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Prison Architect Alpha9 released
Posted by Chris
on Wed Apr 24, 2013 11:05 am |
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The ninth installment of the Prison Architect Alpha has today been released, and it’s a big one. We’ve tackled some of the big issues that have been on our list for a very long time - prisoner employment, laundry services, family visitation, workshops, and lots more.
You can download the latest version from our website here: (Steam will automatically update)
http://www.prison-architect.com/builds.html
Here is our Alpha9 video. Apologies for my distorted voice, I had the levels on my mic set completely wrongly this time around.
Central to the new version is the concept of Prisoner Employment, and we’ve been planning this feature for a long time. Prisoners can now perform a variety of jobs around the prison, saving you money on staff and raising money for you by selling goods manufactured by your work force. Prisoners can work in the kitchen, they can clean the prison, and they can work in the laundry and the workshop, both of which are new in Alpha9.
We have a brand new laundry system, which is entirely prisoner run. Clean uniforms will be distributed around your prison in laundry baskets, and prisoners will change into these after they’ve had their shower. Dirty uniforms will be collected up in laundry baskets and brought back to the laundrette where they are washed. It can take quite a long time to cycle all the laundry in your prison - expect it to take several days to cycle everyone in large prisons.
We also have workshops. These rooms are used to produce trinkets which you can sell for profit - currently car license plates, which the prisoners make out of sheet metal with a couple of new bench tools. It’s up to you if you wish to exploit your prisoners for cheap labour - it will certainly help with the cashflow, and your prisoners will be learning new skills at the same time. (Actually nobody learns anything in alpha9, but they will in a future update)
Prison labour is free right now, but eventually (in a future alpha) you will pay your prisoners a small wage, which they will be able to use to buy essential supplies from a prison shop. And all of these rooms - the kitchen, the cleaning cupboard, the laundrette and the workshop, will bring their own particular dangers to the prison if you chose to use them.
If that wasn’t enough, visitation has also been added in alpha9. Most prisoners now have family, and those family will want to come and visit from time to time. (Note: All bios will be re-generated because of this). Click on any prisoner to see his known family members listed in his rap sheet. Build a visitation room and those family members will come to see their loved one in jail, which makes everyone a little bit happier. However you should enjoy the universal goodness of visitation while it lasts, because in a future alpha it will become a major source of smuggled contraband.
There’s also a number of visual changes: Most noticeably, the main toolbar icons have all been replaced with cleaner, higher resolution versions. You should also notice the grime and dirt and overgrown grass and pathways around your prison look much better (so to speak) - we used to rely on a single crack graphic for everything! It’s now much more obvious when your prison needs cleaning and gardening, and much more satisfying to watch your janitors and gardeners doing that. And of course you can get your prisoners to do most of the cleaning now anyway, which gets the job done much quicker.
This was a major update, adding a load of new “mid game” content to the game. We’ve got big plans for alpha10 as well, which should be another big one. In the mean time, enjoy the latest version.
Full change list
| Code: |
= Employment
Prisoners can now perform different jobs during a new 'Work' regime activity
Create employment opportunities with the new 'Jobs' button in the Deployment screen
Prisoners not employed during the 'Work' regime treat it as 'Free Time'
Currently available prisoner jobs : Laundry, Cooking, Cleaning, Workshop
Note: The rooms must be accessable, ie Prisoners can't cook if the kitchen is Staff Only
Note: Eventually you will pick who can work, but for now every prisoner is permitted to work
= Laundry
New rooms and objects have been added to support creation of a Laundry service within your prison
Clean prisoner uniforms are distributed around the prison in Laundry Baskets
Dirty uniforms are collected up and brought back to the Laundry room, where they are washed in machines
Prisoners now get undressed in their cells before Shower Time, and return to their cell after to re-dress
They will change into a clean uniform if one is available, leaving behind their dirty uniform for laundry.
