Defcon

[Chris]

Our secret treasure hunt has concluded, and has revealed our first Prison Architect video. We hope you like it - please spread the word, tweet it, link it, google+ it. Most of all, enjoy it, and be sure to watch it in HD fullscreen, it makes quite a difference.





We like our dark themes here at Introversion, and this one has been particularly hard to get right. Prisons are an emotive and political issue, and if mishandled a game about prisons would probably be a very uncomfortable experience. We think we’ve got the feel about right. Many people have correctly identified our big influences for this project in Dwarf Fortress and Dungeon Keeper, or just about anything by Bullfrog. We love those games so much, and mixing their mechanics with a topic like prisons has been an incredibly satisfying creative challenge.

Back in October we worked crazily hard to produce a build of Prison Architect we were satisfied with (albeit an early version of the game), and submitted that build to the IGF for judgement. If you’re an IGF judge or jury and you haven’t yet played Prison Architect, please give it a look.

For those that didn’t realise, Introversion has been running a secret treasure hunt for the past week since the Humble Bundle launched, embedding images from Prison Architect in the Subversion tech demos and sending others out to a few select journalists. The five polaroids fit together to produce a string of characters, which leads to a hidden Prison Architect website. Well done to everyone who found the various images and in particular to the Introversion hardcore who meticulously documented every polaroid sighting in this forum thread. A special mention must go to blacknova404, who was the first to find the secret video. Well done sir - we’re sending you a full set of everything from the Introversion collection, including boxed copies of all our games, posters and soundtracks. Gratz!

Here is the full set of polaroids we used. Click the thumbnail to see them fullsize. We would like to introduce Ryan Sumo as our resident Prison Architect artist - he’s the man responsible for these incredible story polaroids, as well as all of the game graphics you see in the video above. Ryan first came to our attention because of his work in Spacechem, and we think he’s amazingly talented. With a theme like prisons we knew we needed a highly skilled artist to convey the gravity of the story and the inner thoughts of our characters, and we’ve really enjoyed working with him on this project.

The first previews of Prison Architect are starting to appear:
- Pc Gamer (UK) has an article about the game in this months mag based on playing the first level, which has been reprinted online here. Our favourite quote : “It’s probably the darkest tutorial I’ve ever played”.
- Rock Paper Shotgun have also been playing the game and have just posted an article about it here.

All of this information will be going up on our official website soon : www.prison-architect.com

We’d also like to say a big thank you to the literally hundreds of thousands of people who have just bought our games via the Humble Bundle. This has been the best promotion we’ve ever done, both in terms of the number of games sold and also the money raised. As of yesterday the Humble Bundle now includes the complete source code to all four of our games, as well as Dungeons of Dredmor, Aquaria and Crayon Physics Deluxe if you beat the average price (currently about $4). That’s on top of all four of our games and two Subversion tech demos! If you haven’t bought this yet please consider donating - you can pay whatever you like and time is running out. One third of your money goes to some very worthy charities and you’ll be supporting Introversion as we continue to develop our next games.

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Last edited by Chris on Tue Dec 06, 2011 3:22 pm; edited 1 time in total

[ynbniar]

Good trailer, edgy soundtrack is terrific.

Launch party at Alcatraz

[Seitaro]

Hah, Dungeon Keeper. I remember trying to get that to work online in Windows XP. I never did get to play it. Hopefully this will be deliciously similar.

[zach]

Yes.

Yes, please.

[Rekka]

I was a bit skeptical when you first annouced it but now, reading these 2 previews, seeing this video and your influences, I must admit I am eagerly waiting for more informations about Prison Architect.

[RabidZombie]

Still curious about the other 4 Polaroids. ;

[Weatherproof]

Seems like you're keeping the music style from a previous blog post Will the music still by dynamic or have you scrapped that tool as well

[Gemberkoekje]

zach wrote:

Yes. Yes, please.

Quoted for truth.

AWESOME!!!

[Xocrates]

RabidZombie wrote:

Still curious about the other 4 Polaroids. ;

Same.

Red herrings?

[screeg]

Amazing! I hope you realize some of the potential in individual prisoner stories to take this beyond simple prison management. In addition to some particularly interesting prisoners with scripted stories, I'd love to see a procedurally generated file on every inmate, just basically a rap sheet, level of education, potential for rehabilitation, violence, etc. Then the player could have a more substantial goal: to rehabilitate inmates for release, or to keep them oppressed so you can keep earning money for their keep. Giving each prisoner a name and some statistics could make this an amazing experience.

[jelco]

It was quite amusing watching people solve the puzzle, it's a nice little exercise you set up for the crowd. Tutorial looks nice, although to be honest it's not really anything new since the art style was already displayed in some previewed screenshots. I'm keeping my eyes peeled for the next bone you throw us.

Jelco

[Feud]

I'm interested in the Dwarf Fortress influences, I remember it being mentioned earlier and I'm excited to see how that works.

[JJJ]

Excited about this, especially with the DF influences.

Ecstatic about getting my hands on the city generator tech demo and game source code though! Can we now have the tech demo source code please?

[MikeTheWookiee]

Excited for this game, albeit a little worried about it being a little too close to actual work for me. As the only person on here who hasn't played dwarf fortress I can only hope that it's a good thing.

[Wasgood]

I didn't have high hopes for this before. But after reading that RPS article I do. When's beta testing start /keen