Prison Architect is coming out of early access today, with version one releasing after three years and thirty-six versions. At EGX Mark Morris, the game’s producer, and Chris Delay, the main designer and programmer, sat down with us to discuss the game, their influences and their views on Early Access.
TSA: There’s quite a lot to talk about with this game; it’s very unusual, I would say. The thing I really picked up on is that the story telling, and where there’s a lot of games like Theme Hospital or Tycoon games which don’t really have a lot of story, or if they do it’s very minimal. Here it’s incredibly dark, and the very first demo two years ago was to build the electric chair on death row?
Chris Delay: It was three years ago, actually! Yeah, that’s been there since Alpha 1, the electric chair introduction.
TSA: Yeah, that’s a very dark introduction to the game, because you have no agency in it but you’re trying to do all these tasks and so it feels very uncomfortable to play.
Chris: Yeah, it’s supposed to.
It’s a construction game in the vein of Theme Hospital or whatever, but we really didn’t like to be just like that with a prison graphics set. So we definitely wanted to make sure that in the first chapter the player is made very aware that this is a different world that they’re working in.
TSA: And obviously with the demo that you’ve got here today, it’s the level where the Mafia Don is caught in a fire, which is again, quite a dark tone to be setting. But it works really well and it makes you want to play more, because the driving force isn’t just to make the prison better, but you’ve actually got concepts and characters.
Chris: Sounds like you had a good go on it!
It’s like every film or TV show you’ve ever seen about prisons, the characters in it are always really richly defined and interesting people. There’s really dodgy characters that you get in prison shows like that. We wanted to have a whole set of characters like that, telling a story that makes the players think about the different aspects of prisons whilst also telling them how to play the game.
TSA: Although it is in some ways a tutorial in disguise, you feel that it has more of a purpose to it than just telling you how to play the game. It’s nice that you’ve managed to mix both elements together.
Chris: Yeah, and that was the thinking. I mean, the first chapter’s the most tutorial like of them all, in that it’s very specifically telling you to put this exactly here, and the we gradually just let the player do more and more themselves.
There’s five chapters in total – we’ve spun that out now into a core campaign for version one – and so by the time you’ve played all of that, as well as having a nice experience of playing five story chapters, you’ll be trained sufficiently to play the sandbox without it being too daunting at that point. So it does serve both purposes, and I think that right from the very start we wanted to have a good story in there to highlight the issues.
TSA: But, to be absolutely clear, you do still have the classic free-play sandbox mode?
Chris: Oh yes. We would be mad to take that out! [laughs]
TSA: Exactly, because it’s just interesting to see that you’ve mixed that story in so heavily, but it’s good that the sandbox is still in it, because that’s what will be hooking people in.
Chris: Well, that’s the long game, isn’t it?
We’ve seen prisons where people have taken forty hours to build a prison on Steam Workshop. There’s no way we would take that sandbox out. The story is there to bring new players into the game and to tell an interesting story, get some nice narrative in there. The sandbox is the long game that will keep you coming back.
TSA: I also wanted to talk about Early Access as a business model, because you guys, well it was three years ago now…
Mark Morris: 2012. It was September of 2012, and the last [monthly] update was number 36.
TSA: Yeah. Perhaps ‘pioneer’ isn’t the right word, but you were one of the first developers to be doing that, and it’s now very, very common now to have Early Access games, but for you guys, how do you feel about how that is growing as a business model in the industry?
Mark: I think it’s a good thing for developers when used correctly. It needs to be treated with quite a lot of respect and quite a lot of thought, and I think that ourselves, Kerbal Space Program and some of the other Early Access titles that did really well almost sparked a gold rush, you know?
I’ve sat down in rooms and listened to people talking about it as just more pre-orders. Like, “Oh, we’ll just shove it into Early Access for a bit before we do pre-orders”. It’s completely misunderstood the purpose behind Early Access and what that is about.
