February was an important month for development as we continued strengthening the foundation of our crime strategy game and refining the systems that support long-term progression, player identity, and decision-making. This sprint focused on key features that move the experience closer to the kind of deep gang management game and crime sim we want it to be.
Gang Setup at New Game Start
One of the biggest areas of progress this month was implementing and refining gang setup at the start of a new game. This is a major step toward making the opening experience feel more personal, immersive, and aligned with the fantasy of building your own organization in a gang management game.
Work completed this month included the gang carousel, boss carousel, gang name editing, gang color editing, boss name editing, boss nickname editing, attribute preview, attribute tooltip, and broader integration and flow review for the setup sequence.
This system matters because first impressions are important in any crime sim. Giving players more ownership over their gang identity from the very beginning helps establish tone, roleplay, and strategic intent early. It turns the opening of the game into more than just a start screen — it becomes the first real step in building a criminal organization.
Crew Pins Improve Map Readability
We also made strong progress on crew pins, which play a major role in how players read the map and track activity across their operation. In a systems-driven crime strategy game, clear information and fast readability are essential, especially when players are managing multiple crews, locations, and objectives at once.
This month’s work included updates to leader images on pins, gang color integration, idle crew warnings, active crew pins, pin click camera snap behavior, and command tracker camera and vehicle selection interactions.
Crew pins are more than a UI feature. They are part of the core gameplay language of the project. As this system improves, players gain better situational awareness and a clearer understanding of what their crews are doing at any given moment. That kind of readability is essential in a strategy sim where map control, crew movement, and operational oversight all matter.
Persistent Crews Are a Core System for a Criminal Empire
Another major milestone in February was the continued development of persistent crews. Once players form a crew and choose its members, that crew persists until it is disbanded, imprisoned, or wiped out ! This is a foundational system for a gang management game because it helps crews feel like enduring parts of the player’s organization rather than temporary units.
Persistent crews are important because they connect several pillars of the game: identity, management, logistics, hierarchy, and command. In a crime strategy and criminal empire management experience, players need their organization to feel structured and continuous. The more crews persist across gameplay and progression, the more meaningful their composition, assignments, and development become.
Strengthening the Core Game Direction
Alongside system implementation, February was also a strong month for higher-level game design. We spent meaningful time refining the project’s direction through design documentation structuring, game pillar alignment, core loop revision, and game design pipeline definition. Additional system definition work was also completed for dialogue, missions, map tools, building tools, and gang member tools.
This work is especially important because strong design direction is what transforms individual features into a cohesive crime sim. Better defining the core game and gameplay pillars helps ensure that every system supports the same player fantasy and strategic experience. Refactoring the core loop is a big part of that. It helps clarify what players are doing moment to moment, what drives progression, and what makes the game feel distinct within the crime strategy game and gang management space.
For us, this design work is not separate from development — it is a key part of development. The clearer our core direction becomes, the stronger the final game will be.
One of my personal favorite gameplay pillars is below, written by our Game Designer, Marisardo Filho:
Territory, Influence & Intelligence: This pillar defines structural control: expanding territory and consolidating influence.
“Players expand their criminal empire by securing neighborhoods and building operational networks across the city. Growth is not only spatial, but relational and informational. As presence increases, players establish supply chains, internal hierarchies, and evolving relationships with rival gangs, political actors, law enforcement, and key community figures. Reputation, past deals, and conflicts shape access, cooperation, and resistance over time. Expansion also depends on intelligence. Through scouting, informants, and surveillance, players reduce uncertainty across the simulation—revealing demand, vulnerabilities, enforcement activity, and alliance shifts.
Strong networks of influence and information enable safer growth, better leverage, and more sustainable control !”
Sneak Peek: Advanced Map Building and Building Creation Tools
As development continues on our upcoming crime strategy game, one of our biggest goals is making the world feel deeper, more dynamic, and more intentional at every level. That means not only improving the player-facing systems in the game, but also building better tools behind the scenes that help us create a richer and more immersive crime sim experience.
This month, we want to give a small sneak peek at two areas of development that are helping shape the future of Project Kingpin.
One area we’re especially excited about is a new map building tool that will make it much easier for us to create roads, territories, neighborhoods, and building placement in a faster, more visual way. Since the city is such a core part of the experience in a crime sim, having better tools to build and refine the world is a major step forward.
We’re also developing improved building creation tools that will help streamline how we assemble, organize, and place buildings throughout the map. While these systems are still in progress, they’ll play a big role in helping us expand the city and build a richer, more dynamic world over time.
These are the kinds of tools players may never see directly, but they have a huge impact on how quickly we can build, iterate, and improve the game. More on these soon.
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