FEBRUARY, 2015

What’s next and the Untold Story video

We're now making a last ditch effort to find a solution to keep the game going past March 15. Since Valve removed the BUY button from our page, we're now offering Bot Colony Steam keys directly to our fans: you can buy packs of 3, 5 or 10 Steam keys; you can get a Steam key for buying the Bot Colony eBook; we're offering Steam keys to customers writing reviews on our Steam page, or to the first players who beat RVM and document that.
See http://steamcommunity.com/app/263040/discussions/0/606068060836404191/ for details. About the eBook: few people heard about Bot Colony, so even fewer heard about the Bot Colony novel. It's an industrial espionage thriller depicting realistic verbal interactions with robots – it was meant to set the benchmark for the kind of AI we hoped to achieve in the game.

A gift to our fans, Bot Colony - The Untold Story was uploaded to Steam recently (it's the 3rd video from the left on our Store page). This 30 minute video was made to give a potential developer a complete view of the game, to help estimate the effort required to complete it. The video goes through all 12 episodes, using prototype assets and stills. A bit clinical (given the intended audience), the video does give a good idea of the scope of Bot Colony, and how much we had advanced before we had to stop. I hope that people who watch it will agree that Bot Colony can be a lot more than just talking to boring drones.

The game now has quite a bit to offer. In the new update, you piece together a juicy story from video clips a domestic robot recorded (RVM’s). You discover these video clips through conversation – truly unique gameplay not offered by any other game. In the two episodes released, you command robots through language under time-constraints – also unique gameplay. With the Untold Story video and the eBook – the Bot Colony story now has closure and can be enjoyed 'as is', like a released game. If Bot Colony continues to attract attention - it's now rated as popular content on Steam, who knows?

What next?

We were encouraged by your response and the emergence of a community of fans. We'll look at the possibility to keep the game going by hosting it in-house on our own servers. Unfortunately, we had to lay off 40 of our employees, so we're now considering the possibility of building a server farm from their PC's. We'll also need to move to a much smaller place, so we'll have to stack them high :)

Thank you again for supporting Bot Colony - something really new in gaming!