When people visit our workshop, the first thing they would see is a big box of parts labeled S13. The HipMonsters sister team use that box for all the leftover pieces when we upgrade our robots (mostly parts from Number Two and Number Three).

The idea for the box came from the online graphic novel series Gunnerkrigg Court, which is one of our all-time favorite works of fiction. This is the mysterious S13 box in Gunnerkrigg Court waiting to be assembled.

This is the one page that sent the Hip Monster’s team on a four year journey to build a robot that could carry on a conversation.

During the Covid pandemic, being able to build your own robot to play with was very appealing to the Hip Monster’s sister team. Gunnerkrigg Court and Girl Genius Online made building robots seem easy. Years later, the whole team now knows that building robots is fun, but also hard and tedious. Our robots can now talk and move on their own, but are still not as good as S13. Given we lack etheric powers (what the supernatural force is called in Gunnerkrigg court) we think we did fairly well.

It was raining over the weekend and we are tired of working on real robots (some of which now talk back at us) so decide to rebuild our first non-work robot from the scraps.

Above is our real-life replication of the assembly of S13. Here in the top left photo we have laid out all of the pieces we found in the box. In the top right photo we are assembling the legs.

The rebranded S13 almost complete.

Gunnerkrigg Count was probably the work of fiction that was the most influential in our decision to build robots. During the pandemic, the adventurous spirit of the two central characters (Annie and Kat) challenged us to push ourselves.

Our emotional AI which controls all our robots is loosely based on S13’s conversation with another robot later in the series about having an ocean of feelings to swim in. When we designed the AI we made sure that at a high level, the code held true to the ocean analogy. Our robots swim in emotions, stimuli, and personality. There is an algorithm that runs deep in the code that lets the robot adjust its behavior given what it experiences.

Here is our very much over used copy of the first volume of Gunnerkrigg Court. We are saving up to buy new hardcover additions.

we hope you find your inspiration.