Prison Architect Alpha 29

[Taleric]

Awesome I love these developers! :D

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CltK6AiV0TI

Spoiler

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Parole
All prisoners are now granted a parole hearing when they reach 50% of their sentence, and another at 75%.
To facilitate this you must build a Parole Room, and start the Parole Program.

- A parole hearing requires the Warden, the Chief, the inmate, and in the inmates lawyer.
- At the end of the hearing, the board will make a decision and the inmate may or may not be released early.
- The decision is based on their estimated re-offending chance (viewable in their rap sheet).
- Under the Policy tab there is a new slider that governs how lenient your parole board will be
- Inmates who are denied parole may become angry, and may even attack the parole board staff

- Financial rewards : If a prisoner is paroled early and does not re-offend, you will receive a bonus of $3,000.
If he does re-offend, you will be fined $10,000
This occurs the moment the prisoner leaves the map


- NOTE: Inmates must be able to navigate to the parole room. Eg Staff Only won't work.
- NOTE: Only one parole hearing can happen at a time, because the Warden and Chief must be present.
However you can have multiple parole rooms in different security zones,
and your Warden/Chief will move around as required.

- New failure condition : You will be fired if too many Wardens are killed in your prison
- New failure condition : You will be fired if too many paroled prisoners re-offend after early release


New room : Chapel
About one third of your new prisoners now have a Spirituality need
Build a Chapel (Multi-faith-prayer-room) to give them a place to pray.

- New furniture
Pews
Prayer mat
Altar

- New reform program : Spiritual guidance.
A religious leader from the community will visit your prison, and talk to your prisoners.
This will instill in them a sense of calm, which affects not only them but also those around them.
Prisoners may attend this program as many times as they wish.


New room : Library
Around one third of your new prisoners now have a desire to read books,
for education, curiosity and entertainment.

- New furniture
Library Bookshelves
Librarian's desk

- Boxes of used and donated books will be delivered to your prison once you have a library.
- Employ prisoners in the library to sort these boxes of books and place them on your shelves.
(Prisoners must have the "Foundation Education" qualification before they can perform this job)

- Prisoners can visit the library and borrow books.
- Prisoners will read in their spare time, wherever they are sitting - library/canteen/cell etc.
- Returned books must be re-sorted onto the shelves
- Books wear out and become ruined after a while, and more will be delivered

- Note: Boxes of used/donated books may be used to smuggle contraband into the prison, so plan accordingly


Parallel Deliveries
Trucks will now load and unload in parallel, so long as they are aligned with a Delivery/Exports/Garbage zone when they stop.
Extend your Deliveries zone vertically so you can unload 2 or 3 or even more trucks simultaniously.
Trucks now cope better with multiple Deliveries rooms (and Garbage/Exports rooms)
Trucks now move 50% faster


Mod warning window
Many prisons now use mods to enhance the game, adding furniture, materials, programs etc to the core game.
This causes problems when you attempt to load those prisons without the mods being enabled.
From now on, upon loading such a prison you will be shown a list of all mods that were used to make the prison
If these were Steam mods, you can easily click on each required mod and auto-magically download and activate it
If they were not steam mods, clicking the mod will open a browser to a URL where you can download the mod
Note: This will only work for prisons saved with alpha-29 or later


- World time index now stored in double precision
This only affects prisons that have been running for hundreds of game days
This caused visual bugs such as extremely jerky animation, slow moving particles etc


- Navigation improvements
- Entities will no longer attempt to navigate through "Remote Doors" that don't have a powered Servo attached,
as those doors cannot possibly be opened by anyone.

- Entities will wait at a locked door for 30 seconds. They will then attempt to find an alternative route.
This alternative route may well be longer, but will avoid the door they are stuck on.

- Fixed : Deployment scheduler doesn't always update live deployment (until end of hour)

[Mason11987]

I died laughing at the comments around 17:15. These guys are great.

[FlowerChild]

Yeah, I watch these every month and absolutely love them :)

[FlowerChild]

I had a really good belly laugh at the beginning of this one when the producer mentioned the possibility of console ports and the developer responded with "when is suicide day again?". I've had conversations like that in the past, so I could definitely relate :)

A little uncertain on the point of the parole system. The penalty to reward ratio on reoffending seems to be a straight out 5 to 1 (I think he said 10K penalty vs 2K reward) which makes calculating the point where you aren't going to be penalized over time and then just leaving your slider there permanently to be trivial, but on top of that, given incarcerated prisoners are your primary source of income, I can't see the player being particularly motivated to let them out early, beyond trying to cut down on the incidents that break out due to them being upset over not getting a hearing.

The chapel and libraries also seem "meh". They're a nice bit of polish and all, but I don't really see them bringing any new gameplay to the table.

