Posts

After a month of storm at my main work hell with all shitty one-day layoffs and rebuilding roadmaps and commitments (I’m a lead engineer there), I’m finally back to put hands on my beloved Penal Engineer. First things first, the result of the poll: Survey results Thanks for voting, and most important – thanks for all your warm and supportive comments under that post! I love you guys. Your presence inspires me to continue delivering the game, and shines the light in our quite dark times we have with IT overall in the world (and especially in U.S.). ...

Hey hey hey, my dear followers, I promised you to deliver _something_ by the end of 2025, and I hold my word! Most of the time I spent since my last post was to deal with the walls textures. Having stepped in shoes of a potential modder, I realized how inconvenient the last design could be. And I’ve made some changes… again. For the last time. Honestly. I won’t retouch this anymore in the closest future. Time to move forward to more interesting parts of the game. ...

Finally, I’ve reworked the wall segments stuff heavily! This took multiple rewrites, and with a bit of sadness I had to reject some capabilities built into the engine in the past (such as free-angle sprite rotation, and it got fundamentally incompatible with scaling and trimming, while trimming was essential to not draw the wall caps at junctions). How it looks for modders since now: 128×32 for wall straight horizontal segment (leftmost and/or rightmost 16×16 to be overlapped by crosspoint sprites) 32×128 for vertical (likewise. 16×16 areas to be overlapped by wall caps) 32×32 crosspoint sprites: L-junctions, T-junctions, cross-4-walls All the walls are now seamlessly rendered. No gaps, no ugly overlaps at junctions. This means dense prisons stay readable even at high zoom levels - no visual noise, no guessing where walls actually are. ...

It’s my thirteenth post, and while I'm thinking on the new wall sprites design, I’d like to share my own personal AI “policy” and perception. I saw a lot of projects, from indie-driven to large enterprises, where AI has chewed everything. No one cares anymore about thinking, engineering or debugging. You got an idea? Ask Claude to code it for you. You got a bug? Ask ChatGPT and blatantly copy-paste its generated code. Why should you care to ever review it when Copilot can do it for you? And if the AI-generated code produces bugs… just make AI to fix it! ...

Hey there my dear friends, I genuinely intended to jump to the assets and some tasty demos soon. But once I introduced a new sprite, something hidden deeply under the engine hood which patiently waited its hour to hit me finally got its chance. What happened? I decided to bring up a texture for the fence. And this happened: Fence segments overlap each other. Why this happened? As you can guess, the rendering engine simply renders full sprites, hanging wall segments over the map tiles to connect their endpoints at corners. ...

This update closes a long-standing visual bug that caused walls to disappear at corners and same-floor geometry to be incorrectly shadowed. Ground floor OK. First floor not OK. Some walls from the ground floor suddenly disappeared, and corners look weird. The fix required a refactor of both data structures and rendering order logic. Data Structure Refactor Walls were previously stored in a shared structure within each map tile: ...

Hey guys, I know I was silent for a long time. So happy to return from my 5-weeks rewind at sunny Crete. This weekend’s work focused on a complete redesign of the prefab system, making it composable, extensible, and suitable for future modding capabilities. The implementation now supports both patching and derivation of prefabs, as well as proper argument mapping and validation. Circular dependency handling has also been added. How it was before this weekend From the very beginning, patching of existing prefabs was always in my mind. The engine always provided a capability to register a new prefab factory under the same ID as an existing prefab. In that case, the new factory didn’t overwrite the pre-existing one, but got appended to the chain of factories. ...

Making steady progress, and this time the changes are a little less “under the hood” and a little more visible: Prefabs now take arguments. Think of it as giving your Lego bricks different colors without having to buy a whole new set. Walls and floor tiles are now regular entities. They may still get rendered in their own loops, but for modders they behave just like everything else. No more “special snowflake” walls—everything’s unified. Camera pan is bounded to the map. At last, you can’t drift into the void and discover the edge of the universe. What’s coming up: ...

After almost 2 months spent on the extensible game engine development from scratch, I have finally some screenshots to proudly demonstrate! The road overcome so far: Modular-based, extensible core Why I Use ECS (and What That Means for Modding) Camera with keyboard-controlled pan and zoom Map-tile system with multilevel-in-mind! Going Vertical: Multi-Floor Maps Sprite rendering Automatic texture atlas building from the individual sprites supplied by mods (so that you as a modder would never have to mess around with your own atlas building!) Automatic Texture Atlasing for Modders Frustum culling Walls in between tiles (unlike in Prison Architect where they occupy an entire tile) Rethinking Walls: Between Tiles, Not Inside Rotation of sprites (so that you wouldn’t have to provide different textures for horizontal and vertical wall sections) Banging Head Against Vertical Walls Stay tuned, there is a lot in my mind to come up with yet before an alpha release! ...

This is the story of how a simple rendering problem turned into a small descent into madness. It started with floor tiles and wall segments — and ended with me re-deriving trigonometry and then deliberately ignoring it. The Naive Start In the early version of the renderer, everything was simple: Floor tiles were drawn with no scaling or rotation. Textures of 128x128 were just taken and drawn. Wall segments had two dedicated textures: a horizontal texture (128x32) and a separate vertical texture (32x128). Just two different .png files. Rendering code was clean, direct, and straightforward. It worked great… until it didn’t. ...