Prisoners now have a 'Clothing' need that reflects how clean their clothes are
Note: Clean prison uniforms will be stored on any table space, or on the floor, in the Laundry
= Workshops
You can now create workshops and use them to convert cheap raw materials into trinkets of value
Raw sheet metal will be dropped off in your workshops
Your Prisoners will use the circular saw and hydraulic press to manufacture car number plates
These will be sold at midnight for a profit
Note: Sheet metal and License plates will be stored on the floor in the workshop.
Build tables if you prefer your rooms to be tidy
= Families and Visitation
All Prisoners now have various family members, listed in their Rap Sheet. Some prisoners have no family.
Family members will want to visit an inmate from time to time
You can now create a visitation room, and visitors will start to arrive every day (8am - 8pm)
Prisoners can also take visits from their lawyer
Note: All bios from old save games will be re-generated to support this
= Cleaning
- Prisoners can now help out with the cleaning of your prison
- New room : Cleaning Cupboard. This is required to assign Prisoners to the cleaning job.
- Janitors and Prisoners will now clean inside individual jail cells, so long as the cell is open to them
- The rendering of decay has been improved - eg muddy floors, dirty shower cubicles, overgrown pathways etc
- Surfaces will now Decay 50% slower than before
- Food Ingredients will now be stored on the kitchen floor if there is no available fridge space
- Older prisoners now have older faces, and are less likely to be incarcerated for certain crimes like Joyriding etc
- Fences now visually join onto walls better
- Electrical cable and water pipes now come in stacks to prevent flooding your deliveries area
- Fixed: Workshops no longer award you money per square.
- Fixed: The deployment system would not always update correctly, leading to a single grey sector
- Fixed: Crash bug in planning mode when drawing off the edge of the map
- Fixed: Dead staff members will no longer be paid a daily wage
- Fixed: The game would not render correctly on Windows Vista or higher when non-standard desktop DPI settings were used
- Fixed: Prisoners under lockdown in their cells would sometimes leave their cell to go to lunch/yard etc,
only to be chased down immediately by guards and returned
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Prison Architect alpha8 - ON STEAM
Posted by Chris
on Wed Mar 20, 2013 5:21 pm |
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Prison Architect is now available on Steam! As part of Valve’s brand new “Early Access” alpha scheme, Prison Architect and a handful of other great games currently in development can now be purchased and played via Steam. We think this makes a ton of sense - paid alpha is a fantastic business model for small indie game developers, but until now we had to completely finish the game before Steam would consider listing it. This makes sense for the big commercial games, but Indies can be in alpha for years - part of what makes indie games so exciting is the open development process with tons of major updates over a long period of time. Here at Introversion we are delighted to see Valve opening up the Steam service to Indies that are playing that game. Three cheers from Introversion!
Our promise: Everyone who has ever bought Prison Architect from us and everyone who buys from our website in future will also get the game on Steam. If you buy the game on Steam you get all the same access to our development community - the private forums, the wiki, and the bug database. Steam customers can even download the standalone builds from our website if they want. A single purchase anywhere gets you Windows, Mac OSX and (eventually) Linux versions (Steam AND standalone), you can install on as many computers as you like, and we will NEVER require you to be online to play. In the wake of recent outrageous mistreatment at the hands of some big publishers who really should know better, we think it’s important to state where we stand on that. You get everything, on every platform, whenever you want it.
Existing customers: To access your free Steam Product key, you need to find your original purchase receipt we emailed to you when you bought the game. Click on the URL in that email and you’ll find your file downloads, and your Steam Product key will be in there. Then in Steam go to “Games” and “Activate a Product on Steam”. If you have any problems with this at all please email support@introversion.co.uk and we will do our best to sort it for you.
Steam users: To activate your community account, first ensure you have an Introversion forum acccount, then grab the key you see in Steam on startup and paste it in on our registration page here:
www.prison-architect.com/register
To coincide with all this excitement, today we launched the eighth update to our Prison Architect alpha.
