They admit their approach to FOW ”wrecked the core game play” and so redesigned the mechanic. Instead of blackness we get a greyscale masking only entities, and not layout or objects.
The Fog of War simply covers areas you aren’t presently able to monitor either through a lack of guard presence or no CCTV coverage, which was also brought in with alpha 3.
Having everything ‘go black’ simply didn’t work and upset players; all static objects now remain fully visible. ”Almost immediately after launching Alpha3 we began to hear from alpha users that the rooftop style fog-of-war (which blocks out the view of the insides of your prison unless you have Guards watching the area) was annoying because it stopped you from building things - you just couldn’t see what you were doing,” they blogged.
”This was a particular problem in the early phase of a prison when you don’t have many guards and haven’t yet researched cctv systems. Prison Architect’s core gameplay is about building things and this needs to be super-satisfying at all times, so we realised we had accidentally spoilt one of the main parts of the game in order to add a new feature.”
”So we went back to the drawing board, and redesigned the look of the fog-of-war. We now darken the hidden areas and render them greyscale, and you lose vis of any entities in those zones. Static objects like furniture and walls remain visible but greyed out, so you can continue to build as normal, but it’s clear you have no visibility of the prisoners in that zone.”
Designer Chris Delay posted alpha 4’s full changelog:
= Fog-of-war overhaul in response to community feedback
- Areas hidden by fog-of-war are now rendered in darkened greyscale instead the solid roof effect
- Walls, floors and Static objects under fog-of-war remain visible but greyed out.
- Guards and Cctv now have a longer view range
- The Chief has a long view range
- Workmen, Cooks and Doctors have a short view range
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The game is now more permissive when loading corrupted saved games. It will no longer crash.
Errors in the save file will be reported to debug.txt.
Introversion have put together a new trailer for Prison Architect alpha 4, narrated by the devs.
