Forward The Foundation: Prison Architect Alpha 5
While I may still be searching my rotten soul for how I really feel about Prison Architect's concept and attendant amorality, I remain highly interested in its ongoing development. The fifth alpha build is now available to pre-orderererers, and among its new features are sexy firemen. Well, firemen, anyway.
The best news from this update for me is a reworking of the Foundation tool, which is basically what you use to construct buildings in the first place. In its previous form, it was a complete arse to create buildings with non-rectangular shapes and expanding existing structures involved a weird mess of duplicate walls and far too many doors. So they've taken a new swing at it and reckon the freeform cell-building of our dreams is pretty much there now.
They've also got Staff-only zoning, as an addition to the former and usually malfunctioning Staff-only door system. Glad of that, as prisoners kept making their way into the kitchens and offices and just hanging around creepily. Apparently they will still go into these areas when they take it upon themselves to cause trouble, it's just that the accidental incursions should now be resolved.
Also, the aforementioned firemen, and the first real sense that our prisons don't exist in a complete bubble. The outside world is there, and now it can help to stop entire prisons being razed to the ground. Though in same cases that was a blessing. Here's a look at the new shtuff in action:
You also get to see the cheat menu in there, which I suspect I'm not alone in asking is made available to us all for a total sandbox mode one day.
Introversion go into more detail about the changes and additions right here.