Introversion Software on why Scanner Sombre is its Prison Architect 'palate cleanser'

After six years of working on Prison Architect, developer Introversion Software announced today that its next game would be coming out in just a couple days on April 26. Scanner Sombre is a short first-person adventure game with one of the most unique mechanics I've ever seen: the game's world is pitch black, and you have to send out thousands of dots of light using a LIDAR scanner to reveal the terrain around you.

It's a beautiful game, and we'll have a full review when it launches this Wednesday. But before that I got a chance to speak with Introversion's lead designer Chris Delay and producer Mark Morris about the inspiration behind Scanner Sombre, its incredible audio design, how making games is (and has always been) hard, and how working on the studio's sixth game was a "palate cleanser" after Prison Architect.

PC Gamer: Where'd you get the idea to make a game with this LIDAR mechanic?

Chris Delay: It's quite an old idea, it's a pre-Prison Architect idea actually. And although it may seem like an odd source of inspiration, it's actually based on a music video that was made by Radiohead. They used this crazy LIDAR effect to kind of—they got hold of some city data or some data of buildings and trees and things, and they just kind of had it blowing around in the wind whilst this Radiohead track was playing over it making everyone really sad. 

There's just something about the look of it that I really like, like all humanity has been taken out of it somehow and all you're left with is just the raw data of what's in the area. I just really wanted to use it to represent a game world, you know? Because I thought that we would be able to create a really strange atmosphere and a really strange feeling in the players when they were playing in that in that world. 

How'd the structure around that mechanic come around then?

CD: During Prison Architect we were getting a little bit burned out, and so I took a month out from Prison Architect and I took Alistair, our audio guy, and Leander, another programmer, and we kind of just holed up in my house for like a month and made these two prototypes. And one of them was Scanner Sombre, and the other one was a bomb defusal game called Wrong Wire, and I think we prototyped Scanner Sombre in about eight days. And that was the first time we had taken the concept of a world rendered in LIDAR or a world rendered as a point cloud and actually made a game out of it. Because it seemed to me that you would naturally need to have a reason as to why there's absolutely no light. Like why can't you just see the geometry around you? Why can't you see everything? Well the answer in this particular case is that you're so deep underground that there is no light.

Scanner Sombre has suspenseful, almost horror-like moments, but it doesn't feel like that's really the point of the game—it doesn't seem like that's its genre. What are you hoping people would get out of it? 

CD: Yeah, I think you're right. We do have a little bit of horror because the mystery of it and the atmosphere of it lends itself quite well to horror. And I'm very well aware that we could have done a lot more horror if we really wanted to. But I really didn't want to. I really didn't want to do a 'jump scares in the dark' type game. There's plenty of them around. I just wanted to be a little bit more like an atmospheric kind of a mood piece, so it would be uncomfortable and it would be unnerving but it wouldn't be full on horror. 

We're trying to create a certain feeling in the player. And I wouldn't quite want to say exactly what that feeling is, but it's certainly very different from the feeling of playing Prison Architect. I guess it's like exploring a strange place, you know? Exploring somewhere that not only you've never been to but also looks completely different, like the effect of just seeing it as a rainbow point cloud creates a feeling in you that is very different from just having like a small flashlight that has a really limited range. It creates a very different feel, because you can't see anything but at the same time you can kind of see everything all around you, like everywhere you've been.

From a technical standpoint, how'd you go about implementing the LIDAR effect? I imagine saving the position of all those teeny tiny dots and having what seems to be an infinite number of dots possible on the screen would be demanding. 

CD: Yeah, it is. It is. I don't know how to describe it, it is just a giant particle system. And people have been saying, "Why on Earth do we have to have unlimited particles? Why can't we just cap it or something?" But a lot of effort behind-the-scenes has gone into making it possible to have this enormous particle cloud. And if you look behind you [in the game], everything you see is all the particles that you've created and scanned. It's almost like you've painted the whole map yourself. 

