Robotopia: A 3D, first-person, talking simulator

Summary

Tomato Cake Inc., founded by Tommaso Checchi and Coleman Andersen, has just revealed their 3D talking simulator: Robotopia. It uses LLM-powered NPC’s to create hilarious and emergent fun that wasn’t previously possible in video games. The founders have just come out of stealth after over a year of hard work. They were quietly showcasing their EGG-funded prototype at DICE last year, earning multiple inbound offers. Then at GDC, they had a bunch of meetings, were asked to give a tech talk at OpenAI and just days after presenting at EGG’s First Demo Day, they closed a deal on favorable terms and went right back to development. Now after a lot of hard work, they have publicly revealed the trailer below.At the end of 2023 my wife and I met Tommaso and Coleman through mutual friends (shout outs to David Hodge and Ian Glow). Robotopia’s rumored world of talking robots sounded intriguing but we knew we’d have to see a demo live. There were a growing number of LLM-powered NPC pitches popping up and nearly all of them were either too ambitious to be feasible or utter slop. No one seemed to be thoughtfully using the technology in a way that would actually resonate with gamers.We flew to Seattle to meet the founders and learned that Tommaso had ported Minecraft to mobile for Mojang while also building their UGC marketplace (Tommaso and I also realized we had met once before in 2015 when Mojang hosted Humble Bundle in Stockholm for lunch after our Mojam co-promotion). He had more recently gone on to make VR gaming content at Meta and then engineered simulations for testing AI models at a friend’s startup. But after many years working for others he had decided it was time to start his own studio.Coleman had gone to NYU Tisch and studied procedural story telling. His screenplays participated in oscar-qualifying film festivals. He had already taught himself to code and was taking charge of player experience and dynamic narrative construction in the game. Robotopia was the perfect p...