After almost two years of work (mostly week-ends, evenings and early mornings), the Bot Colony manuscript is complete! The novel weaves industrial espionage, Computational Linguistics and robotics into a science-fiction thriller. The book will soon go to print. We’re in a race against time to complete the Closed-Beta software. Buyers of the books will get a block of hours to try the game as soon as the Closed-Beta opens.

The storyline is 50% attributable to the work on the game script, and 50% to insights from the development of the natural language dialogue technology used in the game. The latter turned out to be extremely hard to develop, and always ran over schedule. Our company, North Side, doubled in size since GDC. The NLP technology and the game assets evolved in parallel, and will continue to do so in the future, as more levels come online. Both the language technology and the assets are (much) more advanced than in March 2009, when we unveiled the Bot Colony technology prototype at GDC. You can still see that technology demonstration video of on YouTube. It is very, very prototype. Visit this website again before E3 for a game-play demo video. Better still, visit our booth at E3 to try the game (West Hall 4325).

The Bot Colony book is not intended to be a manual for the game. I wrote it to be a science-fiction novel that can be enjoyed on its own. However, the reader will get a good understanding for what a machine will understand, what it won’t, and why. The dialogues in the book are a precursor of the particular style of language-based interaction with machines that works well in our game, and that we’ll see in the future all around us (this language is called Literal in the book). Literal is a very clean, precise, factual kind of English. I think there’s a lighter side to it. Read the book and you’ll discover it. Some of the dialogues in the book are the result of trying to solve some very real NLP problems. Many of us practically lived in Bot Colony for the last few years while we taught the robots to speak. You can sample an excerpt from Bot Colony here.