Mark described it as programmer art because you don't see any of the visuals that we've created. All you can see is the cloud of points that you've created by walking around with this gadget. And yeah, that's the short answer. Yes, it was really hard. [Laughs] It took us ages. We started out using a particle system that stopped working after about 10,000 particles, and then ended up [restarting] basically entirely from scratch just so that we could have enough particles on screen to make it look as dense as it does. 

It was stunning to look back at the in-game map and think, "Those can't possibly be all the exact dots I placed, right?" But they are, and it makes the levels feel very personal.

CD: The map is definitely there to help for a lot of different reasons, but part of it is just that it's such a nice way to visualize the location as well. And it really is all the points that you've created, it's definitely not faked. I've never really seen a video game map like that, you know? When you go at the video game map, it's normally a much simpler polygonal-type flat surface with some ramps and things, and you can tell it's been modeled separately. I really didn't want it to be like that, I wanted it to look like a real LIDAR scan that you were looking at, that you could spin around and move the camera around and view it from different angles.

You mentioned the Wrong Wire prototype, which is actually available to play within the game, but what made you choose to do Scanner Sombre over it? 

Mark Morris: Chris very much likes to go and sort of do his own thing and rebel a bit. And often he'll do that whilst in the middle of critical phases on other projects. I think it's kind of part of his sanity is to take that time away and flex his creative muscles. And this time, for the first time actually— 

CD: [Laughs] It's like you're speaking about your own child when you're discussing this. “He occasionally likes to act out.” 

MM: Yeah, that's how you behave. [laughs] 

CD: "It's all part of his charm, really. We like him, really." 

MM: So Chris does that and this time, at the end, he sat me down with Scanner and Wrong Wire and said "you know, Mark what do you think we should take forward?" And my view is more a sort of commercial point of view, Chris is all about creativity, and both of us felt that Wrong Wire was probably the most commercial of the two—the safer bet if you like. But even the very first prototype of Scanner, I found it to be really emotionally engaging. We were just in a coffee shop in London, and I finished my 20-minute play through with loads of people around and I was sweating all over. It just really got under my skin. And even though we sort of put it on the backburner a bit and thought, "Well, that's alright, but Wrong Wire is better," we showed it to the team and the team kind of had exactly the same reaction. They said, "Well, I think that Wrong Wire is going to be a bigger game, it's going to find a market easier. But there's something quite unique and special about Scanner." 

And that's when Chris and I started thinking, "Well, hang on a second; actually making a game that touches you in that way is very, very difficult, and it's very, very difficult to design for that." You can't really put down in your design brief, "It's going to be emotionally stimulating" or whatever, that just kind of happens I think. Which is why we thought, "Well, we've got [EGX] Rezzed, we've got this consumer show, we're going to have a thousand people or something coming through the doors over the three days. Why don't we test out what we think about the game with them?" Rather than saying, "What do you think the next game should be?" Because that sort of suggests that the other one will never be made, we just asked them, "What game do you think we should work on next?" And about three quarters of them said, "We think you should work on Scanner Sombre next." So we took that as good confirmation of the way we were leaning. 

And then finally, we did do a kind of online vote with a couple of videos just to rule out that we were telegraphing to people that we really wanted to do Scanner at the show. Just off the back of a couple of videos, what do the interwebs think? And the results of that were about 50/50, and we kind of felt that that was a very positive indication that there were a lot of people out there who were interested to play Scanner. So that was the process that we went through this time to down-select, if you like. I think it's probably been the most rigorous process we've ever applied to deciding on an Introversion game.

On the next page: Why Scanner Sombre is a "breath of fresh air" after Prison Architect, how their audio guy went "absolutely mental", and what they think of games like RimWorld.

Were you surprised that there was such a positive response to the game? 

CD: It's hard to say. I mean I'm always a little bit surprised, to be honest. I can never really predict what people's responses are going to be. I think that there's something magical about it when you first see the colours and you see the depth. You scan the first room that you're in and it just looks like a load of noise, and you can't really see anything. But then as you move, and you see the points moving around you, you start to see the layout of the room and the depth of the room. There’s something kind of weirdly magical about that. And I definitely thought that at the start, and I just wasn't sure if other people were going to feel the same way. 