So yeah, overall, definitely not enough to motivate me to boot the game up again, even if I always really enjoy watching the vids :)

[Katalliaan]

I have to agree about parole. Maybe for my minsec guys, who aren't going to be in there long anyway, and my supermax guys, who drive me nuts; but for my normal- and maximum-security prisoners, I want them to stay because they've been the ones that are doing the bulk of the work in the prison. If their sentences are cut in half, that means I don't get as much out of the cost to train them to work.

This probably will be the update that has me selling my prison and rebuilding from scratch. My current prison has a few hundred prisoners all sharing the same canteen and kitchen, although I do have my eating schedule set up in shifts so that the canteen isn't swamped.

[FlowerChild]

This probably will be the update that has me selling my prison and rebuilding from scratch. My current prison has a few hundred prisoners all sharing the same canteen and kitchen, although I do have my eating schedule set up in shifts so that the canteen isn't swamped.

I tend to wait between a few updates until I figure enough stuff has been added to bring something new to the experience, then restart each time I do play a new one. I find that managing a prison gets rather routine and dull beyond a certain point, especially once you have some workshops running well, so I'm never really tempted to go back to my old ones.

While what you are saying about trained workers above is also true, I was talking more just about the payments you get for occupancy with my previous comment. It's extremely rare that I close down prisoner intake due to overpopulation, so basically the longer I can keep prisoners, the more money I am making overall just on those base payments. Thus, letting people out is generally not in my best interest.

I remember commenting on the vid they made back when they added reform programs that I thought it would be rather cool if they played off of that in the system, where if you're running a nightmarish private prison, that it was actually in your best interest in a purely financial sense to make sure prisoners *did* reoffend, and thus by extension to make their prison experience as hellish as possible (including such nasty aspects as letting drugs in to make sure they kept their habits going, or winding up getting addicted in prison, but coming at the cost of needing greater security to handle the resulting incidents), as the prisoners were basically your customers and it benefited you to have as much return business as you could. By contrast, if you went the more humanitarian route of trying to rehabilitate, then maybe you should be almost exclusively dependent on government grants to make that happen, which might provide an initial bonus, but which would negatively impact your bottom line in the long term.

I think they missed the opportunity for both some interesting gameplay, and some very relevant social commentary in the process, as there have been a number of scandals in the news as of late about private prisons being involved in some very nasty business because of that aspect of their profit model (judges being bribed to find more defendants guilty for example). I think putting players in a position where they make these same kinds of decisions is an amazing way of cluing them into the underlying problems with such a practice in a "well...shit, under these circumstances I'd do the same thing" manner.

As it stands, I think they're running into a bit of design trouble as the player is essentially being expected to work at crossed purposes to themselves. They're running a private prison where they're making money for keeping people incarcerated (and many systems support that), while meanwhile they're basically being expected to also think that rehabilitating and releasing those same prisoners is somehow to their advantage, for no practical in game reason. IMO, it's like the game designer's political views are causing them to try and force a certain kind of in-game behavior to make sense in the context they've created...when it really doesn't. They really *want* rehabilitation to be the logical course of action for players, but that's constantly butting up against there being no good reason for it within this context, and really, when I think those same political views would be better represented by letting the in-game logic run its natural course smack intoto the brutal realities of it.

But yeah, I think if I were designing this game, I'd be making it a little more "Oz" overall than the current developers are probably comfortable with :)

[Sarudak]

You know there's actually a lot of potential for political elements to make this game more interesting. Things like new laws mandating what you must provide certain amenities for your prisoners. Media people sneaking into your prison and documenting squalid conditions or abuses (or maybe some kind of regular government inspection and you should of course have the choice to offer a bribe) and then political pressure is brought to bear and if certain conditions aren't being met you get a fine or an ultimatum that leads to more fines and or shutdown(this would be reminiscent of noble demands form dwarf fortress). Or maybe just you have a politician you have to deal with who focuses on certain things (tough on crime, reform, education, human rights) and you have to keep him happy or he might not renew your contract or fine you and then after an election cycle the new guy wants something completely different from you. I don't like the current setup where it's mostly bonuses (for days without incident) and letting guards and prisoners get killed or escape doesn't seem to have any meaningful long term consequences.

[johnt]

on top of that, given incarcerated prisoners are your primary source of income, I can't see the player being particularly motivated to let them out early, beyond trying to cut down on the incidents that break out due to them being upset over not getting a hearing.

Seems like a prime example of meaning arising through game mechanics, to me. I like the idea of game mechanics nudging players to make completely amoral or immoral decisions, so they can see how for-profit prison systems corrupt the political and judicial process.

I like the whole idea of lobbying congressmen for three-strikes-your-out laws, harsher drug penalties, paying off judges to send you more convicts, and so on.