I spent a lot longer tinkering with my prison layout than playing the mission. And I'd found that laying out that map was actually quite a lot of fun. However we did have a map editor for Subversion, and I'd been working on producing a plausible prison layout for the mission. After all the work required to do a prison properly, most players would probably just blow a hole in the wall with explosives and headshot the guards anyway.
It's a nice idea in principle, but in reality that kind of unbounded thinking is what ended Subversion. The core idea had been to simulate a prison in a lot of detail, then just let the player figure out how to bust his teammate out by exploiting whatever loopholes in the security setup he could find. It was far too ambitious for its own good, much like most of Subversion. This mission had loads of specialist code for simulating the inner workings of prisons, and the behaviours of guards and prisoners. PC Gamer: In the post announcing the shift from Subversion to Prison Architect, you mentioned that you "could see how much of the tech that we'd designed for Subversion was directly applicable." Can you talk about any themes or technology that will be making the jump from Subversion into Prison Architect?Ĭhris Delay: There was an unfinished mission in Subversion where you had to bust a team member out from a maximum security prison. We should have seen the danger signs with that earlier I think. We thought it would be enough to have a massively interactive world – just think of the possibilities! So we just kept throwing more tech at the problem, developing newer and more complex simulations, hoping an emergent game would be waiting for us at the end.
With Subversion we had this idea that if we just developed an incredible simulation of a procedurally generated world, that a game would emerge from it. PC Gamer: What lessons have you learned from your work on Subversion that you'll carry through to work on Prison Architect and future projects?Ĭhris Delay: Probably the biggest lesson is to get to the core game as quickly as possible, whatever the cost.
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