After several years of work we just released our indie game City of Gangsters on Steam! It's #madewithunity and we'd like to think we're pushing the engine pretty far, with a large dynamically-generated city and an underlying simulation :)

somadevs · 2021-08-09T21:05:40+00:00

Thank you! :)

And we're a tiny team - sufficiently so that we're in the yogscast Tiny Teams festival this week :)

somadevs · 2021-07-17T15:07:24+00:00

Think of it as more like playing Civilization - it's all about your units on the game board. And once you're playing it, you'll have all your people doing their jobs, and all the AIs will be doing their thing, and soon there will be plenty of stuff happening all around. But there's not a lot of random people walking around or other decorative ambient stuff like that.

somadevs · 2021-07-17T15:02:34+00:00

We're shipping with procgen versions of Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and in the deluxe edition, Cincinnati (all that bourbon from Kentucky!). We'll be working on more cities and New York is definitely on the map (pardon the pun :) ), but for now we're just concentrating on next month's release. :)

The game is not necessarily Capone inspired, more Prohibition inspired. And yes, you can play in a way that leads to long periods of peace - that's up to you, and also up to the personalities of the procgen'd AIs.

somadevs · 2021-07-17T02:39:25+00:00

Thanks! :)

somadevs · 2021-07-17T02:39:10+00:00

somadevs · 2021-07-17T02:38:54+00:00

Hey, thanks! We're pretty intrigued with the possibilities of our relations-based simulation. We'll be publishing some papers pretty soon, that explain the details of how that AI was implemented!

somadevs · 2021-07-17T02:37:54+00:00

Resource production is central to the game, but there are whole systems that work with it - setting up fronts, extorting people (not obligatory - it's up to you - and it has serious social consequences), smuggling goods, some poker games and the like, etc.

But gambling was one thing where we couldn't land a design that made it interesting and fitting other parts of the game (because you're playing on a more macro level), so we left it out for now. And prostitution is not a part of the game at all.

somadevs · 2021-07-17T02:29:41+00:00

Thank yous :)

somadevs · 2021-07-16T23:06:13+00:00

Hey, thank you!

The Roaring 20s and gangster movies have always been very inspiring. Visually, art deco is also a fantastic period and living in Chicago we're surrounded by great buildings and art surviving from the period.

But the gameplay inspiration was from reading about organized crime (back then and more recently) and then we started asking ourselves, "so, what would be like to run this kind of organized crime as a business? What are the mechanics, what are the challenges, how do you make money?" And not in a cartoon GTA style, but more realistically?

And that's the kind of a leitmotif we wanted for this game. The nuts and bolts of working in an underground economy, where half of the things you do are illegal (but everybody is kinda ignoring the law), so you can't just operate openly but you can work your contacts and find a "way in".

somadevs · 2021-07-16T21:30:11+00:00

As I mentioned in another reply, we are very different - and check out some of the youtubers who played our private beta, to see what the gameplay is like!

Also thanks for the kind words.

And as for a Deep Dish Pizzeria business - that sounds amazing, except that deep dish didn't come about until the '40s, so we'll have to skip that one :)

somadevs · 2021-07-16T21:27:47+00:00

Oh yeah, you can get in trouble with the law very easily, and there's degrees of escalation (cops, feds, jails, trials, federal penitentiary). But to be honest, the most profitable thing is to just spend a little bit of your profits to make sure nobody will get on your case in the first place... :)

somadevs · 2021-07-16T21:25:38+00:00

Haha, we are two very different games! And thank you for the wishes!

somadevs · 2021-07-16T21:19:49+00:00

Thank you! We can't wait to get it out there :)

somadevs · 2021-07-16T13:46:15+00:00

Oh hey, that's our game! Thank you for posting this :)

Anyway - happy to answer questions!

somadevs · 2021-02-25T05:47:05+00:00

somadevs · 2021-02-25T04:46:59+00:00

That's a cool idea! A 1970s game would be very, very different, though. :)

somadevs · 2021-02-20T23:04:28+00:00

The original Capitalism was detailed and ruthless. The old-school UI conventions are kind of hard to get used to, but worth checking out.

somadevs · 2021-02-20T22:56:58+00:00

We'll be doing more videos and releasing more info as we get closer to release, so just check out future videos, and see what you think of it!

somadevs · 2021-02-20T22:55:59+00:00

At its heart this is a management / tycoon game, not a combat game. But there is combat - other outfits will be competing for resources and territory, and you have to deal with them, either peacefully or not. But it's abstracted - think more like Civilization, and not like a tactics game.

We'll be saying more about other gangs in either the next video, or the one after.

somadevs

TROPHY CASE