Vinny Bought Bot Colony. Now What?

This game's voice detection is the best way to come up with a cool band name.

Edit: actually, some of these misunderstandings are pretty deep.

"What the fuck are you doing, Jimmy?"

This video was worth losing Vinny at GB West

I attribute this greatness to Max. Only a patient parent would sit through all that craziness with a smile.

Haven't laughed this hard in a long time. Bravo.

Phillips is a patient man.

-wow-

God, this game gave me a whole new appreciation for Siri.

I think I may be becoming an edge case but the video player runs like ass on my macbook. videos are choppy as hell.

HAVE SEX. Thanks for that one Vinny. I usually watch giantbomb while I'm at work. Hearing you yell HAVE SEX was just perfect.

Breaking Vinny and All of Giant Bomb: Bot Colony.

I dont think i laughed so much since 'horse meet rider rider meet horse.' Vinny I applaud your patience with this game.

I can wait!

Hey Vinny, thanks for the great video. Hey Jimmy, get bopped!

There is something hugely therapeutic about watching Vinny go slowly insane over the course of an hour and a half.

This game does not mesh well with Vinny's personality disorders.

By "potential" do you mean decades for voice/speech recognition to get not-shit?

I think this game has a lot of potential, and I hope it gets fine-tuned in the future. I've always wanted to have a pet robot!

Bought Colony?

I think this game is interesting and I like that a dev is here talking about it.

Hilarious.

- I still don't have to make a voice profile for my phone for it to understand me. And it understands the difference between "abort" and "aborts", "shut" and "shot", etc. And, my main point, I didn't have to spend 30 minutes reading things to set anything up. The voice recognition on it is already good, and I'm not talking about an iPhone. It understands me; no profile, no arduous setup. Maybe you should ask Google for their technology.

- You may want to look at 1:09:35 again. "It is already close." His 's' doesn't have the 'z' sound used when 'close(d)' is a verb. He says the drawer is in close proximity. If he is saying the drawer is already closed (which it doesn't appear to be), why the horrible grammar?

- "Keyboard correction solving 90% of the problems" is pointless. In what's supposed to be a voice driven game, I shouldn't have to touch the thing. If I am going to, there's no reason to use voice. If I am going to say a thing and see the first or second word is wrong, having to holllllllld the left arrow until the cursor is on that one letter and then correct it and press enter, I may as well just type. And as said already, what is the game without voice?

- In addition to the right of the coffee maker not existing, once the pepper was there, why did Jimmy walk completely out of the room when Vinny said to pick up the pepper grinder again?

When the game...crashed...because he ..told the robot to put the toy giraffe back..I ..think I reached enlightenment.

Amazing video.

Oh Lord; when he set the pepper grinder on top of the coffee maker I lost it. As painful as it must have been for you Vinny, thank you for this piece of hilarity. Also, perfect ending.

This is gold! What a trainwreck of a game. I demand a review! :D

@botcolony: I think that's all great for further down the road in the game, but you also have to look at the use case for this particular puzzle. Players are 5-10 minutes into your game, and have just spent 20-30 mins or way more calibrating the voice commands etc. They want to poke and prod at the game a bit, and will need some direction. Jimmy could have a huge library of functional commands but the player simply won't know that. It's best to introduce them slowly so the player can grasp both the use and limitations of certain features. This is the very first time they're asked to rotate an object, and though its very cool, they wont know right now they can tell him to "rotate the pot 75 degrees counter clockwise". It's not necessarily about removing those options, but streamlining them in the early game and introducing them properly.

Especially if you have a very large, robust list of commands and command modifiers, you're going to need to introduce them slowly. When a player gives a command jimmy doesn't know, but may correlate to something else he can do with an object, he should suggest other commands (specifically those relevant to the puzzle at hand) rather than just referring to his command list. "I dont know that command, you can see all my commands by asking about them" is not as good as "I cannot squeeze the ball because I do not know the command squeeze, but I know how to pick up, push, and throw a ball. Would like me to try one of those?"

@renahzor: All great points. Maybe we went overboard, wanting the pot to look exactly like in the picture (handle pointing left, aligned with the stove top). There is even an align command to enable you to do that, if you explore what Jimmy can do. Perhaps we should have been satisfied with telling Jimmy what to do, and have him cheat and position the object correctly. The way it stands, you can control by how many degrees something is rotated, and if it's clockwise or counterclockwise. While this may not make sense for a game, it may be OK for a modding tool ( see http://steamcommunity.com/games/263040/announcements/detail/190591878968722392 ), where you want fine control over animation.

