ABSOLUTE ASCENDANCY

UK Games Expo 2025

I will be attending the UK Games Expo 2025 to showcase Black Metro once more. The difference this time being that I have physical copies of the game to sell. I exhibited at the expo 3 years ago with a prototype which received great reception from those who demo’d the game. I learnt a lot from that experience and my opportunity to put those lessons into practice will be coming soon. If you’ve wanted the opportunity to see what Black Metro is all about straight from the source, this is it. 

Black Metro AI Mode

I have been hard at work developing an AI mode for Black Metro. Below is a small sneak peak at the AI mode opposition expansion that is currently in development, with a plan to release sometime in Q3 2025, initially as a PNP expansion.

“The overlord has many tricks to keep the pressure on. He always retains possession of the relic, so each round the players must be careful not to lean too heavily into any particular strategy, lest they risk detrimental impact from an event! The Astral Tower’s defence systems have been primed, turning the district into a battlefield where the overlord has stationed his forces. A new, secret upgrade has been developed, bringing forth a devastatingly powerful unit, the likes of which have never been seen before. That is but a few things to anticipate when taking on the overlord!”

From a thematic standpoint, AI plays a large role within the world of Black Metro. I interlink Black Metro’s game development with its storyline. The two drive and influence each other. So when I decided to make an AI opponent for the Black Metro board game, I also decided to tie that into the storyline’s future, where the main character faces off against the AI.

Black Metro Deep Dive

With all this talk about AI, it makes sense to utilise AI functionality to help showcase the Black Metro universe. I have been playing with Notebook LM to see whether the AI would be able to learn Black Metro and explain the game.

The first day, I did around 5 test runs, but no matter how much I tried, the AI could never get everything right. On subsequent takes, it would get one thing wrong, that it got right on a previous take and vice versa. Having said that, it still managed to get around 90% of the information correct, which is hugely impressive given the quick turnaround of around 5 minutes or so for the AI to crunch the data and spit out each deep dive discussion.

The interesting thing happened when I returned the following day and ran another simulation. It took almost 10 minutes for the conversation, but it spat out an almost 30 minute deep dive convo while retaining a similar accuracy. I get the sense that the AI had time to crunch the data behind the scenes overnight, and was therefore able to provide a more cohesive and in depth conversation on the following day.

So with all of this conversational data, I decided to spend a near full-on two days editing it all together to create what is honestly a pretty solid deep dive conversation into the Black Metro universe.

There is no chance humans could accurately go into such detail about the Black Metro universe in such a short time span. This AI functionality is extremely powerful and it is still in its beta testing stages!

Conclusion

I hope this update has sparked some excitement in you. 2025 is going to be a big year for Black Metro. Thank you for reading.

Missions Complete – Overlord Drakow signing out.