Panopticon

Using hand-sketched, scanned drawings for the characters and backgrounds, Panopticon is a platformer I made back  in 2003, in part an attempt to eschew typical platform aesthetics and mechanics at the time and bring the structure of the space, as well as user perception, into the puzzles that were required to progress.  Taking the idea of Jeremy Bentham’s proposed radial prison, and expanding on the idea of a sprawling entropy coming from the rational, utilitarian design, I ended up constructing a series of symbolic regions for the user to navigate and make sense of.  The position of the viewer ends up being something of a spoiler.

 Panopticon was originally created as a class project in Adobe Director (Macromedia Director back in its original form) - I've managed to get it working (as far as I've tested) as a standalone executable on Windows 7 and 10 machines, and hope it can be of some interest or enjoyment to whomever finds it.