Hey inmates,
In today's devblog, we're coming back to the making of the map, the prison corridors, and the environments, where every day brings its share of new challenges and opportunities for exploration.
Mix of procedurally generated & handcrafted
When creating the first concept of Space Prison, we rapidly chose an ever-changing map where we blend procedurally generated corridors with a series of fully handcrafted environments. What do we mean by that? The prison's heart is the cellblock, from where you can go to Locations like the Medical Bay, the Dining Hall, or the Bathroom, and even further once you get restricted access cards. But to get to any of the locations, you will have to cross the corridors with pathways broken into nodes, which lead to rooms.
Corridors evolving daily
Each day, you have a new set of corridors connecting each location with a selection of rooms that can hide combat encounters, events with characters, guard patrols, special objects, or loot. You will never enter the same rooms in the same order. All the rooms are manually designed and drawn. We have very talented artists that create beautiful 2D stylized art.
Hand-drawn environments
We’re aware that today AI can make great artwork that can sometimes be indistinguishable from human-made art, but we believe it cannot provide seamless locations, not to mention locations that blend with each other seamlessly. And there’s still something unmatched in the hand-made art. That’s why we decided to make the assets, the level design, and the level art ourselves. But as we still wanted to get you something fresh every day by designing the corridors of the prison to shift every day, so the prisoners couldn’t plan their escape.
Making a "closed-world"
At the very beginning of the development, we were actually considering and experimenting with making a “closed-world survival” as opposed to popular open-world survivals. And back in the early prototypes, the prison was much more closed and claustrophobic. However, when we started running the first playtests with our community, it was obvious that we needed to give them more space for exploration, as in a proper survival game. In order to accomplish this, we did two things:
- Added the procedurally generated corridors. They change every day to keep inmates from planning the escape.
- Divided the facility into the Inner Ring and Outer Ring. The Inner Ring has locations like Dining Hall, Bathroom, or Medical Bay, which prisoners are allowed to access. And the Outer Ring is out of bounds for inmates because there are Engine Rooms, Power Hubs, or Labs there. In order to get there, you need to get a special keycard, and even then, you need to be careful not to step on a guard patrol.
Designing the prison
When making the map and each individual area, we made sure that each location was designed to best reflect its real function. So the Dining Hall, for example, has some tables, a window where the food is being sold (yeah, you need to pay for chow in this place), or windows where you can sell creature meat that you hunt in the corridors (that will most probably be made into tomorrow’s dinner). But it also has braziers where you can cook the meat yourself, a Kitchen area that is out of bounds for inmates but that you can break into to steal ingredients or cook better meals, and of course, a scanner that keeps you from getting in our out with a shiv (or at least that’s supposed to be doing).
On top of that, we decided to add a pool of conditions from which one is randomly selected by the game at the beginning of a new day. An area can be closed temporarily, a bonus or penalty can be applied for combat, relationship gains, etc.
Our creative process
We designed the prison facility as a circle, because what’s a better closed shape than a circle? The prisoners are supposed to keep themselves to the Inner Ring, so they are closed even more tightly with the whole Outer Ring region, which is patrolled heavily by guards, guard dogs, and drones.
Exploration in this place is not only about knowing where the guards are. When you venture into the corridor labyrinth, you need to come prepared. There are many dangerous creatures roaming this station. Location areas are a bit civilized (if you can call it that with the galaxy's most notorious criminals in there), but corridors are like a wild west—no one really cares what happens to prisoners, so you can meet every kind of disgusting creature you can think of (yeah, Baby Wyrsts too).
But sometimes even the nastiest creatures are better than a Ferath assassin waiting for you with their company because you haven’t brought them the dinner they tried to extort from you. Good thing is that you can deal with situations like this in a few ways. You can, for example, be a good boy or girl and bring them what they want. But if you don’t want to be considered a pushover for the rest of your sentence, you can also choose the tough inmates that fit your party, get on their good side, and befriend them so they can cover your back when you need it.
Thank you all for your support and for participating in our demos and playtests. Your feedback is always incredibly precious in helping us continuously improve the game.
Stay tuned for more insights as we continue to advance the development of Space Prison!
See you behind bars!
Wooden Alien Team