![ocelot chatbot ocelot chatbot](https://d.facdn.net/art/asarax/1566479268/1566479268.asarax_%D0%BE%D1%86%D0%B5%D0%BB%D0%BE%D1%82.jpg)
The game's outstanding feature might be communicating with Kaizen. You learn a lot about these characters by speaking with Kaizen, and you influence its emotions directly yourself as you make decisions throughout the game and talk to it in different ways. Originally, it only had the Laws of Robotics built into it, and didn't have a character at all, but as time passed and more people talked to it, it took their points of view on different things and made them its own. It's been aboard the Nautilus for quite a while. Now, the story is vital is well, and Kaizen is the core of it. People are expected to understand other humans, but if you know from the beginning that you're talking to a machine, then you will naturally assume that the machine can be defective! That's why we decided to put a piece of technology at the heart of Event. The chatbot will fail eventually, and when it does, if the NPC you're talking to is supposed to be human, it takes you right out of the experience. You can make them very smart and very responsive, but currently, no technology can actually simulate human intelligence accurately. One problem is that chatbots are inherently limited. We iterated on it, and after some playtesting, it became apparent that we should just focus on our core mechanic and build everything else around that. Originally, the game was supposed to be a survival horror where you had to type messages into a computer to dodge evil aliens. It all started with the chatbot mechanic. That's why 2001 is so great! HAL was an excellent character, but it wouldn't be half as interesting without Dave prompting it to do and say things.ĭid you start with the story and work your way up from there, or did you come up with the game mechanics first and built your story around it?
![ocelot chatbot ocelot chatbot](https://www.pinclipart.com/picdir/big/557-5576210_ai-bot-clipart.png)
We tend to say that these stories are about AIs, and the AI is definitely at the heart of the story of Event, but fundamentally, it's a story about you and about other human characters. It always makes for an interesting story when it's about the human interacting with the computer as opposed to robots killing everybody for no reason. I think that the best science fiction stories featuring AIs are the ones where the AI is neither good nor evil.
![ocelot chatbot ocelot chatbot](https://covers.openlibrary.org/w/id/6796428-M.jpg)
Some (like 2001) are references for both. Some of these are story references, others are references for the environment. We're all big fans of classic sci-fi, so there's no lack of influences here: Asimov's robot stories, Ridley Scott's Alien, Solaris, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Brave New World, Neuromancer, etc. What were your main influences, both aesthetically as well as literary? We said yes, got the second half of our funding from a government grant here in France (CNC FAJV), and that's when Ocelot was officially born.Įvent looks and feels very much like classic science fiction. But we didn't completely abandon the project because we kept receiving encouraging feedback from players, industry people, festival organizers, and judges.Īnd then at some point last year we got an email from Indie Fund asking whether we were interested in finishing and releasing this game commercially. Other members of the team had also moved on. By that time we were already working in the industry at different companies: Leonard (our producer and CEO) worked at Ubisoft, Emmanuel (game designer) at Amplitude Studios, and I worked on Rime at Tequila Works. We sent it to a couple of festivals, and to our surprise, it won some awards and nominations. When we finished school, we had what we thought was a kind of cool prototype on our hands, but we didn't believe that we would do much with it. Initially, Event was our 6-month graduation project. ENJMIN is a French video game grad school. Key members of the team met at ENJMIN about four years ago. We're a small (10 people), indie studio, based in Paris, France. Who is Ocelot Society and for how long have you worked on Event? I talked to writer and designer Sergey Mohov about the creation of Kaizen. The game released two weeks ago and was pretty well-received, mainly due to the interaction with its AI, Kaizen. Event is a retrofuturistic narrative exploration game where you must build a relationship with a lonely spaceship computer to get home.