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.
Follow us to stay up to date:
Subscribe to our Blog
Subscribe to our Youtube channel
Follow us on Twitter
Hopefully this will be deliciously similar.
Will the music still by dynamic or have you scrapped that tool as well 
