Prison Life (working title)
A prison management sandbox about running a place full of people who each have their own character, memory and relationships.
- Status
- Early development (simulation core)
- Platforms
- PC (Windows, macOS), planned
- Built with
- Godot 4, C#/.NET
- Release
- Not announced
“Prison Life” is a working title. The final name will be different.
What it is
A pure sandbox: no story, no campaign, no quests. You build the prison and keep it running.
- Smart, explainable AI. Inmates and staff have needs, memory, relationships and rumors. Gangs can emerge on their own, and you can see why someone did what they did.
- Real prison systems. Daily schedules, roll calls, searches, contraband, informal hierarchy, and staff who are people too.
- Building on a tile grid, with floors. Multi-storey construction instead of a flat plan.
- 3D with a limited camera.
- Scale. The target is up to 1,000 inmates and staff running smoothly.
Roadmap
Seven milestones, in order. No dates: a milestone is done when its gate is met, not before. This list mirrors my task tracker.
M0 – Core skeleton in progress
Repository, solution, simulation tick loop, a world with floors in its data, commands, saves, local checks.
M1 – Building and view
Godot client: walls, doors, rooms, floor slicing, a camera that rotates in 90° steps, debug overlays, plain cubes instead of art.
M2 – Movement and daily routine
Regions and reachability, pathfinding across floors (HPA*), flow fields, daily modes, roll calls.
M3 – Life
Needs, utility AI, food, showers and sleep, guards as full characters, logistics, and an inspector that answers “why did they do that”.
M4 – Social
Traits, memory, a multi-axis relationship graph, rule-based social actions, rumors, fights.
M5 – Prison
Contraband, searches, gangs, informal hierarchy, riots as a group decision.
M6 – Floors and art
Stairs, tiered cell blocks, watchtowers, low-poly art, lighting.
Follow the work
- How it’s built: the development process with Claude Code and a diagram of the simulation core.
- Devlog: notes from the work. #1 covers the deterministic core.
How it’s made / Use of AI
Prison Life is developed by one person with an AI coding assistant, Claude Code by Anthropic. The code is written with the assistant’s help under my direction, and I make the design decisions. The process is described on How it’s built. Inside the game, characters’ behavior comes from deterministic systems (utility AI): the same state and the same inputs always give the same result, so every action can be explained. Generative AI makes no decisions in the game. If generative AI is ever used for content such as text, art or audio, it will be disclosed here and on the store page, as Steam’s AI disclosure requires.