The main mechanic of the game takes inspiration on the ice cave puzzles from Pokemon Gold and Silver and the already a classic 2048, where playable characters are placed on a tiled scenario where they can only move in one of four directions until another object is found, being every move one choice among four.

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In these two references though, the whole possible path is already correct due to the nature of the games. In Pokemon Gold and Silver, the level is previously designed by the developers, while in 2048, the scenario is just a 4x4 grid where numbers being obstacles is itself part of the main mechanic of the game.

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In Weird Prison People, every room of the prison is generated by the game so that the possibilities are endless. Although, with such few movement choices, it would be usual that the game generates obstacles on scenarios that could, for example, generate areas where characters got stuck inside or outside, or maybe generate movement cicles where a single small route is the only possible way to move.

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To prevent this, the game needed an obstacle generation system. One that, considering the possible sizes of rooms from 6x6 grids to 10x10 grids, and an undefined amount of obstacles to place, allowed the playable characters to move through all the free tiles in case of items or enemies spawning there.

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The design consisted in:

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This design allows the playable characters to get to almost all tiles of the path, maintaining a nice flow of movement, as every time a character stops by an obstacle, there's another obstacle in line, so the character doesn't have to move towards a wall.

Despite that, this design also allows two or more obstacles to be placed on adjacent diagonal tiles, which can break the flow if placed near a room corner, or even generate an inaccessible tile on that corner tile.

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With this iteration, this problem would be fixed, so a huge amount of possible ​rooms could be generated, all of them allowing the playable characters to move around, most times generating two possible new directions to choose.

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