Inside the VR Crafting Chaos of Prison Boss Prohibition

When they set out to build Prison Boss Prohibition, the team at TREBUCHET didn’t just want a sequel—they wanted a leap forward. While the original Prison Boss VR brought humor and physicality to the confines of a jail cell, for this new chapter they wanted to smash open the prison doors and drop players into the bustling, prohibition-era world of New Yolk City. With crafting still at the core, this change meant they now had to scale to chaotic co-op play, unpredictable factions, illegal goods—and, of course, more eggs.

Ahead of their launch we sat down with the team at TREBUCHET to learn more about how they built one of their most ambitious (and egg-perimental) projects yet: a fully tactile VR simulation layered with shared-space multiplayer, mixed reality features, and cross-platform support across all major VR headsets.

To start things off, could you tell us a bit about the game?

Trebuchet: Prison Boss Prohibition is a crafting and simulation VR game about growing your own black market empire. It’s the sequel to Prison Boss VR, a game that TREBUCHET released more than 7 years ago now. In Prison Boss Prohibition the player is out of the joint and running a chain of stalls, crafting a huge catalogue of legal and not-quite-legal merchandise for the citizens of New Yolk City – rolling cigarettes, brewing booze, writing stirring manifestos, and much much more! They need to stay out of sight of patrolling cops or they risk losing all their precious contraband. They can accept special jobs to boost their reputation among different factions in the city and then unlock cosmetics and other gameplay items.

The biggest addition that was requested a lot by the players of the first game is co-op. Playing the game with a partner really changes everything!

With the addition of co-op play, gestures and player interaction are an integral part of the experience. Did these new features pose any challenges for the team?

At its heart, Prison Boss Prohibition is a hands-on experience. Whether you’re stirring brandy, assembling illegal magazines, or tossing a bag of cash to your partner across the room, every interaction is built on gesture-based physicality. But crafting in VR is one thing—making it feel natural in co-op is another.

We wanted both players to interact simultaneously in a believable space, pass objects to one another without lag, and perform actions that felt satisfying, even chaotic. To accomplish this we built a custom multiplayer network layer on top of Photon Fusion 2, using the Shared Hosting paradigm. This hybrid approach ensured each player could simulate local state authority over physics objects, even when the relay hadn't yet confirmed ownership.

While we’re continuing to improve state authority management, the current result is a co-op system where both players feel equally present, responsive, and empowered to scheme their way to black-market dominance.

Prison Boss Prohibition features some more experimental elements than its predecessor, including mixed reality. How does that affect the game experience?

One of the most experimental elements we tackled was the co-located mixed reality (MR) mode, available at launch on Meta Quest. The premise was simple, yet wild: What if your real-world coffee table became the speakeasy counter? What if you and your friend could duck behind your actual couch to avoid the cops?

We used the Meta Quest's Room Setup system to map players’ environments, then built tools to treat real furniture as solid surfaces and places where you can store items or progress through crafting. The real challenge was synchronizing two players' rooms into a shared MR layout, allowing them to physically interact with the same real-world objects while wearing separate headsets.

This required:

• Shared spatial anchors with calibration logic to align play spaces
• Rendering Occlusion using passthrough and the furniture data
• Real-world collisions and item physics tied to furniture volumes blocs

Players can now craft side by side in MR, stash illicit goods behind their actual IKEA cabinet, and coordinate silently in the same room until the sirens blare.

Speaking of the overall experience, were there any other features that the team considered a must-have?

We knew that to support real co-op criminality, we had to remove platform barriers.

Prison Boss Prohibition supports cross-play across Meta Quest and SteamVR, from day one. This was made possible by architecting our backend with scalability in mind. Shared netcode logic, input abstraction, and content parity across platforms were essential.

We also made sure to support both room-scale setups and seated play, including distance grabbing to reach items on the floor. Whether you’re rolling cigarettes standing in your living room or mixing hooch from your office chair, everything stays within reach and under your control.

Chaos and creativity are central to the experience of Prison Boss Prohibition. How do you encourage that through gameplay?

Supporting emergent gameplay was really key for us, and so we embraced systemic design. Each level functions as a sandbox filled with crafting tools, police patrol routes, and NPC requests. The nighttime phase emphasizes production and stealth, as players work under the threat of patrols. Daytime shifts the pressure toward commerce management, with a flood of customer interactions, surprise police visits, and incoming special requests.

With every successful run, players climb the ranks of New Yolk’s criminal underworld. They unlock new cosmetics, tools, and increasingly quirky recipes like tobacco-scented tea.

You’ve done extensive playtesting to get the experience just right. How did that early player feedback affect the overall experience?

Throughout development, we treated playtests and community feedback as more than just bug-finding tools. They became a staging ground for feature validation and backlog prioritization. Watching how players interacted with the systems in real time allowed us to identify friction points, emergent behaviors, and unexpected edge cases we couldn’t predict in-house.

When players struggled to manage crafting while navigating locomotion, we introduced a grace period that separated movement from input interactions. When testing revealed confusion in Mixed Reality room syncing, we expanded our debug tools and added more onboarding clarity. These moments directly shaped our roadmap.

Rather than relying solely on internal assumptions, we used player behavior to steer decisions. It made the game better, faster and, most importantly, more fun.

Thanks so much for chatting with us. Anything to share before we go?

For us, Prison Boss Prohibition is a game about joyful mischief. Whether you're whispering “hide the bottle!” to a friend across the room, or chaotically tossing illegal soaps in a chest before the police stroll by, it’s about creating stories together.

By combining physical interaction, shared space MR, and platform-agnostic multiplayer, we’ve tried to push VR beyond the headset and into the real world.

And we can't wait to see what you build, or break, inside it.

A huge thank you to the team at TREBUCHET for chatting with us! Prison Boss Prohibition launches on Meta Quest and SteamVR on July 10th, 2025—be sure to check it out along with other great games from Trebuchet. Join their Discord for all news and updates and some giveaways!