Order of Magn i t u d e
A colony management sim from the makers of Prison Architect
“the long-term vision is for you to be able to build stellar-scale constructs”
Introversion’s Prison Architect is a compelling simulation game that continues to evolve years after a massively successful alpha release. In space building game Order of Magnitude, the scale of simulation is grander, but you’re still controlling an environment rather than the people directly. Instead of a prison, you’re in space, trying to ensure humanity survives after a terrible event on Earth. “The high level concept is the Earth has been destroyed—meteor, planetary disaster, whatever,” says Introversion cofounder Mark Morris. “We haven’t figured that out yet. You have to build a colony, probably on the moon, to reboot humanity to start off with.”
Introversion is still figuring out the game’s direction, but Morris discusses what they’d like to explore. “The hope is that you will go from a Moon base, or maybe a Mars base, or maybe an asteroid base—we’re not certain—and scaling up potentially to a ship in orbit or a space station in orbit and start colonizing other planets, the asteroid belt, that sort of thing. It’s called OrderofMagnitude because the long-term vision is potentially for you to be able to build enormous, stellar-scale constructs within the game.
“I’m not promising that’s what we’re going to deliver, but that’s where we’re heading. What we’re trying to do is work out how to get there, work out what that’s going to look like.”
I play the tutorial, which functions as a demo. It’s in 3D, and has colder-looking visuals than PrisonArchitect. I create solar panels to generate electricity and create resource-gathering plants that collect algae, which apparently functions as food for colonists. Little drones do the building work for you, and you select commands for mining constructs depending on what you want them to collect.
Fled Planet
You can scan your surroundings for resources, then place your buildings accordingly and join your base up to new areas of the Moon with towers. It’s in an early state, but does illustrate the planetary scale pretty well. This should be a solid base for Introversion to build upon, and PrisonArchitect’s history suggests the devs can find plenty of ways to layer interesting systems on top of what’s here.
“At the moment, we’ve only got the basics,” says cofounder Chris Delay. “Our aim is to simulate on a colony level, on a society level. This is not like Prison Architect where every prisoner has their own AI. You have thousands of people in your colony, and a general model of how they’re behaving. The Moon is where you start, it’s like your refugee camp. It’s been a very fast emergency evacuation from Earth, and the Moon is where you’re going to build your refugee camp, your foothold, and then you’ll expand out from there.”
“If you’ve got one colony on the Moon and another on Mars,” says Morris, “what might cause those colonies to stay coherent, stay together, what might cause them to break down into ‘us and them’? Trade wars, maybe war at some point. But [right now] we’re not sure how to do that.”
Morris seems particularly interested in the potential of human reactions in the game. “If PrisonArchitect was about psychology and the psychology of the individual prisoners, I want Orderof Magnitude to be about sociology and how the colony is functioning,” he says.
Introversion floats the idea of one day being able to simulate up to 1,000 colonies. If OrderofMagnitude goes in any of the directions that the studio has planned, it’ll hopefully have the capacity to create plenty of stories as players try to fashion a future for humanity away from Earth—even when they fail spectacularly.