Prison Architect is a simulator game in which you build and manage a high-security prison; keeping, working, and most importantly feeding the prisoners in your care. If they don’t get their needs met well enough, you’re likely to have a riot on your hands. Unfortunately the game is still in an Alpha state (even if it’s quite a well fleshed-out one) and that means some issues still need to be fixed, and one especially has been causing the developers a headache for a while.

Smaller prisons do well with just one kitchen and one canteen to feed their inmates, but the problem comes when the prison grows beyond the size that one of each can adequately provide for all the prisoners. The food needs to be kept in a storeroom, then cooked, then laid out in the canteen for the prisoners to fill their foodtrays from. The problem is that more than one kitchen and canteen tends to confuse the AI about where to take the food, which leaves the canteens empty causing hungry prisoners and as their food needs aren’t being met… well, it results in riots.

The last Update, Update 26, attempted to fix this by having the chefs make the food and store it, and it instantly teleported to the canteen when a prisoner requested their daily meals. It seemed a great fix, and then some creative players found a way to exploit it.

Like all staff, chefs are susceptible to attack from armed and rowdy prisoners. One of the work and class spaces you can assign prisoners to is the kitchen they work in; the same kitchen that just so happens to have loads of sharp things in there that would make wonderful weapons. You can see where this is going.

The exploit basically had the players building a kitchen outside of the area that the rest of the prison was located in, ensuring that the chefs never needed to have contact with the prisoners and the prisoners never had the chance to steal knives or attack the chefs.

So Update 27 has come along with a new method of attempting to fix the food issue. A new logistics system will automatically map which canteen prisoners use based on their level of security clearance and their schedule. Chefs can now know how many people will use each canteen and hopefully prepare enough food so that all hunger needs are more adequately met and hunger-based rioting will become less of a problem.

Got to love it when players get creative with the mechanics of a game.

Seems like the developers at 11 Bit Studios are onto a winner. Their latest release is a survival sim game called This War of Mine which takes place within a war-torn landscape of a ruined city and calls for you to scavenge, defend your bases, and generally take care of your little pocket of survivors until the ‘end of the war’ and the end of the game.

The game was released on November 14th and has been floating around the Steam Top Sellers list since then, having made back its development costs in just two days. That’s the mark of a popular game.

There was a patch released to the public today, and with it the news of the recouped costs as well as a few other bits of information like the percentage of players who made it to see the end of the war (less than 11% in case you were curious.) If this has made you curious about the game it’s currently 10% off on Steam right now.

Patch notes are as follows:

Features and tweaks:

• A new radio station, featuring the music by Cool Kids of Death.
• Unlocked two additional dweller setups on higher playthroughs.
• Graphical improvements on various locations.
• Minor changes in French, German and English localizations.
• Minor animation improvements.

Fixes and balancing:

• Fixed “Input Not Supported” bug on Windows.
• Changed fullscreen mode handling on Windows.
• Improved game stability based on crashdumps sent by players.
• “Aggro bug” fix. NPCs should no longer attack or flee without reason.
• Fixed broken trade. NPCs should no longer trade their entire stock for one item (Marketplace, Garage).
• Price changes now have an impact also on selling items to NPCs.
• Fixed an exploit that allowed players to prevent items from getting stolen during night attacks.
• Fixed a bug with getting stuck with only one initial dweller group.
• Fixed a bug with incorrect shelter description when Reinforced Door was built.
• Fixed a bug with visible gendertag in shelter description.
• All achievements can now be unlocked.

Assassin’s Creed Unity did not have a good launch. Sure server-wise it was alright and worked most of the time (although there were some sudden disconnection issues), but it was the host of other bugs that gained so much attention that the BBC even sat up and took notice. Climbing invisible walls that weren’t there, falling off things you should be able to climb, NPCs rendering without body parts, heads vanishing except for hair eyes and teeth, objectives not completing… needless to say Ubisoft got it in the neck for releasing such a seemingly broken game (pun not intended).

Since launch they have been working to patch the bugs however and they’re about ready to release a nice big one to fix around 300 of the more common bugs and issues. Most of them relate to breaks in mission scripting, bugs that left many players unable to finish missions they played and thus unable to progress through the story.

Other fixes include some framerate fixes (although they plan to better address more of these in a later patch), quite a few of the bugs that made the player fall through the world or off climbable buildings have been fixed, it’s less easy to get yourself stuck somewhere (especially in the infamous hay bales) and its now possible to peek while in cover again.

The patch will make its way to PC sometime before the weekend.

Steam Gifts is a system set up in Steam to allow you to trade games with other users of the service, therefore both getting a game that you want and everyone’s happy.

Unfortunately there’s been a nasty little bug in the system that scammers have been exploiting to get games for nothing. Simply if the payment is declined for the game you traded for, you lose that game not the scammer while the scammer makes off with the game you traded to them and paid for. Basically it’s not good and so Valve have changed the rules a little bit. Now any game in your inventory set aside for trading can only be traded 30 days after purchase, which gives plenty of time for checks to be sure the payment method won’t be declined. This also means that legitimate trades that get hit with this payment declined issue will no longer happen either, which is good for all.

Valve said: “We’ve made this change to make trading gifts a better experience for those receiving the gifts. We’re hoping this lowers the number of people who trade for a game only to have the game revoked later due to issues with the purchaser’s payment method.”

The rule only applies to trading though, so if you want to buy and gift a game to a friend of family member for the holidays this new rule won’t be there to trip you up and stop you sending them your gift.

Bohemia have set themselves a goal for DayZ. Though the game is still a ways off from being complete, they realise that there’s still a few things getting in the way of what made the game so popular back when it was nothing but an Arma 2 mod and continues to make it unique today – the fact that no two encounters with another player on a server will be the same.

In the remaining weeks of 2014, they will be working on fixing as many of the issues keeping those meetings from happening as possible. This includes server issues, connection problems and all sorts of other bugs that stop people connecting or staying connected.

Lead producer Brian Hicks says that as well as these issues, security and server performance fixes rank “just as high” on the to-do list for the next month.

“Be it friendly or hostile, direct or at a distance – the interactions between players within Chernarus is what makes the world come alive without a structured narrative or reason to be… As we move towards our Christmas break, making those experiences be as fluid and enjoyable as possible on a development build is a personal goal for the team.”

He is also excited for the year ahead and thanks the community around the game for giving Bohemia the chance to develop the game in ways that wouldn’t be possible through a traditional design method.