I'm really quite glad we picked this one. I think because it's such a different game to Prison Architect as well. It's completely the opposite end of the spectrum to Prison Architect, and it's a real breath of fresh air, you know? But at the same time it's also way out of our normal comfort zone. We've never really done a first-person game before, we've never done a game where you're walking around a 3D environment, exploring it. We've never really done anything like this game internally, so it's all been quite new and I think that's been really good.

Scanner Sombre is not only a big shift from Prison Architect in terms of gameplay, but also development time. You spent six years on Prison Architect, whereas this is coming out on Wednesday. 

CD: Yeah, it's fucking cool though, right? [Laughs] We're actually releasing something in a reasonable time frame for the first time ever. I think Defcon was the only other game that we ever did in a year or less. I think we really wanted it to be that; we've actually spent longer on it than we initially intended. We wanted it to be a really quick turnaround, nice breath of fresh air, nice palate cleanser as we called it internally. It would be our sixth game, but it wouldn't be like this behemoth like Prison Architect. It would just be something really strange and arty and creative, and we would just run with it and not think too much about what we were doing—just try and do something creative. 

Why did you want to go that way? Why not make this LIDAR mechanic part of a larger game? 

CD: It doesn't really work like that for us. It doesn't really work in the sense that we would come up with a LIDAR mechanic and then try and craft an enormous game around it. We knew that it's just one mechanic, and so I think if we tried to extend it over this enormous game, it would have probably outstayed its welcome in quite a serious way. It's kind of a visual style to some extent as well as a game mechanic, so the whole game is built around that.

One thing that stood out to me is that you backup the visual mechanics with some really phenomenal sound design. Was that an important part of the game?

CD: Yes, it is. Sound is absolutely critical in this game. I mentioned originally that when we did the prototype I took one of our programmers, Leander, and I took Alistair, audio guy, because I knew the audio was going to be 50% of the game as far as I was concerned. Because you can't see anything, but there's no reason why you can't hear exactly what you would hear if you were there, and you can get all these hints from the size of the room that you're in and the terrain that surrounds you just from listening to the sound. And Alistair Lindsay has been an audio guy since Darwinia, so he's done the audio on every project of ours. So he did all the Darwinians by getting cats to scream and mewl and stuff, and he did all the music in Defcon, he did Multiwinia. He's just been with us for almost everything we've done. 

MM: I'm not sure he got cats to scream, mate. He might have used samples of it, but if he was actually screaming cats, that would probably be— [Laughs] 

CD: [Laughs] Oh yes, I forgot. Oh yes, yes. It wasn't a real cat, that's what you're saying. The cat was already injured. How about that? Should we go with that? [Laughs] 

MM: Yeah, that's right. [Laughs] He just captured the injured cat. 

CD: Yes. Maddie the cat, I believe the cat's name was. It just made these really strange sounds, it was perfectly healthy. I'm digging myself further into this hole. [Laughs] Moving on from the Darwinian cat. Yeah, Alistair just went absolutely mental on this game, there's no other way to describe it. He told me that this was basically his dream project. It's classic audio designer, he wanted a video game where there were virtually no visuals so it would just be audio selling everything. And the things that he did—I mean the footsteps allude to it, there's got to be hundreds and hundreds of different footsteps, different types of like 'walking fast', 'walking fast on gravel', 'walking fast on stone', 'stepping on wood', 'falling on wood', 'landing on wood', [laughs] 'turning on wood', it just goes on forever. He just went completely beyond the call of duty on this game and the results are just amazing. 

It also gives you the emotional meaning of each level as well, and so the moments when it's quiet or the moments when it's anxious or the moments when it's scary are almost entirely coming from the audio, because nothing's really changing in the visuals. I think that Ali is basically our secret weapon. Ages and ages ago, back on Darwinia, I remember telling him that I thought that his audio made all the animations look better even though we hadn't changed the animations. They just looked visually better when they had Al's audio attached to them. 

