Major Update: Checkpoints everywhere, Big Brother unleashed, robot personalities, improved speech-to-text
Checkpoints everywhere
You now have checkpoints in both Intruder and Arrival. When Saving your progress pops up in the top left corner, you’ve hit a checkpoint. If you EXIT TO DESKTOP and later return to the game, select CONTINUE from the game menu and you’ll continue from the last checkpoint you achieved. Checkpoints add major replay value because you no longer have to replay 2 - 3 hours just to get to a point where you’d like to do something different. There are checkpoints every 3 objects in Intruder and 4 checkpoints in Arrival. Bot Colony poses special checkpoint challenges: everything you did and said is saved, if you had a PDA or a briefcase – you’ll have them after the checkpoint, the messages you received on your PDA will be there after you return, your gameplay history will survive the checkpoint. With checkpoints you’ll be able to explore alternatives, and dive deeper into the game without losing your progress.
Known problem: Please DON’T use EXIT TO MAIN MENU – it has problems! Always EXIT TO DESKTOP.
More background story in Arrival
You can now explore the story of what happened in the Airport before you landed, and AFTER you landed (did you notice the bald guy?). Remember that you can always ask “What day is today?” and “What time is it?” to get an idea about what happened when. You can now explore the background to the events that take place in Airport, and what led to the situation you find yourself in. Right now you can explore the story using time questions, so a robot who overheard conversations can tell you what it heard. Later, you’ll be able to explore by asking a robot what it observed a particular human character do or say (for now, you’d need to refer to characters precisely, like ‘what did the woman with the red hair and blue jeans say?’; we obviously need to make that less precise to access this feature).
Robot Personalities
In their quest to ‘do as people do’ (read the book:) robots now have personalities. They’re so eager to please humans that they deviated from standard operating protocol (it’s up to you to find out when and how!). Find out more about Cindy, Tina, Mike, Mary and Joanna from their colleagues (co-bots).
Big Brother
You can also ask a robot “When did you first see me?”, “What did I say then?”, or “How do you know?” (about the answer it just gave you), and you’ll realize that they observed YOU and they remember where you were and what you said when. You can also find out about the conversations they overheard passengers in the airport have, prior to your arrival. It’s Big Brother unleashed, a unique experience that makes you appreciate where our connected world might end up! Coming: Two new achievements for exploring the Arrival background story in a coming upgrade.
Robots remember.
With the checkpoints, we put in a personalization feature: you can tell a robot whatever you like, and ask questions to test it remembers after a checkpoint (so after you exited the game). We didn’t make this really persistent (meaning - between games), but we will if you give us some feedback about what you’d like to see (we want to see some engagement from you first). For example, we could get Miki or Jimmy (or any favorite robot) to remind you to do things outside the game, keep track of your priorities, etc. This robot could become your assistant if you'll want it to. FYI, our robots are already very good at banking through voice, see www.northsideinc.com, We're now using the same NLU pipeline for Bot Colony and serious applications - that's why this upgrade took longer.
Microsoft Cognitive LUIS Speech-to-text
We did massive work to improve the speech-to-text feature: remember, hit Enter, start speaking when the mic icon shows it’s listening, then hit Enter again to signal that you’ve checked the text in the textbox and it can be processed. If there’s a mistake, fix it with the keyboard. We’ve disabled speech-to-text when the robot is speaking, so the sound from the headphones doesn’t get into the input. However, if you hit Enter while a robot speaks, you’ll cut him off. We’ve eliminated most of the crashes occurring during speech-to-text (to make it 100% we’ll need to replace Scaleform libraries and we’re waiting for the source code). If it crashes, remember that checkpoints work, so you won’t lose much.
Finally, if you like the game, please Recommend it on the Bot Colony store page. We’re still shy of 50 reviews that we need to be found more easily in the store. Thank you!