The developer of Prison Architect Introversion Software has said that Order of Magnitude, the sci-fi colony simulation title it announced in April 2018, has been canned.

Speaking to PCGamesInsider.biz, one of the studio's directors Mark Morris said that the game was failing to get the developers working on it excited, making them question if anyone else would be enthralled by the project.

However, the company is now hard at work on a brand new concept which Introversion is hoping to have out in 2019. Morris says this game will feature some of the DNA from Order of Magnitude and is broadly speaking more of a systems-driven simulation title a la that title, Prison Architect and Uplink.

"We were working on a project called Order of Magnitude that we announced at Rezzed last year, but even though it was announced we couldn't quite pull that together," he told PCGamesInsider.biz.

"We didn't want to keep cracking on at a game that we couldn't see how it would work in the end. We've been in that position in the past with a game called Subversion a few years ago. It was kind of like a jigsaw; all the pieces were on the floor and we kept thinking there must be a way that they all fit together somehow and we just couldn't figure it out. We spent quite a lot of time doing it. That was what things felt like a little bit with Order of Magnitude - it just wasn't just lighting the fire in our belly and if it's not doing that for us then it won't have the intended effect on anyone else. We've stepped away from that now and there is a new concept that's in the works. I'm hoping that we'll get that out in 2019."

Pressed for more details on this new project, Morris continued: "Chris Delay [Introversion's lead designer and developer] loves the simulation work and creating an environment in which other people can do things that he has not thought about. He gets an awful lot of pleasure and enjoyment from that - watching people play in his sandbox. [The new project] is definitely one of those games. It's not a million miles away from Order of Magnitude in terms of setting and what you do, but I'm not going to say anything else about it at the moment. It's too early."

You can hear more from Morris in our forthcoming interview about Introversion's decision to sell the Prison Architect IP and what the future holds for the studio