Introversion opens up on Subversion

Introversion's Chris Delay has detailed the indie developer's next game Subversion on the company forums, revealing it to be a game of infiltration and espionage in which the player commands a team of operatives moving through a hostile high security building.

You'll use a wide variety of techniques to get past the building's people and systems - "Sabotage, Social Engineering and Grifting, custom Electrical and Mechanical devices, Distractions, Hacking, Stealth, Acrobatics, Precision demolitions, Trickery" - either employed by your team, or by you remotely via computer hacking. Combat options will be available but, ideally, the enemy will never know you were there.

"The combination of your guys physically on site using their own special skills and equipment, mixed with you taking control of building systems via computer hacking, opening locked doors, disabling cameras, exploiting weaknesses in security systems, is something of a holy grail of game design for us," Delay said.

Delay demonstrated a mission at Introversions' Darwinia+ launch party last week, showing how the office layout - displayed in crisp, minimal "3D blueprint" style - is gradually revealed by two agents using gadgets like wall scanners and motion trackers and other recon tactics. Eventually, Delay was able to hack into the CCTV network and hugely expand his view.

Delay said Subversion could be considered a "spiritual sequel" to Introversion's debut game, the hacker simulation Uplink, and said the look of the game was defined thus: "what would Uplink look like if it was set in real building rather than inside a computer?"

Don't expect to see it soon, though. "Internally, we still haven't hit what we'd consider a 'first playable', and we're certainly not in full production," Delay said. "We are still experimenting and prototyping, but things are coming together rapidly now." He didn't mention a date or platforms, although PC is a given.