Algo Bot

Description

Algo Bot is a puzzle game which challenges players to control the movements of a lowly maintenance droid aboard the pan-galactic colonization ship Europa. Over 46 levels, players must devise algorithms to carefully control Algo Bot’s path, borrowing concepts from the programming world - including variables and subroutines.

Deep inside the Europa, a pan-galactic colonization ship, the sleeping crew dreams about their new life on the far side of the galaxy.

But there can be no rest for Algo Bot, a service droid working on the junk deck. When a routine recycling mission with cantankerous line manager PAL goes horribly wrong, crisis strikes at the very heart of the Europa.

Unless PAL and Algo Bot can restore the Europa's systems and recover the shipboard AI quickly, there'll be no waking up for anyone.

As the player, you will take the role of the operator and use a visual programming language to issue a sequence of commands to Algo Bot. Will you manage to solve all the puzzles?

History

2013, Algo Bot is born from a collaboration between our studio and a training center in Belgium, Technobel. The goal of the project was to create a game that helped people grasp the essential skills of logic that the programming craft requires. You are not just learning to code, you play with its concepts while learning mathematical and computational thinking. That initial version has been played by ~3000 students. However that version was pretty verbose, had aging graphics and the UI had huge ergonomic problems. The story was non-existent and there was no drive for the player to continue playing...

In 2014, we decided to work on a “game” version of Algo Bot featuring an interesting story, better controls, better UI, streamlined learning, better difficulty curve and full 3D graphics. We launched a successful greenlight campaign on Steam and the game was greenlit in March 2014. In July 2014, we decided to launch a Kickstarter campaign to fund the project which failed, following that failure we put the project on hold for more than 2 years.

In 2016, following the success of Epistory, we decided to reboot the project and make it an internal "wow" project worth shipping on the Steam store following our project development philosophy: smart with soul.

Features

• Bittersweet story with two lovable heroes
• Over 40 programming puzzles set in 5 unique environments to explore
• Easy to get for beginners and hard enough for puzzle experts
• Play with various programming concepts (yes it’s cool)
• Backtrack to already cleared levels to optimize solutions
• Stunning 3D graphics
• The British Touch: once again, we’ve teamed up with Epistory’s writer, Joseph J Clark, to give Algo Bot a light storyline with a touch of British humor
• Sequential command lines with limited syntax
• Planning a program (mentally run code and debug it)
• Variables management
• Functions
• Recursive Functions
• Debugging
• Optimization strategies