To explain, I see these kinds of games having two possible approaches:
- Limit money (or resources): this basically means a game where the goal of the player is to build something using limited resources; the player has to balance their spendings with their income and slowly build up from a small, simple system to a big, complex one. Most simulator/tycoon games have this kind of approach, you start small, gain a profit, use that profit to build more things, get more profit, build bigger things, etc.
- Limit design: The idea here is that the player has practically unlimited resources, they can essentially build whatever they want; the true challenge is in the design, because it's difficult to design something that works properly: the design is tested by constant internal and external stresses and the goal of the player is to come up with something that will stand up to all that. Games that do this purely are fairly rare, but something like Dwarf Fortress is a good example: beyond the initial setup phase, you can pretty much build you fortress in whatever way you want, the main challenge is actually deciding what design to go for, to keep things efficient and keep your dwarves from going crazy or getting murdered by invading goblins.
The problem I see with PA is that the game kinda seems to be stuck in limbo between these two ideas.
Money is both constraining and not: if you have a bunch of grants (maybe you use a mod for this), then you will likely have more than enough money to build whatever prison you want; doubly so if you sold your previous prison. If you don't have grants, however, then even with an efficient prison you will likely only gain a few thousand dollars a day, which is barely enough for any kind of decent construction: there is no way to keep up with constant intake on this much money, and even if you turn that off, you'll be spending days sitting around waiting for cash to flow in. There's also the problem the game is clearly not designed around a prison you gradually enlarge and expand: it's very difficult to take an existing small prison and make it bigger, while also keeping things efficient and secure; you'll generally want to pretty much plan out your prison at the start and build it all in one go.
The other approach would be to go for limit by design; problem with this is... well, in its current state the game is actually way too easy for this. According to Steam, I have 70 hours logged into the game (real timesink, this thing...), and I currently have very little difficulty actually building a prison that doesn't have escapes or riots; in that 70 hours, I've had exactly one prisoner actually escape through a tunnel, and that was from a cell about 4 squares from the edge of the map (it was my first prison). There's really just very little design challenge, apart from a few very specific things, it's actually pretty hard to build a prison that doesn't function well. There are also no 'challenges', external pressures that you have to stand up to. There is no equivalent of the invading goblin army, there is never, say, a power outage, you never get a sudden spike of difficulty, except maybe when you suddenly get 30 prisoners dumped on you.
So tl;dr, this is a long-term concern. What should this game be focused on, how should it challenge the player? Should the challenge be limited resources; or should it be simply hard to design a prison that actually works properly, and can stand the test of time as well? I think this is a question the developers will need to answer before the game gets out of alpha... or perhaps they already have, in some internal design meeting, we just don't see it yet.
