Sorry it took so long! We’ve made some significant improvements. Please read KNOWN PROBLEMS - we need your feedback! We made the call to give you something NOW, even if not all the polish we wanted is there.
NEW FEATURES
- You no longer lose your progress in Arrival after 1 - 2 hours of play, which was frustrating. Arrival is now more playable, though it's far from where we want it to be. There are 4 checkpoints ( coded speech here to avoid spoilers): you get your Virtual Assistant, find blue, find green, 20?. This took TONS of work: we needed to save the game state, messages you receive, position of objects, events that happened – before a checkpoint. Several Known Problems come with this feature, please see below.
- The game is faster, more responsive. However, during checkpoint save you'll think the game is frozen. It's not - wait a few seconds if you typed a command or asked question and nothing happens.
- More contents. You can access previous robots’ conversations with passengers in Arrival. You can also investigate the background to something green ending up where it shouldn’t.
- How do you know? after a robot answer returns source of knowledge (seeing, hearing, doing, programmed in factory with that knowledge).
- Better question answering performance. Questions about a particular character will no longer return facts about another one if the verb and other words in a fact match your question – the character now takes absolute priority. Usually, Jimmy will assume you’re exploring events in the same time period his last answer was about. Understanding in Arrival still needs a lot of work.
- Where was X at (Time) (on Date) is supported now, and helps you find key robot memories more easily in Intruder.
- The experimental What do you see? question shown in an older YouTube video now works in Intruder, try it!
- You can use your own words to refer to objects. For example, go to the scary red chair. You click on it to teach it. You can say Forget the scary red chair.
- INTRUDER TIP We recommend you discover the robot memories before you play replacing objects in Intruder, to avoid failing because of the time limit. Find out about who lives there and what happened in the house in the last 48 hours, and discover the 14 Jimmy videos.
KNOWN PROBLEMS (BUGS) AND WORKAROUNDS
- Playing through speech is no longer available due to cost! . Supporting Bot Colony ( above ) costs (WAY) more than what the game makes. Microsoft or Google charging by the hour for their speech-to-text doesn't help. PLAN: Make available high-performance speech-to-text through micro-transactions (1, 3, 5 hours for $2, $5 and $8). We're also contemplating a free Intruder level, playable through typing OR SPEECH (that will require micro-transactions). Finally, a bundle including 5 of hours of speech support (time roughly needed to finish the game ) – but that would only work for new players. We need your feedback on this!
- You get to a saved game using CONTINUE but it takes 15 - 25 sec to retrieve it and load it , so please be patient if you’ve got a saved game!
- After continuing a saved game, some robots can’t move any more (this doesn’t happen if you play Arrival in one shot). Both Charlie the Vacuum Bot and Cindy (the Cute Bot) are unable to move after a checkpoint. As a short term fix, we’ve made 2 endings of Arrival (one where Charlie moves if you play without checkpoints, the other he’s stationary).
- Sometimes the Vacuum bot will open and close a certain door twice, and he'll be very insistent to play a game. You can ignore that if you don't need his help anymore.
- You’ll sometimes see a blue sky with animated clouds after the 4th Arrival checkpoint (Charlie), just hit Escape and you’ll be in the game.
- Teaching new commands (like ‘bring me a beer’, 'set the table') works better in Intruder than in Airport.
- The style of Arrival is still guessing what makes sense to say in that situation and hoping the robot will understand. For players interested in the tech, we’ll need semantic frames plus a hybrid Machine Learning – rule-based approach (massive work) to improve that. Working on it.
- Cases of a robot cutting off another (Miki and Jimmy, or Many and Mike speaking at the same time)
- Joanna the taxi bot shows signs of dementia and repeats greetings.
- Mary the X-ray technician asks you to respond to her previous question that you already answered - just ignore it.
- Crash reporter appears at end of game and asks to send a Crash Report. Ignore it, hit Cancel.
- The game menu appears when you hit ESC to close your first dialog with Tina (the receptionist in the Airport). Just click RESUME.
- Even if you choose Jennifer Philips, the robots will still call you Mister Jennifer Philips. Sorry.
- The baggage bot sometimes thinks you meant THE LAST briefcase you manipulated and turns to face it, or tells you it’s too far to reach. You can overcome this by moving it to another shelf before. TIP: Remember to use Up/Down Arrows to access the previous commands (you need that to save time when playing the timer game in Arrival). Also, use ‘rack’. Go the to Manila rack, Hong Kong rack etc – works. Then you can use Move Up, Move Down. NOTE Please appreciate we need to deal with subtle ambiguity, which is HARD. Imagine you have a green briefcase, put it somewhere, and THEN move to a shelf containing another green briefcase. In this situation, "Pick up the green briefcase" should refer to the latter, but "Where is the green briefcase now?", "Go back to the green briefcase", should refer to the former.
- If you exit the console view in baggage claim before a bag is scanned, it reappears in "the claw" of Mike, but it's invisible. If you tell Mike to put it on the scanner again, it automagically reappears. Same with Jimmy game boxes in Intruder. Even if you don't see the yellow game box, Jimmy does:)
- If you play with Charlie and he’s got to guess you’re thinking about him, you’ll see this: Charlie: I give up. What did you have in mind? player: You. Charlie: I haven't seen a you. Charlie: You have chosen something which does not exist in the airport. Charlie: You need to be honest.
That's about it :) We're still planning to release Riot eventually. Thanks for your support!