Robotopia

Robotopia is a first-person talking simulator set in a theme park built by Apotheo Systems, the industry leader in AI-powered consumer robots, to show off the wonders of a world run by machines. Players wake from cryogenic sleep in a garbage heap beneath the park with no memory of who they are or how they got there. The humans are gone, the robots are still on duty, and their protocols have started to drift.

There is no scripted dialogue in Robotopia. Every character is powered by a language model, responding in character and in context and advancing a scenario as the player talks. The world exists to make that work: a park full of robots with jobs to do gives each character a role to stay in, and the drift gives them license to leave it. What would be a bug in a scripted game is the premise here.

Players explore the park, question its inhabitants, and recover artifacts of the past, including audio logs of the humans who used to run it, to piece together what happened and who they were before they went under. A mysterious voice guides them. Whether it should be trusted is part of the game.

As Narrative Director I created the world and core story, including the identity of the player and the villain, and I own the game’s lore. I work with the design team to develop robot scenarios and build the dozens of robot characters that populate the park, and I draft the audio logs that carry the story of the vanished humans. The game is in early alpha with a community of 15k on Discord, and the same character system now powers a platform where players draft levels of their own.