I think that pressure cooker is a good motivator for sandbox mode, but it might end up as one particular game mode. Eventually, the overcrowding will be just too great, and you lose control. And every now and then you get a random event where you get, like, 20 in one day. At the moment, Sandbox mode is that you start on a fixed plot of land which is initially large and empty, but every morning, at 8am, more prisoners are delivered. The Story mode is objective-based levels, one after another, that teach you the game and give you, hopefully, a fun experience. There's the Story side, then there's Sandbox. PCG: Are you pursuing Dwarf Fortress' powder keg gameplay? The more you build, the more unstable your holdings get?ĬD: There's two sides to Prison Architect. In Prison Architect, you've got this really weird scenario where there's base building, and there's army building, but there's no enemy army. In Dwarf Fortress, you're building an army and fending off repeated attacks. is heavily influenced by Dwarf Fortress but much more accessible, and then by constraining it to prisons – which are such a rich, thematic area anyway – it creates a really interesting world. It's not even technically a bug.ĭwarf Fortress has had the same problems for years on end, but also never managed to solve its user interface and accessibility problems. There are rules that say prisoners need to sit on a bench when eating, and there are benches in the shower block, but there's a rule that says when they enter the shower they need to take their clothes off. The bug reports that you mentioned, the guys going and eating in the shower block – those are the results of really complex systems interacting. It's the same game design we tried to use for Subversion, but ultimately failed because we couldn't find a core game that'd be fun to play on its own.īut we've applied the same thing to Prison Architect, with a detailed simulation of what's going on in your world, which results in amazing things. A better name for it would be a Dwarf Fortress Simulator, in which you just happen to be able to have fun because it's an inherently fun scenario. What I love about it the most is that it's the opposite end of the sprectrum to most game design projects. One of the hardest games in the world to play, I think. I got heavily addicted to Dwarf Fortress, and it took me a long time to get into that game. It seems to me like Prison Architect has more in common with that than with “theme” or “sim” games.Ĭhris Delay: I think that's fair. PCG: Something you mention in the Alpha video is the inspiration of Dwarf Fortress. We don't really have any idea how successful this is gonna be, so we're going to let it evolve and find the best way of doing things as we go forward. We've not really written down a formalised idea for communication. And if we think a fan's got a really good idea, then obviously just email. “We'll be available to chat for an hour, from now.” That sort of stuff. We also did an Ask Me Anything on Reddit for the last Humble Bundle, so we might do something like that. MM: We've got a forum that's up and running, we've also got a wiki, and probably the bulk of it will be going through those mechanisms. PCG: What's the structure by which fans will be able to shape development of the game? This is all “ifs”, right? But imagine it goes on sale for $10 or $20, and people chose to buy it, and it doesn't work for them, and they say, “This is bollocks. There's a quality bar we're putting in there. Another is that we're more interested in a smaller number of players that are more engaged in what we're doing, than a huge audience that want to pay less. We've got a pretty close relationship with the Humble Bundle guys, and we were talking to them a lot about how they do things. MM: There are a couple of reasons for that. PCG: Isn't $30 a little higher than normal for alpha or beta access?
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