Twitter Left 4 Dead

Okay okay so Twitter isn’t dead or even dying; even though some wish it was, in fact it seems to be steamrolling ahead stronger than usual even it still isn’t making any money. One of the more endearing features of the service however is its open API that lets people do all kinds of cool; and silly, things with the service.

Such is the case of Tom over at the Infovore blog who has let us in on a little bit of fun he’s been having with Twitter and some of the characters from one of his favourite games of this year – Left4Dead. You see tom has this thing for bots and lately he directed that interest towards creating some miscellaneous ones for Twitter. His latest creations are the four characters from the game – @louis_l4d, @zoey_l4d, @bill_l4d and @francis_l4d.

So what do these bots do? Well this is how tom describes it

They run a scenario, they bump into boss zombies, they find stuff, they get hurt (and help each other), they get scared (and reassure each other). At the moment, there are some dialogue overlaps; my main work at the moment is adding more unique dialogue for each bot. Bill is sounding pretty good, but the rest of them need work. It takes about 2-3 hours for them to run a scenario, and it’s usually fun to watch. (And, as you can see, it makes sense to follow all four of them).

apparently he has constructed the whole Left4Dead bot structure in such a way that he will be to easily add more conversation as well as any new characters that come along. He does say in his post that he will be running the bots on a reasonably regular basis so if this sort a thing catches your fancy grab a follow of the characters and have some fun.