I’m pleased that it’s taken off, because it does make so much sense if the game is right – but not all games are amenable to Early Access and you need to think about the factors that make a game amenable and which ones don’t. It’s a good way of working and so much better than how we used to have to work in the past, before this particular channel was available to us.
The fact that more and more developers are using it is a great thing. The fact that there are a lot of failures is starting, perhaps, to upset gamers a little bit, but I don’t really mind because gamers will just start to become a little bit savvy. Just like having a kickstarter, they’ll know that if somebody is selling them snake oil and that they’re not going to get what they paid for. They’ll be burnt and they’ll realise in stepping away from it just what makes a good Early Access title.
The developers that respond to that will be able to continue to put the games out early, get the feedback early and benefit from the crowd in that mechanism. The ones that try to abuse it and suck every penny out of it will fail. So I think it’s good; it’s old news now since Steam have supported it, but it’s here to stay.
TSA: I’ve played your games all the way back to Uplink – I played Uplink when you physically sent out discs through the post…
Chris: Ah, brilliant! There’s a picture of us in the booth, putting the first Uplink discs in the envelopes, and yours might have been one of them!
TSA: I don’t think I was right at the beginning, but I was early enough that it was actually a disc. But you’ve had quite a wide style of games that you’ve made. Uplink, not in a negative way, was kind of a text adventure dressed up, and then you went to Darwinia and DEFCON which are both very different games. Now you’ve got Prison Architect, so… Do you just get bored?
Chris: [laughs] Yeah, I suppose. That’s me, really. The new ideas just come sometimes. This one came from a trip round Alcatraz and being a massive Dwarf Fortress geek. DEFCON came from watching Wargames one night. Darwinia then came from just a nostalgic love of old Amiga games.
I like doing everything different. I can remember right from the beginning of Introversion thinking I never really wanted to do the same game several times; I wanted each game to be a unique project. We sort of broke that a little bit with Multiwinia, and I note with interest that’s the only one you didn’t mention!
TSA: That’s because I kind of see Multiwinia as Darwinia but with multiplayer in it.
Chris: It’s the one that failed for us, where we missed with that one.
But there’s so many fascinating topics to make videogames about, why would I want to make the same one twice?
TSA: And what about Subversion?
Chris: That was also a very interesting project, but it never coalesced into a good game. After month and months turning into years of work, there was never a game. After quite a while we realised this, so we tried to put together a level that would be playable, and even that wasn’t any fun but had taken months to do. It was very unwieldy and very tech heavy, and very difficult to work with and build levels with, because there was so much tech everywhere.
Subversion, although it was a disaster and went very wrong, it was actually a root inspiration for Prison Architect, because there was a Subversion level where you had to bust one of your mates out of prison. We were going to model a prison and have guards roaming around, cell blocks and a yard, and the player would think of some crazy clever plan to bust his mate out of prison. It was going to be a ton of work.
TSA: I was going to say, that’s a lot of design for just one level.
Chris: Well, yeah, it’s taken us five years to build the necessary simulation level! [laughs]
But the process of actually making that level was actually quite fun, and the mixture of that, my love of Dwarf Fortress and a trip to Alcatraz all kind of coalesced and formed up. Prison Architect came from that, really.
TSA: Have you played Gunpoint? Because from what I can recall from Subversion, there’s some similar ideas in Gunpoint.
Chris: Yeah… I know Tom Francis quite well, actually. Gunpoint’s kind of like a 2D Subversion, but it’s good and a lot better actually.
TSA: I think it’s because, from what you’ve shown of Subversion, it was very complex, whereas Gunpoint is a simpler 2D.
Chris: Yeah, he went straight to the core gameplay, where it’s fun. But it’s funny, because that simulation approach to Subversion that I was trying to do, to simulate the world rather that script anything, is actually what has worked really well in Prison Architect, but it didn’t work in Subversion. It’s hard to say why, really, but because Subversion is a procedurally generated game work, in Prison Architect, as in Dwarf Fortress, we hand an empty world to the player and let the player do all the hard work!