Download it from our website: www.prison-architect.com/builds.html
(Use your forum username and password to access the builds page)
Here is our video demonstrating the changes:
We knew this alpha would be the first version that made it onto Steam, so that changed our usual process a little bit. Specifically we knew we were likely to see a large number of new players who had never seen Prison Architect before, and we wanted them to have a decent first experience. Pretty quickly we decided to hold back on any game breaking new changes that would heavily unbalance the game or confuse brand new players, and instead to focus on improving almost every system we already have. If you take a look at the change list below, you’ll find very few new features, but an incredibly long list of improvements.
We did pay a lot of attention to the feedback on the new door system that requires Guards to unlock every door. In truth we knew that alpha7 would be harder to play than any other version because of this change, but this is part of our deliberate process - we want to see how players respond to having the apple cart overturned, so to speak. Requiring a guard to open every door forces everyone to rethink their prisons on a fundamental level. We reserve the right to break everything for everyone every now and then! However in alpha8 we’ve made some changes that make the door system much more manageable.
We’ve introduced a new Staff Door which can be unlocked by any staff member or guard, reducing the amount of time required for guards to escort chefs and workmen around the place. However these doors are weak compared to jail doors - there is always a security trade off, and you shouldn’t be surprised if a gang of prisoners decide to bust out of your prison through your new back door logistics tunnel. You can also set any door to be “Locked Open”, which holds it open at all times except during lockdown - very useful as a high security emergency door which will slam shut at the click of a button, but otherwise stay out of the way. And because your workmen often get locked inside a new building whilst it is under construction you can now set entire sectors to be unlocked while your men work. Just make sure you remember to lock it up before the prisoners arrive.
There’s quite a raft of AI improvements that should make the game run much better, along with a new planning mode to help with designing new buildings to be the correct size before you start building. There’s a ton of bug fixes, and the dreaded sight of a guard trapped forever in a medical bed or a prisoner serving his term in a solitary confinement cell should be a thing of the past.
Here is our full change list:
| Code: |
= Steam integration
Prison Architect is now available from Steam (Pc & Mac)
Existing customers : You have been gifted a complimentary Steam Key!
Open your purchase receipt email then click on the URL and you'll find your steam product key
Use this key to activate your copy of Prison Architect for Steam
= New Planning Mode
Accessable from the main toolbar, use this to plan your upcoming buildings and room layouts
You can draw in the usual way with the left mouse and clear with the right mouse
Plans are automatically cleared once actually built by workers
= Door Lock system changes
- New object: 'Staff Door', which is a locked door that can be opened by any guard OR staff member
Note: Prisoners treat this as a normal door, requiring Guards to unlock in the usual way
(Staff never unlock doors for prisoners - it's not in their job description, and too dangerous)
(Want a Staff-ONLY door? Set the Sector type to be Staff Only in Deployment)
- Doors have two new special modes: Locked Shut or Locked Open. Click on a door to set this.
Locked Shut prevents anyone using the door at any time.
Locked Open keeps the door open at all times, EXCEPT during a lockdown when it slams shut
- There is a new sector setting called "Unlocked", which keeps all doors within the sector open
This is useful during construction of a building, or during a fire evacuation
- Doors that are blocked when closing will no longer push the blocking object aside.
They won't close fully until unblocked.
- Guards will now stick to their assigned patrols and sectors, only doing jobs within their sector
This makes them much more responsive at opening doors within / bordering their sector
- Fixed: Guards will no longer be called upon to unlock wooden office doors
= AI & Behaviour Improvements
- During Shower / Yard / Meal times, Prisoners will first go to the nearest room of that type,
then will only use the facilities within that room.
This stops prisoners in one shower running to another shower on the other side of the map
- Facilities within a Holding Cell may now only be used by prisoners living in that holding cell
- Prisoners will no longer nap during the day, instead preferring to sleep for longer at night
(Requires Sleep regime)
- Workers/Chefs/Janitors etc will now attempt jobs even if there is mild danger nearby,
but will still refuse if the area is very dangerous
Guards will no longer refuse any job because it is too dangerous. They are paid to be brave!
