Bot Colony is set in Agrihan, an island in the Marianas in the Pacific. Agrihan has become the private island of Nakagawa Corp., a large Japanese robot company, who relocated its R&D and manufacturing facilities there. Nakagawa’s fierce competitor, the North Korean KHT Corp., attempted to spy on Nakagawa in Japan. Nakagawa relocated its facilities to Agrihan to accommodate it rapid growth, but also to have a sanctuary out of KHT’s reach. A 900 m tall volcano covered with lush jungle rises from the center of the 7 km X 7 km island, surrounded by pristine beaches and coves. The traditional Japanese village on the island’s western shore contrasts with the skyscrapers housing Nakagawa’s R&D and living quarters on the north side. People intermix freely with robots in Agrihan. As Nakagawa’s robots will play a major role in the colonization of Mars, they need to achieve a high degree of autonomy. Therefore, Agrihan is mostly staffed with robots, and hence the name Bot Colony.

The player takes on the persona of Jeff Philips, a specialist in robot cognition, who occasionally accepts challenging assignments involving white collar crime. Jeff receives a call from Nakagawa Corp., and he is offered a mission: investigate the disappearance of three new-generation sensors. He is warned that KHT may have infiltrated the island, and will stop at nothing to get its hands on the sensors. The game starts with the player landing in Agrihan, also known by the name of Bot Colony. The player travels through the island with a futuristic hovercraft, sails around it, uses rickshaw robots to move on roads, or simply walks. Robots travel between facilities on the island using a specially designed monorail.

The player’s mission evolves from finding the sensors to chasing the Korean spy who has indeed infiltrated the island. The first part of the Bot Colony novel relates how KHT managed to infiltrate Bot Colony. This part of the story has been made publicly available and can be downloaded from www.botcolony.com/book.html

Towards the conclusion, the player is instrumental in preventing WW3.

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.

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.

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.

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).

Until Bot Colony, dialogue in videogames took the form of dialogue trees, essentially canned choices from a list (for example, Mass Effect, Hotel Dusk, The Last Express and older text adventure games), voice commands (EndWar, Sega Seaman), or an attempt to key on a word or extract a sentiment from the input (Façade, Starship Titanic). In Bot Colony, the player speaks freely, asking questions, seeking clarification, or requesting the characters to carry out actions, and the game attempts to respond intelligently. In this respect, the North Side language understanding technology is superior to chatbots, which are limited to serving ready-made answers incorporating words or clauses previously uttered (or typed) by the user/previous users; this makes a chatbot seem responsive for a small number of dialog steps (Jabberwacky, Allen, Alice). Façade relies on word polarity and a shallow processing of language, rather than deep semantic processing as in Bot Colony.

The dialogue pipeline running on a server-farm is the key technological innovation in the game. While North Side is not claiming to have passed the Turing test. That would mean that if a person saw only the transcript of a dialog between the player and a game character, he would not be able to tell if the dialog was between two humans, or a human and a computer. North Side does not claim that its software performs perfectly. Natural language understanding is a very hard problem, and the company’s objective is to understand language well enough in order to complete the levels of the game, or to help people improve their English. In many cases, the software may not understand the player and will ask for clarification. This is part and parcel of the Bot Colony gameplay. It is not difficult to say something that a character will not understand – the real challenge is to get through to characters, and advance in the game. The language software is general purpose, and not tied to the Bot Colony game in particular. In general, the hardest problems in understanding language are tied to the lack of sufficient world knowledge: things that are obvious to a person are not known to a computer – but they are needed to understand what someone said.

In Bot Colony, game objects behave and interact like objects in the real-world, further enhancing this feeling of immersion. The Bot Colony game engine, Anitron, is data-driven, so all scenes are actually real-time simulations. There’s no need to use cut scenes.

Bot Colony is not programmed in a traditional way. All game logic, animations and interactions are entirely scripted in English. English-based scripting will enable players to extend the game world with their own content. A script describes in simple English how a game entity should react, when its context and probable goals are taken into account.

The language software attempts to extract the correct meaning from a player’s utterance, irrespective of the particular words or the syntax used, and attempts to it to a familiar context. This means that a player may formulate the same message in many different ways and the game will extract the same semantics in all cases.

North Side believes that its innovative use of English as a scripting language will enable players to extend the world by adding their own content. This English-based scripting technology has additional applications, for example to rapid visualization of movie scripts, workflow visualization, debrief, and exploring alternative courses of action.