Darwinia and DEFCON developer Introversion announced today that its crime caper Subversion is now on hold, as the English indie has a whole new game in the works. The mysterious new project has been submitted to the 2012 Independent Games Festival, so it's surely already playable in some form, at least.

"Internally we had come to realize that somewhere along the 6 years of part-time development, we had lost our way," Introversion lead designer Chris Delay explains of Subversion's little nap. "We couldn't even remember what sort of game it was supposed to be anymore."

According to Delay, there was "a massive gaping hole" where the heart of the game should have been, and Introversion "tried and tried to fill that hole with ambitious tech and experimental systems" but to no avail.

Though Subversion was supposedly about pulling off heists with a squad of crack criminals skilled in different dastardly disciplines, it boasted tech including a highly impressive but questionably important procedural city generator.

The new idea however, came "fully formed, just like DEFCON, just like Uplink," Delay says. "I could see most of the core game design straight away."

While Introversion is keeping the new game secret for now, other than saying it's "unrelated to any of our previous games," Delay promises that more will be revealed "soon."

As for Subversion, he says that it has not been cancelled, "but I would certainly forget about it for now." The team will return to it "eventually," but he plans to "gut the thing from top to bottom of all the tech fluff that we forced in over the years," as "without a core game it's all a worthless distraction."