Jobs which are paused due to danger will be restarted quicker once the danger has passed
- Dead Firemen will now be taken to the morgue by Guards (rather than being left to rot),
and fire trucks will leave without them
- Guards that are not assigned anywhere will try to hang out somewhere useful
- Fixed: Chefs will no longer bin all prepared food during Bang Up / Lockdown
= Interface improvements
- The top toolbar now displays the number of available guards, prisoners, and cctv cameras when you have them
- The Lockdown and Bangup buttons have been moved onto the main toolbar (placeholder graphics)
- Tooltips have been added to many items in the main toolbars
- The prisoner Rap sheet now displays any recent misconduct they were involved in
- The graphics options screen now asks you to confirm a new resolution is acceptable, or reverts after 15 seconds
- The hunt for Stuck Entities
- Fixed: Prisoners could become trapped in Solitary Confinement forever after saving and reloading
- Fixed: All entities could become trapped in a Medical Bed
- The maximum number of prisoners you can receive in a day is now based on your prison size:
Small = 16, Medium = 24, Large = 32. Previously it was 24 for all prisons
- New command line option:
-safemode : Runs at 1024x768, windowed, with shaders disabled, and a blank new map
(Steam users can run this directly from steam by selecting "Launch in SAFE MODE")
- Prisoners minor injuries will now heal while they sleep overnight
- Prisoners misconduct is now saved correctly in save games
- Administrators now have a short view range (3 squares)
- Fixed: The hardware compatability survey will no longer popup when playing the Introduction level
- Fixed: Entity animations glitched for Eating, Cooking, Unlocking doors, Building etc
- Fixed: You can now construct (free) fences even when your bank balance is negative
- Fixed: You can now construct / place objects that you have in stock, even when your bank balance is negative
- Fixed: You can no longer sack Firemen
- Fixed: Crash bug caused by closing the prison to any category at the exact same moment the first prisoners arrive
- Fixed: Bug that caused the game to crash when loading partially corrupted save games
- Fixed: Prisoners sprites sometimes became corrupted whilst sleeping
- Fixed: Prisoners who trip the metal detectors whilst being escorted by a Guard will now be searched
- Fixed: Placing pipes will no longer be blocked by walls or sprinklers in progress
- Fixed: In the tutorial, Edwards new cell will never be used by another prisoner
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Prison Architect Alpha 7 RELEASED
Posted by Chris
on Thu Feb 21, 2013 1:33 pm |
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Breaking news: Starting with Alpha 8, Prison Architect will be a PS4 platform exclusive!
Just kidding. What other platform could have supported something like our Prison Architect Alpha but the mighty PC? The PC is the ultimate open platform, both on the game development side AND the business side - we decide when we are ready to release our game to you guys, and we set the business model that best suits our alpha needs. As of last week, thirty thousand of you agreed with our approach and jumped on board with us. We love the process of delivering new updates to you guys and your feedback and your youtube videos inspire us to work harder. Prison Architect will be a better game because of our alpha process, and opening it up to the community in this way could only ever happen on the PC.
Here’s our Alpha7 video.
Download it straight from our website : www.prison-architect.com/builds.html
Use your forum username and password to access the builds.
You can also get the latest version from the download url in your email purchase receipt.
In alpha 7 we’ve started making good on the some of the promises we made in the higher level tiers to include face in the game and name in the game entries. This is our way of giving back to those customers who are in a position to help at those higher different levels - you’ve been incredibly generous to us. You’ll find a new option in the Main Menu to list all the current Names in the game and Faces in the game, and you can transfer any of them into your prison straight away. In addition, about one third of all randomly generated prisoners will now take their name and bio from this database, meaning our prisons just became a little bit more colourful ; )
If you’ve bought the game and fancy including your own name and bio in our database, then we have a special offer for you. For the next two weeks you can upgrade your purchase for just an extra $10 - half what the upgrade would usually cost.
(Note: This upgrade does not include the game itself - you are purchasing your name and bio in our game database)
Click here to upgrade to the Name in the game.
