"The combination of the visual lack of anything other than rainbow colours mixed with the audio is a strange feeling. I see it being like a one hour experience you play and you feel some things, hopefully," says Delay. I don't see it being an enormous game like Prison Architect. I'd describe it as an exploratory experience.
#SCANNER SOMBRE MONSTER SIMULATOR#
"It is one of those games that's derogatorily referred to as a walking simulator at times. Where Prison Architect is a detailed floorplan, Scanner Sombre is closer to a sketch. There was no explicit narrative, just hints of ideas which could feasibly be developed into something meatier, or left as mysteries. The demo at Rezzed was actually a loop which wound through caves and across bridges before leading you to a steep drop back into the starting area. Several human-shaped figures speckled into view at various points, frozen in time and when I dropped from one bridge to another an alarm started to sound. There's no real sense of solid space either, because although you can't pass through cave walls you can see all the previous particles you've left in the form of these ghostly blue tunnels, stretching back to the start area. The trail you leave is colourful but the colour adds another layer of meaning, with the dots closest to you being bright red and moving through the spectrum to dark blue for the points furthest away. If you need better information for more detailed exploration you concentrate the beam. You can control the size of the scanner aperture so when you get to a cavernous space you can widen the spray of laser beams and get a quick impression of the basic layout. When these beams hit a surface they leave a pinprick of colour so the more you use the scanner, the more concentrated the speckles become on a surface, creating a more and more detailed outline of the environment. The scanner is kind of reminiscent of one of those handheld barcode scanners and shoots a cone of laser beams off into the darkness. There's a scanner gun which you pick up before heading off down a pitch black tunnel. You spawn in a cave with a fire burning in the middle. Let me tell you a bit more about my experience with Scanner Sombre before I go on with the chat. He later links me to Radiohead's 2008 video for House Of Cards, explaining that the ideas for both games pre-date Prison Architect: If I combine that with being trapped in quite a claustrophobic cave network with no visible light that would be a very atmospheric environment." I think it looks very inhuman and impersonal and strange but beautiful at the same time. "I said 'I've had this idea' in that I just basically love point cloud data like LIDAR data - they use it to scan cities and roads and things. "The one you played is quite esoteric and quite weird," says Delay. I played Scanner Sombre because I will always gravitate towards visual oddities in gaming but needed to scoot off before I got time in with Wrong Wire, instead having to settle for peering over the shoulders of others. So they were made at the same time and from the same brain, but they're not otherwise connected. It was really tight and fast and I had a clear idea of what we were going to do."
#SCANNER SOMBRE MONSTER UPDATE#
"Last year we took a month out and decided we were going to make some prototype games and so we did an update for Prison Architect that was just bug fixes and me, Leander and one other audio guy made these two prototypes in one month. "We've been doing Prison Architect for five years and I've been doing it since October 2010, so we needed a bit of a break," says Delay. We headed to one side to discuss the new projects and how they came into being – it turns out they were a kind of busman's holiday… Introversion's lead designer, Chris Delay, was there, helping man the room and listening to reactions from the steady stream of players. Scanner Sombre is the latter and the weird and wonderful aesthetic is what drew me into the room in the first place. While at Rezzed the Prison Architect devs Introversion casually plonked not one but TWO new game prototypes onto the show floor – one a bomb defusal idea with echoes of the studio's erstwhile project, Subversion, and the other an exploratory mood piece where scanning a pitch black cave system gradually picks out shapes with a speckled spectrum.
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