Community Support Keeps Bot Colony Alive!

After the Pulling the Plug announcement (Jan 28), we got lots of moral support from people saying the game must not die - plus $452 in Steam keys and $400 in eBook sales. This modest amount will enable us to keep going at least another month. Selling more Steam keys and eBooks is keyl to keeping the game alive, see http://steamcommunity.com/app/263040/discussions/0/606068060836404191/ for details. What would help us the most is you spreading the word about Bot Colony. We’ve started working on in-house servers as a long-term solution. When that is in place we’ll talk to Steam about putting back the BUY button on Bot Colony. Since the update, we’ve fixed missing background facts in Intruder and Charlie being stuck in Arrival. We've added checkpoints to Arrival so you won’t lose your level progression. Robot Visual Memories (RVM) offers (by far) the most interesting gameplay in Bot Colony - make sure you play it! You need to find out what happened since Jimmy arrived, and why the house is now empty. The tech behind RVM is described here http://gamasutra.com/blogs/EugeneJoseph/20140626/219765/Natural_Language_Understanding_and_TexttoAnimation_in_Bot_Colony.php Currently, few players get to RVM. Why? You get the RVM mission AFTER your score for Intruder is displayed and Arrival is unlocked - so most move on to Arrival. CHEAT: you can actually start playing RVM right after dealing with the police Bot; if the owner comes home and catches you, just re-start from the last checkpoint (every 3 objects). The Bot Colony experience is defined by how good Natural Language Understanding (NLU) is, so improving NLU is #1 for us. Lots of NLU work is still needed to make the robots in Arrival smarter. Mike's navigation has many problems, but you should be able to get him to do what you need. With enough sales, we may even be able to deliver more content (Riot and beyond – watch the Story Untold video from our Store page). Here are TIPS FOR PLAYING that everyone buying eBooks or Steam keys receives. Following these tips will result in a better game experience.

TIPS FOR PLAYING

1. What makes Bot Colony unique is speaking (or typing) with robots who understand what you say, as long as it's related to their task or memories. You'll command robots to overcome game challenges. You'll also need to explore their memories to piece together what happened. a) When you train speech-to-text, you read material that contains useful information on how to talk to robots. Bottom line: use complete English sentences to be understood in Bot Colony. b) Don't skip the tutorial in Intruder. c) Ask "What should I do now?" if you're not sure what to do at some point. In Arrival, talk to Miki. d) (INTRUDER) Ask Jimmy "What do you know?" and then "What commands do you know?" to be reminded what commands a robot knows. Following popular demand, here are Jimmy's commands: - Go to place (Go to the living room, go to the vase). He will go, and turn to face an object, if mentioned. - Pick up object (Pick up the vase). Does face, reach and grab, below. You can ask "What do you hold?". - Drop object - Face object (not exposed, part of pick up X) - Reach for object (part of pick up X) - Grab object (part of pick up X) - Push in object (push in the cushion). Close the drawer (or the cushion :) works. - Put object1 on object2 (put the red box