Sandbox idea

[christopher1006]

Somewhat of a random idea but I figured it's worth posting just to see what people may think about it. There was a game called The Outfit, a ww2 squad based shooter. Anyway the part that I think would be interesting to see in PA was the fact that in the game there were medals you could earn for doing certain optional objectives. When you got certain amounts of medals you got fun little cheats such as unlimited ammo or unlimited field resources to call in whatever you want. Something that would be interesting would be if you did certain things in game you could gain plaques, the name of it doesn't particularly matter, and with these plaques you could unlock things such as disasters like being able to select a prisoner or prisoners in a click and drag box to make them riot or be able to drop guns in the yard to see how your prisoners react or making your doctors be able to heal anyone within 20 tiles instantly without even having to go to them or. . .

As you can see there's plenty that could be used and it'd add a bit of incentive to experiment with your prisons to get those plaques so you can turn on the cheat to make your guards have twice as much health on your maximum security prison. Though one of the things that was also fun about the cheat system was that you couldn't use cheats to get cheats, for example if you have guards with twice the health then you can't get any more plaques until you turn that cheat off. In fact you could use this to unlock parts of what is defined as a sandbox mode. So with 5 achievements you can unlock unlimited money, the most obvious thing you would expect in a sandbox. I'm not going to spend an hour thinking of all of the requirements and rewards for x amount of plaques but I will give some examples of what I think requirements should be for some plaques. I'll try to list them in varying difficulty.

-Iron curtain: Build 500 tiles of concrete walls.
-Guardian angel: Have your doctors heal a prisoner from 10hp to full health (I don't know what the actual scale of HP is so I'm just using a 0-100 scale.)
-Small scale operations-Have 50 prisoners living in separate cells for 1 in game week.
-Hammer time: Build $1,000,000 worth of foundations.
-Police brutality: Your guards lower a prisoners health to below 40hp
-Grimm Reaper: 100 prisoners die due to execution
-Won't see you later!: Rehabilitate 100 prisoners
-Welcome to Shawshank: Put a prisoner in to solitary within the first 24 hours of him arriving.

[MAdMaN]

This is actually a really good idea.

[drakhri]

Could also use the same system in regular play by changing the reward to some amount of money or points ect.

[christopher1006]

Could also use the same system in regular play by changing the reward to some amount of money or points ect.

As in "Achievement completed- "Welcome to Shawshank" Plaque awarded +$10,000"?

[paktsardines]

Gawd, sounds perilously close to 'achievements'.

[Novbert]

I'm against it for the time being. Though an achivement system can be a nice addition on a finished game, considering that PA is still in Alpha, the developers should focus on implementing elements which actually enhance gameplay and leave the bells and whistles for later releases.

[christopher1006]

Gawd, sounds perilously close to 'achievements'.

They are achievements, the idea for them was that they'd be useful for something rather than a worthless icon that you got for doing X.

I'm against it for the time being. Though an achivement system can be a nice addition on a finished game, considering that PA is still in Alpha, the developers should focus on implementing elements which actually enhance gameplay and leave the bells and whistles for later releases.

I didn't bother mentioning I expected it to be implemented in mid-late Beta as I thought that'd be commonly understood by all.

[wildbillhdmax01]

I like this Idea. It's simple and fun. Especially the Shawshank Redemption reference. It could also be tied to Achievements too. They should also have lots of pop culture and game references.