So for this specific point, I think you really need to look at what was happening and why. Context in this case is of utmost importance. You've asked the player to "find the hidden differences" via this entire tutorial puzzle. These puzzles are usually completed by, say, circling the difference in a newspaper. You have the added wrinkle of having the player fix the problem, which is fine in some cases, but has some design decisions that must be addressed and worked around. This really feels like something that should be caught in testing or just needs someone to point it out so it isn't glossed over.

A couple of many possible examples:

-Vinny tells Jimmy to "turn the pot" or something similar. At this point *He has solved this puzzle portion*. He demonstrated that he knew the object and what needed to change to re-orient it. Having to repeat this command 3-4 times is unnecessary, and adds more points of failure for no good reason. If it needs to be more complex have Jimmy ask the player which direction to rotate(gradually showing them ways to give more specific commands).

-The salt/pepper incident is similar. He is interacting with the 2 objects that need to be changed, he knew how to solve the puzzle, the ONLY thing keeping him from doing it is the inability to figure out what exact commands Jimmy needs to put them in the proper spots, which by the way I still wouldn't be able to guess if it wasn't for a previous post explaining it. This is easy enough to solve via proper tutorial pop-ins suggesting the correct commands to give, or AI that isn't nearly as strict and knows what goal the player is trying to reach as well.

-Your translation, text, dialogue etc can be extremely confusing. Jimmy's responses seem nonsensical and in many cases arbitrary. Adding a dialogue above the input that shows what Jimmy *thinks* you meant for your last command could be helpful, as well as cleaning up the grammar mistakes to make it less confusing. Additionally, bad inputs should be recognized and responded to immediately in as clear a way as possible. Waiting for jimmy to respond to a command(even one he doesn't recognize) makes it hard for the player to observe the problem and correct it. When Jimmy *defines* something, I would not guess he was going to perform an action on it, I would think he mis-understood the command. Simple things like this can make all the difference for training the player into the way you want them to speak for easier understanding.

As this is early access I expect some of these problems, but many you addressed here can be solved even more thoroughly, and may require more thought than just expanding the options within the AI routines.

Ah hah! I pick up the pepper grinder.

Jimmy, hang yourself off of the ceiling before Phillip does.

The toy giraffe. The TOY GIRAFFE!

The wrecking of the training part seems to presage the rest.

Instant classic

Dat Beard

@vierastalo: I answered it as you suggested, but I'd like everybody here to see the answer

http://www.giantbomb.com/bot-colony/3030-46842/forums/a-cursory-examination-of-bot-colonys-steam-page-1489155/#21

@gnoltac: Ah, point taken.

But some of the words Vinny said were pretty clear. Like his name. My bet's on that the game probably wanted him to say it differently, like "Whinny" considering the bad english in this game.

You still got to agree they need to make some sort of better way to make these types of games. Maybe one they have tried out.

Oh man, when Jimmy sets the pepper grinder on top of the coffee maker... I was worried for Vinny's mental health. Between the new setup and having a toddler at home, this game had to be so frustrating for him, but this was a really great video and freaking hilarious to watch.

Thank you, Vinny!

@botcolony: Hi, so is there any particular reason behind the actions of your dev team in marketing the game in a seemingly misguiding fashion? Details here: http://www.giantbomb.com/bot-colony/3030-46842/forums/a-cursory-examination-of-bot-colonys-steam-page-1489155/#16 PS You can totally answer in that topic to keep this page strictly for people to clamor at Vinny's great experience.

How does communicating with Jimmy compare to negotiating with a two-year-old?

You're probably right, yesterday our Steam sales (in units) went up 40%.

See *** for answers.

Why build one giantbomb for the price of one, when you can build two giantbombs for the price of two?

Catched a bit of this live. So. Funny. And frustrating.

I'm 10 minutes in. Is this fucking Frog Fractions 2? Please tell me this is Frog Fractions 2.

Vinny's cobbled together setup plus the isolation makes it seem like he's recording on a space station.

We read you loud and clear Orbital-Vinny 1.

makes me appreciate my kinect a little more, only a little.

Breaking Vinny.

Good gracious I think I love this man.

Classic Vinigawa

So this is what it's like to watch a man die.

Jesus...