Unfinished: Bot Colony 07/10/2014

Alex Navarro shall henceforth be known as hello Jenny.

@luck702:

Some comments from a developer of Bot Colony.

We agree that speech-to-text is a key mechanic. The Nuance Dragon solution seems to work a lot better than Microsoft. People who have NaturallySpeaking installed can try it, I'm getting close to 100% success with it. We should probably check success during training, and only allow to play through voice when a player gets a precision over 90%. But speech-to-text will always be a third-party technology for us, and I'd like to address other problems, that are related to the core technology of the game (NLU).

While playing Arrival, Vinny and Alex made a lot of progress in figuring out how to play the game, and did it totally through experimentation, which is commendable. Bot Colony is a game where you're in an island populated by robots, and you have to get through to them to make progress. While Vinny and Alex encountered problems, the experience was totally realistic - though not optimal as far as gameplay is concerned, but again - there's no cheating - for a robot to do something, he's got to understand what you're saying. We did program machines to try to understand people, and for the time being, this is how well they understand, warts and all. Remember that the game is Early Access, and it was hard to get to this point - ie., give the player total control over the environment, which other games don't do. The take home for us, the developers, is to to get them to understand better and make the experience smoother. From Vinny's and Alex's experiences we learn this:

- Commands should work uniformly for all robots (drop, for example, should work for Mike and Jimmy), and their synonyms as well (release X, let X go).

- More synonyms should be supported (so release X, let go X for drop X)

- Something like 'give me the briefcase' should use reasoning (coming). If a robot could reply after being given the 'give me the briefcase' command, 'For me to give you the briefcase, I first need to hold the briefcase, and for that I need to pick up the briefcase, and for that I need to know where it is - it would be fine, and totally in the spirit of the game (very robotic).

- When there are several objects of the same type (shelves, briefcases), a robot needs to know WHICH ONE you want him to interact with. Jimmy provides a lot of feedback about that in Intruder, but Mike in Arrival doesn't. So 'which shelf?", "which briefcase?" are not clarified, and they should be. Alex and Vinny got to that themselves towards the end when they tried really well-formed commands 'go to the center Jakarta shelf", but the game should handle the clarification if the command is incomplete.

I'd also like to point out a couple of problems that were not the fault of Vinny and Alex, but are ours to fix:

- the hint about the color chart is only applicable to finding the blue briefcase (the first mission), and should not have been given on the next one.

- the photo of the vase is simply wrong, it should have shown a vase in the center of the table. Will be fixed in the next update.

I love how one of their points is the photo to solve one of the puzzles is wrong. Some of the wording issues I can understand but for a puzzle to effectively be unsolvable is pretty huge.

Vinny vs Jimmy Wrestlemania 31, this has the making of a timeless rivalry.

@botcolony: Can't speak for everyone of course, but I do admire the fact that you have been willing to participate with our community working to address the concerns that these videos raise. I get so frustrated when I see Steam games come out and you suddenly find developers scrambling to silence any and all criticisms. I think that Vinny sees the potential in this game and will be willing to give it a fair shake as it gets closer to release while these small issues are refined further.

Okay, I lost it at Vinagawa McCaravellaburgito.

That's so Jimmy!

@tebbit said:

@jauntyhat said:

@ohdearaudrey said:

For the record...this is the one with the bomb.

THAT BRIEFCASE IS NOT GREEN. Yeah... I know they talked about the tags, but when the game says "look for the green briefcase" and what you mean is "look for the brown briefcase with a green tag attached to it", I can't help but feel cheated.

Fuck Guam and fuck briefcases.

Also fuck Jimmy.

Sorry, but no, when it says looks for a green briefcase, it really means what it says. The tags are useful for the first challenge (find the blue briefcase). [Spoiler Alert] When you're arriving, you're told on what day of the week it arrived. Knowing this will help you pick the right blue briefcase, there are two blue briefcases in the Tokyo shelf.

I would watch Vinny trying to figure this out. There's at least 3 hours of content here to mine..methinks...

So as the video went on I started thinking about what a sex bot would be like with Jimmy's personality. I would issue a command and sex bot Jane would say, "A penis is a dual purpose organ that plays a key role in the digestive and male reproductive systems..."

-___-

This game is an abomination. An abomination.

Some days you can't get rid of a bomb.

Why do the robots say, "Okay" if they don't understand the command given? That is the most frustrating bullshit to see them say "okay" and then do nothing.

Also, I read developer's explanation about the tags and briefcases and arrival days... and I don't understand. This doesn't make any sense. It's not about the voice recognition and not about the limited number of commands. This game in its current state does not work.

get the briefcase

I would buy this game a hundred times to watch a Vinny/Alex Endurance Run of it.

I think the real takeaway from this is

Vinny says forward real weird

Did you mean.

Vinagawa McCaravellaburgito cracked me up every time. Vinny snickering whenever it was said didn't help.

Yeah, I also appreciated the post by Botcolony. Simply having better voice-recognition wouldn't help in situations where you're saying things that make sense to you at that point (because you've learned earlier that's how these robots work) simply because the outcome would be the same even if you typed the request. More contextual commands would really benefit the game (such as replying "center" to the question of what shelf to go to, and not have to say the entire thing) and I think this game is a great fit for early access - could really help iron these things out. Watching others go through this is like basically focus testing.

I wasn't programmed with the Did you mean command.
Would you like to teach it to me?

