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.
The Founders
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 project for him to apply all of his skills in this new digital frontier for entertainment.
The two had known each other for some time through the Seattle game development community and their shared interests plus complementary skillsets seemed like the ideal founder origin story. Now it was time to see the prototype.
The Proof of Concept
The build that day was super early. The environments were made out of gray boxes and one generic robot model was the stand-in for every character. But this was due to the guys focusing entirely on proving the gameplay mechanics and finding the fun (something EGG believes in strongly). They had just added several new features before we arrived and now needed twenty minutes to stabilize the build. We looked over their shoulder as they patched everything up in Unity. Tommaso got it compiling and slid the laptop in front of me. “Push spacebar to talk,” he said.
Instantly, my mind flashed back to Portal 2 released in 2011. The game’s introductory scene is a robot companion giving you a check up. He invites you to push spacebar to talk… but instead you jump (like you’d expect to do in every FPS game) and then he laughs at you and implies you have severe brain damage.
No one was joking now, these guys had built the future… I walked toward the nearest robot and got ensnared in a trap. I looked my captor in the eyes and pushed spacebar. This was my chance to negotiate my release… but as a policy I don’t typically negotiate with robo-terrorists. So I ignored every in-game hint about how to conduct diplomacy and defiantly insulted my captor’s appearance. He returned fire with a witty repartee about MY appearance (he called me a shaved monkey), told me I had failed to prove my innocence and then dropped a panel of spikes on my head and I was dead.
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