TSA: So basically, what you’re saying is that level design is hard?
Chris: Level design is really hard, so let your player do it for you and then provide the simulation that will make your level work!
Because I had that Dwarf Fortress experience. I played it for about 20 hours and I had this massive fortress and saw off many, many attacks, to the point where after 20 hours you know your fortress very well. When it was finally raided and destroyed by the invading army, there was a last stand in the canteen, where there were crossbow bolts flying everywhere in ASCII, and there’s blood everywhere and there were creatures piling through the door in ASCII and murdering all my dwarves.
It was horrible and it was the end of my fortress, but I’d built all of that and all of that battle that happened had occurred entirely within the space that I had built myself. It was amazing, far more so than seeing a scene in a game and a pre-built level.
TSA: You’ve obviously got riots in the game and fire in the demo here today. Is it important to you that you get that potential feeling of loss in there?
Chris: Oh, absolutely, and the sandbox is full of opportunities for disaster! [laughs]
There are various failure conditions that can happen. If you have a riot that you don’t control, you get the mayor phoning you up and it’s like, “You’ve got 12 hours to put this riot down or I’m renationalising the prison and sending the National Guard in.”
That’s based on a story I heard of how they lost control of Alcatraz and they sent the US Marines in to retake it, because they were the only guys hard enough to retake this rioting prison, and you can still see grenade blasts on the walls from that. So yeah, if you don’t do it, you get the Game Over event and the guy says you’re fired, but in the background you can just see the National Guard retaking the prison one wing at a time.
You can also go bankrupt, and there’s something we put in ages ago, where if you let too many people die in one day, you got a warning that this was an absolute PR disaster for so many prisoners to have died. So you’ve got to make sure nobody dies tomorrow, or you’ll be charged with this, and if it happens, you get convicted for corporate manslaughter and you go to prison!
We put this in a while ago as like a joke ending, and you don’t really get to do anything, you just sort of arrive at your prison on a prisoner bus. Now in version one, that’s on the show floor, we’ve expanded that into a whole new game mode called escape mode, in which you have to break out of any of the prisons that you’ve made.
So any of the prisons that you’ve built in sandbox, you can load up in escape mode and you’ll arrive by bus in handcuffs, you’ll be taken to a random cell in the prison and you have to break out. You can dig tunnels, you can recruit followers and fight your way out, try to raid the armoury, try to sneak out…
TSA: I like that you get to test your own prison…
Chris: Yeah, it’s a lovely alternative game mode, and there’s like 12,000 user made maps now on the Steam Workshop and you can escape from any of them. You can escape from a random one, if you want.
TSA: I didn’t realise that was in there!
Chris: It’s in the next update as a special version one feature. We’ve been keeping it very quiet, because we knew it was going to be really interesting and it turns the whole game on its head.
Mark: There’s like three game modes now. There’s the sandbox, there’s the campaign and there’s escape mode. Everyone’s played sandbox, they know what that is, and there’s these two whole other areas that we’re connecting in.
But picking up on your question about failure conditions, one of the things that I wanted to do with Prison Architect was genuinely explore the question of incarceration and what style of prison you as an individual you might want to build; whether you want to rehabilitate everybody or whether you want to punish them quite harshly.
It’s one of these conversations that, if the everything goes quiet at the dinner table, you could throw that in the air and you know that people are going to have different views on the way things should work. The reality is that there’s always a compromise and there’s always a tradeoff.
That’s kind of where the fire and flood systems started from initially, that fires are more likely to occur where there are electrical systems that come into contact with water. So if you put in a load of extra TVs, you’re increasing the chance that there’s going to be a fire in your prison. Every click that you make, every decision that you make, either in terms of giving them access to more contraband or drugs or whatever, making it easier for them to acquire that, or just in terms of the more stuff there is in your prison, the more chance there is it will catch fire and burn down. That was something I think we’ve done well with.
Thanks to Mark and Chris for their time and insight. If you’d like to read more about the game then our review will be up later today.