Oh my god, the robot refusing to do what Vinny want and spouting random uninteresting facts while the the clock count down to an explosion is COMEDY GOLD!

All the robots seem super passive aggressive in this game.
"That is not an arm. That is me."
"Message received. There's a bomb." ROFL

Jimmy is GB East's Big Bo meme.

Walk fo-ward, walk fo-ward.

Ah Vinny's NY accent is already reasserting itself.

Nope. Nope Nope. Even if the Voice Commands were calibrated giving exact instructions is too damn precise.

I have to do the "Make a Peanut Butter Sandwich" exercise with my company for corporate training sessions a lot. I do not want to have to do it with a damn video game.

What a waste of pixels and light

Shoot the glass.

Hahahahahahaha.

Actually, it's brilliant.

Microsoft need to get Cortana onto PCs NOW!

$16 for a shitty Spot the Difference game. Ask for a soggy and get 20% off!

Also: TOKYO BOTTOM SHELF!!

Thank you!

This is so painful

If they had just stopped using the word "the" in front of the get briefcase command they would have been fine. Obviously the first time they used "the" and pointed to a briefcase that specific one became "The Briefcase" in all future cases. If they had said "get briefcase" it would have probably asked them to specify a new briefcase.

What a frustrating non-game. Voice commands that don't work but are a key part of the game. Voice recognition that don't work but are a key part of the game. No clarification from the game as to what you're doing wrong. No communication from the robots in any way to be helpful. Not only is it trial and error to find out what to do it's the most tedious, boring trial and error to find out what to do.

Did you mean.

@ch3burashka: No, that has nothing to do with it. It's not constantly sending information, and it's not like those random words are being transmitted. It's always listening, but you have to manually hit enter when you want to tell the robot a command. The only time this was an issue was with "type that" and Vinny explained what happened immediately.

Maybe cool it on the derision and the "I do not understand how they both got jobs in the games industry".

This game seems totally broken on so many levels. The voice recognition is straight up broken and even when it occasionally recognizes your speech or you type commands manually it still doesn't understand jack shit. There are porn-games with better voice recognition and natural language parsers for Pete's sake.

Heated Refuse seems an appropriate term for this =)

I'm very appreciative that there is finally a video on this site with closed caption. Finally, the deaf can enjoy Giant Bomb content!

I WANT MORE BOT COLONY! MORE SUFFERING!

A great GB classic QL after a really long time! This and the Long Night Ql brought back good QL feelings :D

I guess the GBeast move seems to be working out pretty well :)

In the future, baggage handling will still involve a union: the singularity.

Need to go back to the 60s to get their technology

Fuck I am late, but this I have to comment on this. I see this in people programming/scripting logic and conditions way too often. They try to make something as comprehensive as possible but in the end fall flat on their faces, because it is beyond the hardware's ability and their time do so.

When the robot said they aren't program for a certain set of instructions then you have to ask what is it program for?

The whole suitcase scenario. There are different shelves, different cities, different level, and then color of the bag. These are the key words that should take care of all there is. Rather the player mention "The" or not shouldn't have bearing on it.

Move to a shelf, which city? which level? what color? Just 4 basic steps prompt the player to enter the answer each step. If the player enter stuff like "move to tokyo top" then in that part of the game it should pick up tokyo and top. In the Jimmy part it wouldn't make sense, but then the player is not likely to enter that kind of sentence there. The rearranging the house part is actually not too bad, since the player have a lot of option, it is hard to figure out what kind of inputs a player would give. But on a robot arm that can only move to a couple of fixed locations and do 3 actions, move, pick up, drop. It is quite frustrating.

Sigh.. I love this video! Even though I spent 20 minutes just shouting stop using "the" at the screen.. But I still loved the gradual descent into madness!

If the voice recognition worked perfectly 100% of the time, this would still be a buggy game made almost impossible due to its ridiculous syntax. The fact that some of the puzzles are literally impossible due to incorrect clues frankly isn't surprising, considering what a mess the whole thing is.

@botcolony Syntax is everything. If it could reasonably understand synonyms and gave more feedback it would be much more workable. For instance, just saying "Okay" and then doing nothing doesn't help the player. Having it repeat like "Okay, I will push the cushion" or whatever the command that it's processing would go a long way. Another possible improvement is to have "What can I do with this" command and be able to click objects. Several times they had to fish for the exact verb that the game wanted for an object.

@r3dt1d3: While "What can I do with this?" is not supported, "What do you know?" is. That will tell you a robot knows facts it witnessed, commands, and his job. If you ask "What are your commands?", you'll get "I know some manipulation commands, movement commands, ...". If you then explore the manipulation commands, you'll get 'pick up X', 'put X down', 'face X', etc. The problem is that there was no attempt to explore what the robot knows. It is true that there should be better support for synonyms. The whole game is portrayed as a 'command the robot' game, while we intended it to be much more a game where you investigate through language, and converse to meet game challenges. Look at the Robot Visual Memories trailer on the Bot Colony Steam page.

"oats"

Thank you for this. I figured the robot was going for something outside of the room and I couldn't figure out why. If it was going after a specific shelf and specific suitcase, it makes more sense. Still absolutely non-intuitive and undeniably terrible for the user, but at least I have an explanation.

Vinny now needs to change his Twitter handle to Vinagawa McCaravellaburgito.

HOLY SHIT.