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Prison Architect

Started by slink, July 03, 2014, 12:17:25 PM

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slink

Anyone else here playing this game?  I've been addicted to it these past few days.

solarscreen

Tell us about it! Stir up some interest by telling us what you like about it.

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slink

It's an alpha with no apparent ability to take screenshots, so any telling would have to be illustrated with my digital camera.

I am reminded of Dwarf Fortress, in a vague sort of way.  The goal is to shoehorn in as many little bedrooms as possible without having the population go into a tantrum spiral.  A secondary goal could be to minimize re-offenders.  *grin*  The save file is in text, so one can alter it easily, if somewhat experimentally since there is no documentation.  I have been able to remove some glitches that way, which were probably caused be reloading from autosaves done in the middle of a mouse action.

The pleasure of reading the biographies of the offenders incarcerated in your prison is somewhat reduced by the lack of quality control.  Apparently they partially funded the development by selling the rights to name and define prisoners.  Some of the custom offenders sound like they were defined by brain-damaged 12-year-olds.  There is no way to remove these from the game because these added definitions are compiled in with the officially designed portion of the game data.  This is my only complaint about the game in its current alpha state.

Although they are essentially requiring a donation for the use of the alpha, with your donation you get access to future versions so that is not so bad.  Tarn Adams gets more money every year from me in voluntary donations, but I suppose I am not the usual sort of player.  Also, Prison Architect has not got the cult following that Dwarf Fortress has.

It's a nice little game, but without enough depth at this point to keep my attention for more than a couple of weeks.  I've finally gotten housing for 400 prisoners on the original land plot, with sufficient amenities for at least 317 prisoners, and then I moved back to Banished for the Vegetarian Challenge.  After that was submitted, I have been playing Arena in between periods of painting walls and gardening (along with normal chores).

Dwarf Fortress has a new version that just came out so that will also be distracting me as the new tools are updated.