Rezzed Sessions: Why Subversion sucked and Prison Architect won't

One of the best things about the developer sessions we hosted at Rezzed last weekend is that they gave game developers the chance to give frank, personal accounts of making their games direct to you guys without interference from publisher PRs or, well, us. You've already seen some of this from Peter Molyneux, Day Z's Dean Hall and the Project Zomboid team.

And you couldn't get a better example of it than Saturday's brilliant presentation from UK indies Introversion (of Uplink, Defcon, Darwinia fame), which you can watch in the video below.

Flanked by his partner in crime Mark Morris, Introversion's Chris Delay gave a funny and honest talk that looked at the reasons why Subversion - the procedurally generated infiltration game he'd been sweating over for four years - simply wasn't fun (illustrated with live gameplay). He then told the story of how Introversion took the painful decision to cancel it when he had the idea for the team's latest project, Prison Architect, after a trip to Alcatraz.

There's also some insight into Prison Architect itself, a fascinating game that blends Dwarf Fortress with Theme Hospital and some surprisingly edgy themes (and is also great fun to play).

This was one of the best sessions at the show (it's my personal favourite) so if you couldn't make it down to Brighton at the weekend, do yourself a favour and watch!