Unique speech recognition adventure being assembled in Bot Colony

The argument is familiar to any adventure gamer: detractors decry the genre as stagnant, having seen no real gameplay evolution since graphic adventures crowded out their text-only counterparts. Many adventure fans respond: “why change a winning formula?”. Developer North Side aims to stir up this old debate with Bot Colony, an episodic espionage-foiling adventure doing away with many familiar adventure gaming staples and replacing them with voice-controlled communication.

Set in 2021, players will take on the role of a robot cognition specialist on the island of Agrihan in the Marianas archipelago. Agrihan serves as a manufacturing base for Nakagawa, a Japanese corporation that plans to use the robots to colonize Mars. You are sent to the island because “Nakagawa fears that KHT [a competing North Korean robot manufacturer] may have infiltrated the island and found a way to access the prototypes. Bot Colony allows you to conduct the investigation and track down the perpetrator using your own name, with your own back-story.”

Although keyboard input will be available for communication, Bot Colony is designed primarily with microphone use in mind. Before beginning the game, to account for variances in vocal pitch and accent, the player will need to calibrate the game to recognize their own voice. English will be the only supported language. Another new element introduced by Bot Colony is the game's AI, which allows robots to learn “about human behavior, objects, and the world at large to expand an ever-evolving knowledge database.” There will be a choice between first- or third-person perspective, and a mouse/keyboard combination will be used to control the game's camera and your character's movement.

Playable exclusively online, the series prologue episode (The Intruder) is a training simulation wherein the player must verbally and remotely guide a domestic robot to investigate the house of a research manager that's been invaded by a spy. After passing this simulation, the Bot Colony itself will be opened for exploration. There will be 12 episodes in total, with a new episode projected to be released every 1-2 months.

No release date has been announced for public release, but the first two episodes are currently in alpha testing. Soon a transition will be made to open beta, which will be paid-for-content that will crowdfund Bot Colony's further development. To learn more about this unique game with ambitious ideas, visit the official website for complete details.