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[prisonscape]

Prisonscape is an adventure/RPG game that is taking place in prison. The player needs to survive in this harsh and violent environment. Inside you have to deal with such things as constant assaults, creating and using weapons, interacting with other prisoners and learning the trade inside the jail. The player can develop his character to be, for example, a strong, tough fighter or an intelligent, charismatic manipulator.

We already have a devblog at our website (www.prisonscape.com), but we felt like doing another one here with completely different content - in this devlog everyone from our team can write about their progress and thoughts on the development process. In a way, this is more informal devlog about our progress and problems we have with the game. Our team consists of five members:

• Tuomas - Coding and design
• Pekka - Design, game mechanics
• David - Graphics
• Case - Composing, SFX
• Will - Writing, proofreading

We are currently working on following:

• Tuomas is working on point of interest system so that we can add items, containers and hotspots in the game.
• David is working on the UI
• Case composes songs for different chapters and areas in the game
• Will is writing some dialog and character bios
• Pekka is mostly trying to get people to notice the game. Once in a while he also works on the story, battle and trade mechanics

Without further ado, here are some recent and not-so-recent screenshots from Prisonscape:

Intro



Guard post with guard



Short fighting GIF

[prisonscape]

So I suppose some kind of progress summary is in order. We started developing the game in November 2012. Here are some early screenshots from early November (click for bigger image):

Character creation:



The actual prison



Interaction with another inmate



Graphic assets at this point were from some old free tileset from the Internet, and the character designs and animations were done by Tuomas. Looks cool, eh? After this, I took over the graphics, but the end result wasn't much better:



After a while, we decided that we need an artist, and we found a fellow called David Hammond. David had done work for several big companies such as Wizards of the Coast & Fantasy Flight Publishing, but had only little experience in game graphics. He sent us some amazing sketches after which we started working on Prisonscape.

[CasePortman]

David's Graphics <3

I'll be getting some music samples up here very soon!

[Games Inquirer]

Looks great 

[prisonscape]

We started working on the job (quest) journal. We came up with this idea of making it a notebook where the player characters scribbles all the stuff he's promised to do for other inmates/guards. Here's what we've done so far (click for larger image):



Tabula rasa!

[Conker534]

Go get arrested so you can have a truly realistic simulation.

I'm just kidding, this looks interesting

[billychester]

Love the Idea and the look i allways wanted to make OZ the Game , lots of interesting territory to be explored  .

[FamousAspect]

I think the idea of an old school RPG set in a modern prison is very interesting and the opening sequence gif looks great. What is your combat system like? Any interesting innovations to share?

[prisonscape]

I think the idea of an old school RPG set in a modern prison is very interesting and the opening sequence gif looks great. What is your combat system like? Any interesting innovations to share?

We're going with traditional ATB/turn-based battle a'la FF games. We're still considering if we should implement simple QTE's for combos (e.g. punch-kick-uppercut) and for avoiding some attacks, but as everyone seems to hate QTE's we're still not 100% about doing them. We replace magic attacks with intelligence based attacks - the player can observe the enemy and look for weak spots or taunt him/her with threats or mocks which might give some benefits in the battle.

We've been continuing the work on the job journal, here's the latest version (click for larger image):

[CasePortman]

Got you guys a taster of some in game tunage, not gonna mention which parts they're for as it might ruin parts of the story..

Prisonscape 1

Prisonscape 2
Enjoy the sneaky peak! 

[ericmbernier]

This looks really cool. Interesting setting, and great graphics. Looking forward to more updates.

[prisonscape]

We've continued our work on the UI, here's how the character screen currently looks (click for larger image):



The skills will be changed so that there's only one skill on each row and the font needs to be changed to something more readable (probably the same as in other windows). How do people feel about changing pixel sizes? The game itself is not as detailed as our UI menus, do you think that this affects the gameplay experience in a negative way?

[MrBones]

This looks pretty good. Very good concept. Hope it turns out well!

[Voltz.Supreme]

Instead of having all the skill levels up at one time, why don't you just have one bar for each skill and have it let you know what level you're on?

[prisonscape]

Instead of having all the skill levels up at one time, why don't you just have one bar for each skill and have it let you know what level you're on?

That's the idea, those are just placeholders until we come up with all the skills in the game.

The journal is coming along, next we will add the jobs in it (click for larger image):

[prisonscape]

Some updates on both the character screen and the job journal. Here's how they look right now (click for larger image):

[ericmbernier]

What a difference the clearer text makes. The text under the info box still feels off to me. Perhaps I just don't like the all-caps look. Regardless, the character screens are coming along nicely!

[prisonscape]

It's been a while since our last update, so here's a lil' something. We're still actively working on the UI, and also made some major overhaul on the combat mechanics.



We changed the windowing from that RPG Maker/FF/Chrono Trigger style to something more prison-y.



Inventory screen. Every item has a trade value that determines how valuable it is considered inside the prison. Some items are 'hot', which means that they are illegal contraband.

Next we'll do some work on the battle UI after which we concentrate on polishing and adding new animations to the game to make the prison more "lively".

[prisonscape]

We put together a small samples of music from the game with Case Portman, who's done awesome job on the songs. Feel free to give any feedback on them. The track can be found from here:

https://soundcloud.com/kc_portman/prisonscape-soundtrack-teaser

[prisonscape]

Long time, no update. We're doing a small overhaul on the graphics, and I think it's looking pretty good!

Here are some GIFs that show the change (click for larger image):







Next thing is to add more inmates and also some animations, since the prison looks way too static at the moment.