One of the first big design choices I made was to break away from Prison Architect’s flat map. In PA, everything happens on a single plane: walls, rooms, entities, and jobs all share the same 2D grid. That’s simple, but it means no basements, no bridges, no multi-level facilities. When I set out to design my own engine, I knew I wanted true multi-floor gameplay. Multi-floor buildings. Underground tunnels. Rooftop yards. A real sense of vertical space. ...

One of the more subtle design changes in my game compared to Prison Architect is where walls live. In Prison Architect, a wall occupies an entire tile. In my engine, walls live between tiles — exactly where you’d expect them in real architectural terms. This may seem like a small shift, but it unlocks a lot. The Problem with Tile-Occupying Walls In PA, walls are just tile entities. When you place a wall, it takes over the tile. ...

One of the most annoying parts of modding 2D games — especially tile-based ones — is dealing with spritesheets and texture atlases. If you’ve modded Prison Architect, RimWorld, or similar games, you’ve probably had to: Cram your sprites into a shared PNG file Copy paste into exact pixel-aligned grid slots Maintain an accompanying XML or Lua file with offsets, pivots, and sizes Rebuild everything if just one image changed It’s tedious, error-prone, and downright unfriendly for casual modders. ...

My game is built on top of an ECS — short for Entity-Component-System architecture. If you’ve never used one before, this post will explain what it is, how it compares to traditional Object-Oriented Programming (OOP), and why it’s such a good fit — especially for a simulation-heavy, modding-friendly game like this one. What is ECS? ECS is a way of organizing game data and behavior by separating what something is from what it does. ...

I’m starting something new: a Prison Architect-inspired game, rebuilt from scratch with one core goal front and center: make modding first-class. If you’ve ever created or maintained mods for Prison Architect, you probably know the struggle: Want to add a new need or status effect? You’re out of luck — hardcoded. Want to tweak how AI prioritizes jobs? Better grab a hammer, because there’s no real interface for that. Want a new UI panel? Prepare to inject Lua into undocumented corners of the engine and pray the next update doesn’t break it. That’s the kind of friction I’m eliminating. ...