Hi all,
We have a development update today for the new year (pardon the radio silence!).
Bot Colony _redux is making steady progress, leveraging improved technology to deliver new features.
Robot refresh
Following our sweeping, game-wide remaster of environments in every episode (exploiting several Unreal 5.6 features), we've now completed a similar refresh to all the robots and vehicles in the game. It's great to see this extra detail, with sophisticated shaders and nuances like weathered metal--making the bots feel more at home in their respective environment.
Check out some examples in this post!
Faster response
We're refactoring our dialogue pipeline to better use streaming to reduce latency in dialogue. This should improve response times across the board. There's never been a game like Bot Colony _redux: you can tell our characters anything that's on your mind, gameplay-related or something spontaneous, and they answer intelligently. To feel truly conversational, we know that rapid response is essential.
Flexible commands
Our in-house tech ("Perla"), using spoken words to command characters in a 3D world, is evolving. A robot is deeply aware of its environment and can now interpret all sorts of commands with ease, including more casual language. For example, you could say "Shoot over to the living room", "Snatch the vase", then "Stick it on the table" - and we understand that as go to that room, pick up that object, and put it on top of the other object. A game with unconstrained speech has unique challenges to solve, and we're aiming to be as flexible as possible.
Tutorial level
The "dialogue training" mini-level mentioned in our previous update is now complete. This will be your first experience when starting a New Game: an intuitive, dialogue-driven training scenario featuring the AI assistant Miki-05 (who accompanies players throughout the game) and a perky Cutebot named Mindy. You'll learn all the nuts and bolts of dialogue, like how to toggle Speech-to-Text (to prevent background noise from being captured as speech), effective text editing tips, using the dialogue history, along with basic controls and interface guidance. This tutorial will get players ready for the missions that follow!
Multilingual support
While full localization of in-game menus and interface isn't planned until post-Early Access release, we're taking the first steps to support non-English languages in conversational gameplay. Text messages sent in French, German, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, Korean and other languages will be recognized by robots, who can then answer in that language in text and with emotive speech. This is a fun way to discuss objectives and discover the story for players who are not native English speakers. In fact, the player's AI assistant Miki can offer an English Tutor mode to help folks who are looking to improve their English!
Personality push
We've integrated OpenAI's GPT-5 series into the conversation system, which makes excellent use of each robot's custom personality, humour, and their role in the player's gameplay objectives. It's a lot of fun to speak to our intelligent robots, who (in the story) have recently received an experimental software update that reprogrammed them to "Do As People Do". As you might imagine, this new goal leads to some quirky chit chat, and our unscripted dialogue means that no topic is off the table!
These, along with other big improvements, will help to prepare Bot Colony _redux for Phase 2 of the public Playtest, which will roll out next month on Steam.
Thank you kindly for reading!
We knew that creating a fresh, innovative game would be a challenge, and your continued interest means everything to us.
Regards,
The Team @ North Side