Introversion has been around for 16 years now, what's it been like to watch the indie dev revolution over the last few years? 

MM: When we first started, our real crusade was the tyranny of the big publishers. We've grown up during the '90s… everything was very similar, reskins, clones, sequels. The publishing developer model I think was... 'fundamentally broken' is what I would have said at the time, you know, on stage and very vitriolic. But what it did is it only allowed a certain subset of games to be made. 

So when the the revolution sort of started, and I'm going to quote World of Goo [as the start]. That was the first time (and we launched Multiwinia at the same time) that another small studio released something that was a hit. That was the wake up call for us. And at the start, for the first seven or eight years of our business, we traded on being like the smallest game development team in the world, and so therefore, play our stuff and help us out because we're tiny. And suddenly all of that went away. Suddenly we're just one in a sea of indies all producing great, creative output. And once I'd sort of realized that, actually, it didn't matter that we weren't the only tiny team anymore, it was just wonderful to see the creativity and the number of games that are being made nowadays. 

It is interesting to me, having been in the industry for 16 years, monitoring some of the conversations and the complaints and the whining. "Oh, it's so difficult to get press to cover your game." It's always been difficult. It's always been hard. Pre-Valve, just getting the game in the hands of customers was a really tough problem, working with retail and all the rest. And Valve kind of made that problem go away, and then, you know, obviously XBLA and PSN came along and back-filled that. And the problem now is one of getting awareness out for a game, and yeah, it's very, very difficult indeed to do that. But it's better than it used to be. In the old days, if I wanted a million people to hear about me, I needed to—I don't know—have some kind of crazy relationship with the BBC or something that I didn't have. Whereas nowadays there are tons and tons of YouTubers out there, all of whom have hundreds of thousands, millions of subscribers.  

Now I'm not saying it's easy, I'm really not. I'm just saying I don't think it's any harder than it's ever been. And that's something that I sort of sit at the back sometimes at conferences listening to panels and things, listening to the perceived changes in the industry that suddenly made it impossible to be a success. And I look and I think it's always been like this, this has always been a very difficult industry to thrive in.  

So it's just as difficult, but with different specific challenges. 

MM: Yeah, exactly. So I don't need to worry about getting paid from retailers anymore. In the old days I would have to spend part of my time just chasing money from unscrupulous retailers who just wouldn't pay it. That's all gone. Your Steam back end, you get paid monthly. I mean we used to get paid a month after the end of the quarter, so you had a cashflow issue that you had to wait four months before you were going to see any money from your sales.

I think my summary is that the problems have moved, but nowadays we've got a lot more levers to pull. There are a lot more potential solutions to these problems, whereas the old days it literally was get in the elevator with the buyer from Walmart or whatever and you've got 20 seconds to get him to take your game. That's what it was like when we first started. And I'd much rather have the same problem being "there are 100 YouTubers who I need to get to cover me, I've just got get one of them or two of them." 

How do you feel about so many other indie developers using Prison Architect as a model nowadays? Games like RimWorld and the more recent SimAirport are clearly heavily inspired by it.  

MM: Yeah, it's interesting. I feel great about it. I certainly don't feel, and nor does Chris, like jealous or kind of embittered or, "Oh, look at that, they're ripping us off." It's very much more you do something, and obviously Prison Architect just blew away our wildest expectations and just did really well, and you realize you've tapped into something that just resonates for so many people. And then that's why you get—I mean, you could call them clones I guess, or just people that want to explore construction sims and god games in the same way. I guess part of it is that because we grew up with all those great Molyneux classics like Theme Hospital and all the rest back in the day, we don't feel like we invented this genre. 

You know it would be great for me to sit here and go, "Well, we created this amazing new genre and everyone is copying us, and that's brilliant." We sort of feel like we just reminded everybody that it was there, you know? It had always just been sitting there, and then we just came along and thought "well, no one's ever done that with prisons." Did it, and it really resonated. And internally we had the discussions about whether we should do School Architect and whether we should do Airport Architect and all the rest of it, and then obviously we decided to go down a different path than that.