Hey inmates,
Today's devblog, we will talk further about what inspired our game and how we challenge ourselves with the idea of creating a survival game in a place as confined and strict as a prison.
Why a prison survival game?
We wanted to make a space prison game from the start. We didn’t have a precise genre specified at the beginning, but survival mechanics made a lot of sense in a place like this.
We needed to give them a twist though as the situation of the player character is far different than in most survival games. You are not stranded on an island/ocean/planet/forest and your main threats don’t come from the environment, flora and fauna. On the contrary, you are surrounded by other people (and aliens)... however they are the main threat here. We needed to turn the systems so they reflect this social survival aspect through the Relations with other inmates, the gang hierarchy, doing favors, gifts and so on...
Inspirations
We were of course analyzing the rich history of movies, series and games about prisons, but our main inspirations were Guardians of the Galaxy, especially the scene in prison, and Orange is the New Black. This series showed us how perspective changes when your freedom is limited and how many amazing stories can be told in a lockdown.
One of the major difficulty was to create a place where players were to be limited, but at the same time have an agency of their lives in prison. This is a challenge for most games – to make the repeatable game loop entertaining. We might have had an edge on this one as if anyone felt that the days in prison are getting a bit repetitive, they sometimes explained it to themselves that it’s how it goes down in prison.
Yet, there is a lot of unique content in the game with 18 crafted and interesting gang inmates, each with an original story that you can learn by doing their individual quest chains. From the beginning, we wanted to have a colorful cast of criminal characters.
Hope as a mechanic
From a narrative perspective, it made a lot of sense to add a resource of Hope as in a grim and dangerous place like a remote jail, where you are sentenced to imprisonment sometimes longer than your lifetime, hope is one of the most important resources.
From a mechanic standpoint, we needed another resource that would balance Hunger and Health, so players could trade and balance these three, somewhat like Health, Hunger and Sanity in Don’t Starve. Hope was perfect for it with low and high thresholds reflecting hopelessness or hopefulness in character’s statistics.
A survival game in a prison
It was a challenge as survivals are known for their open worlds. Prison’s idea is that it limits the inmates freedoms, one of which is the freedom of space and movement. That’s why we needed to get creative. We went more in the direction of a wild prison with simple rules. Think more Riddick or Alien 3 than Shawshank Redemption.
To make the space more interesting we divided it into biomes. We also divided it into locations that are available for inmates and those that are restricted, like labs, engine or control rooms, that also feed the grim narrative of the prison.
Furthermore, we needed to keep exploring the locations everyday fresh for players, so we came up with the idea of moving corridors. The prison map changes everyday, because the space station is designed in a way that the corridors move, disabling convicts from planning an escape. After all, you're sentenced here forever, right?
Thank you all for your support and the heartwarming feedback you gave on the release of the game. We read all your suggestions and enthusiasm about the life in Space Prison with great pleasure and feel free to leave us a review if you have not done it already!
Stay tuned for more insights as we continue to work on adding new content to Space Prison!
See you behind bars!
Wooden Alien Team