Moving on, we’ve made a fairly massive change to the game AI rules. From this point forward, only guards can open locked doors. Previously we had a slightly weird situation where prisoners and staff could simply glide through any locked door, so long as they weren’t misbehaving. Jail doors ended up looking like supermarket doors, sliding open willingly. With this new change, your guards will be kept very busy indeed running around and unlocking doors to let prisoners and staff through. You will need to ensure you have enough guards distributed around your jail through the deployment system, otherwise people will end up waiting by locked doors for hours and will fail to achieve their needs or assigned jobs. You will need to think carefully when securing a building with several heavy doors, because this will tie up your guards for a lot of their day. This is another massive change to the guts of the game, and makes the prisons feel quite different.
We’ve also introduced two new Emergencies buttons. “Lockdown” immediately closes and locks all jail doors, sealing everyone wherever they happen to be. This is extremely useful during an attempted escape attempt. Long term fans of Prison Architect will no doubt have experienced the frustration of a single janitor opening the front gates just as a bunch of armed / escaping prisoners run through. This will help with that.
The other emergency button - “Bang Up” - instructs all prisoners to return to their cells. This is useful for crowd control when a fight breaks out. We may consider moving these two new alarm buttons to the main toolbar at some point.
And finally, long overdue, you’ll see a new Options menu in the Main Menu. From here you can change the resolution, fullscreen/windowed etc. You can also press F11 at any time to toggle fullscreen. It’s hard to believe we got by for so long without these basic options! Lucky customers with a shiny new Retina Mac can pick the highest resolution from the list (2560x1600 on a 13” screen!) and enjoy Prison Architect with a level of detail currently unsurpassed.
We hope you enjoy the game.
Here is the full change list:
| Code: |
= Name-in-the-game / Face-in-the-game
The community database of personalised Names and Faces has been imported into the game
You can view the full database from the main menu option "Names in the game"
Around 30% of all randomly generated prisoners will now include a custom name and bio taken from this database
You can manually transfer any prisoner from this list into your jail - they will arrive in the 8am delivery
= Only Guards can open doors
All locked doors must now be opened by Guards using their keys. Prisoners and staff must wait to be let in.
The exception is the doors on each jail Cell, which open automatically when the prisoner should be let out
Office doors are never locked - anyone can pass through at any time
You can right click on any door to open it manually
Doors can be blocked open but will gradually push blocking objects aside until they close
= Alarm buttons
Under 'Emergencies' there are two new "alarm" buttons:
LOCKDOWN immediately closes and locks all the doors in the prison
Guards will not open doors for anyone. However they will unlock doors on their way if you move them somewhere
BANGUP instructs all prisoners to return immediately to their cell (confusingly, this was called Lockdown in alpha6)
Prisoners will obviously ignore this alarm if they are misbehaving
= Game Options menu
From the main menu you can now access an 'Options' menu to control the application settings
Under GRAPHICS You can control the screen resolution, fullscreen/windowed setting and filtering mode
- Multisampling uses fullscreen anti-aliasing (4xMSAA) to improve the sprite render quality
- Supersampling renders everything at double resolution then downscales to your screen
Both improve the game visuals at the cost of reduced performance
There are also options for Sound, Game etc
- You can now press F11 at any time to toggle fullscreen
- You can press ctrl-p at any time to save a screenshot
- The game will no longer crash on launch if your previous save game was corrupted.
We have disabled autoload of previous saved games for now, until we can fix some loading issues.
(The game now launches with a new empty sandbox)
- Prisoners can now be re-categorised (Max/normal/Min) from their rap sheet
- All research times have been halved
- Fixed: Building lots of fences whilst paused caused endless delivery of empty boxes
- Fixed: Prisoners were no longer bothering to run around the yard whilst exercising
- Fixed: The main build toolbar was sometimes scaled wrongly at certain resolutions,
leading to an annoying scrollbar in the lists of objects/rooms etc
- Performance improvements:
Fixed a major performance bug in the renderer, causing occasional extreme frame lag
Many parts of the render system have been optimised - some visual glitches may occur in entity animations
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