The developers of Prison Architect today were on stage at EGX 2015 to talk to us about the new things we could expect from the game as it moves towards its final full release.
Prison Architect has currently been in alpha/early access for the last 3 years, slowly being developed on a monthly basis with several new feature being added over that time. In fact it was revealed to the audience that there had been a large spreadsheet of features that they had wanted to add to the game before they would release version 1.0. The full release will be October 6th 2015, but the biggest pieces of news announced were that there would be two new game modes added to Prison Architect upon release.
The first is your standard Story Mode campaign, extending the brief story-driven introduction you get to the game and will also serve as a tutorial for the game, although you don't have to play it first and the sandbox which the game has been up until now will be available right from the off.
The second was covered in a lot more detail and is called Escape Mode. There exists already in the game the possibility of being jailed yourself if you do a poor enough job managing your prison and so this mode is an extension on that, with the aim being to escape naturally. Any player-made map on the Steam Workshop will be playable in this mode and you can steal things from different areas of the prison and causing trouble will earn you 'Reputation Points' which you can then spend on things like upgrading your character, recruiting other prisoners to follow you, upgrading your followers and so on. The aim is to over time build yourself up so that you can escape the prison you find yourself in. There's also a Skip Punishment button for when you find yourself sentence to solitary. Nice.
Other things of note were that while versions are coming to mobile platforms there aren't any concrete plans for console versions... yet. We also had a hint at some future updates when talking about making the guards more realistic in that they could vary in how they handle the job and whether they would accept bribes or other things.
It was a very interesting look into a game that has done Early Access right in my eyes. They even said during the presentation that without the community feedback Prison Architect would not have been as good a game as they would have wanted to make, and that if you do Early Access that you need to respect your community. And they have. We all too often hear about Early Access games being left unfinished but here at least is proof that it is possible to get it correct and release a game through it.