Missions

To compensate for the freedom afforded by the sandbox style, intelligent help is provided in the form of Owen-01 (aka Big Brother) through a conversational interface.

While the game is in general inspired by the book, the player should not attempt to use the book as a manual for playing the game. The book is useful to understanding how Bot Colony works at a high level, and how to communicate with robots. The gameplay often diverges from the book and varies on a wide range: While there is some (bloodless) combat, there is also an opportunity to talk about feelings. Complex puzzles may involve directly controlling robots, vehicles, or cranes. Other missions are typical of adventure games, like disabling unruly robots or negotiating with them. The player can play cards or trade in the Bazaar, discuss food with a robotic waiter in the restaurant, train robotic animals to do tricks on the Kabuki stage, or investigate a crime against a robot in Old Nakagawa. He may need to prove he is human in order to gain a robot’s cooperation, or break into a hotel rooms with a robot’s help in his search for the elusive Korean spy. He may save other human characters on a search and rescue mission.

Conversation

What makes Bot Colony potentially more immersive than other 3D games is the integration of conversation with the robots to support this gameplay. This is a major advancement over current state-of-the-art in videogames, where the player has to choose a canned alternative from a dialogue tree. This opens the door to a unique gameplay: the player can guide a robot through a complex tasks, discover the story, query characters about their environment and events that occurred in it, trade, negotiate or carry out commercial transactions with robots, teach robots new information or new tasks, and seek help from Owen-01 aka Big Brother. All of these interactions are done through English conversation mediated by sophisticated speech-to-text and text-to-speech solutions intergrated into North Side’s server-side dialogue pipeline. As the robustness of the language capabilities increase, it is planned to extend these conversational capabilities to human characters without affecting suspension of disbelief.

Simulation-based game engine (Anitron)

An additional element contributing to a more immersive experience is the Bot Colony game engine, Anitron. The entire game environment is simulation based. All animation in Anitron is data-driven and the environment is controlled by physics. This means that players can directly manipulate objects: doors open continuously, elevators actually move between floors with the player in them, cranes pick up objects while their loads swing in a pendulum-like motion, briefcases actually contain objects that can be taken out, and virtual video cameras transmit the images they actually see them in the virtual 3D scene.

PDA

The player can see if a robot understood her by looking at its cognitive avatar. The player’s location is displayed at all times on a detailed island map. Holographic displays suspended in space summarize the transactions the player makes with robots, such as orders at the restaurant, or hotel reservation (the code for the last four interfaces is automatically generated with VAPS, see Development History).