential but it needs more audience so finally everyone can enjoy the conversations with the AI.
Bot Colony appeared rather promising when it released on Steam as part of the Early Access programme last year. It aimed to be the first game where you truly interacted with the characters through holding conversations with them. But it wasn’t until this month that the potential of this system was was hinted at through an update that introduced a need to pry information out of one of the characters .
The task was to gain access to 14 recorded videos in an attempt to piece together the events of the last 48 hours in the home of a Nakagawa Robot Corp. employee. To do this required talking to Jimmy, a robot servant left in the house. And when I say talking, I actually mean talking. Either through speech recognition with a microphone or typing, Jimmy was capable of responding to questions posed in naturally flowing English.
This certainly makes a refreshing change to only selecting from predefined dialogue options. And had the potential of revolutionizing interaction with game characters. Unfortunately, Bot Colony will cease to be playable in mid March. The result of not enough units being sold to cover the cost of running the server that processes the speech input, let alone paying for further development.
There was a lot of promise in Bot Colony, and anyone interested in seeing that should check the store page on Steam. While no longer purchasable, one of the videos does cover the story as it would have unfolded. It is a shame that Bot Colony slipped under the radar, a likely victim of Steam’s increasing release schedule and lack of promotion. Had it done well it could have been a hit. When the game shuts down, I’m going to miss my conversations with Jimmy.
I had high hopes from the trailer, but was really dissapointed.
The game is so buggy and finicky it's essentially impossible to get through the tutorial, even if you're not using voice recognition. Often you'll tell the robots to move things, and it'll turn out that that was the wrong thing to do, it's completely irreversible, and you need to start the game over. I restarted many times and eventually gave up.
The natural language understanding that was supposed to make this game so awesome seems like it's on par with text adventures from the 80s... not much beyond "VERB NOUN."
It's too bad; the concept is good, and it sounded like the story could be great as well.
The game itself is still rough and the voice recognition can be frustrating at times, but the understanding of the bots in Bot Colony is fascinating. Highly recommend picking it up if you're a robo-nerd like me. It's an exciting look at human-machine interaction in games and beyond.
In its current state, I've had no problems running this game on my iMac running Windows 8.1 via Bootcamp. I usually do not purchase Early Access games, but I'm a total nerd for Asimov's Robot books and this game's notion of robots seems pretty reflective of Asimov's characterization of robots and their interaction with humans. I'm also a computational linguist, so the inclusion of NLU (Natural Language Understanding) had me very curious as well. NLU is complicated to achieve since meaning needs to be derived from an utterance, which sometimes means inferences must be made, but I think it works pretty well in this game, especially for the game being Early Access. I'd love to see the NLU improved and extended to other genres of games. But I think the first implementation--dealing with robots that don't always understand pragmatics--is a perfect first implementation.
For an early access game, it is pretty solid. I really enjoyed the interaction process and figuring out what to say next. Plus there are tons of more interactions that can be explored in each level (I can see that from the achievements list) so theres a lot of replayability there. Can't wait for the next level to be released. Keep up the good work!!
Дополнительная информация
| Разработчик | North Side |
| Платформы | Windows |
| Ограничение возраста | Нет |
| Дата релиза | 17.01.2025 |
| Отзывы пользователей | 55% положительных (47) |