April marked a major turning point for Project Kingpin, our debut crime strategy game, and for the studio in general.
After months of prototyping, testing ideas, building systems, and exploring what Project Kingpin could become, we are now moving into a much more focused phase of development: turning our crime strategy game into a playable MVP.
Project Kingpin is being built as a crime strategy management game about building a criminal empire, managing crews, reading the city, expanding influence, and surviving the consequences of your decisions.
The prototype phase gave us room to experiment with that fantasy from different angles. It allowed us to test mechanics, challenge assumptions, and explore what it should actually feel like to run a criminal organization inside a living city.
But the next phase is different.
This is where exploration becomes execution.
The goal now is to take the strongest parts of the prototype, align them around a clear creative vision, and build toward a version of the game that players can eventually test, challenge, and help shape.
April was the month where that transition truly began.
Let’s get into it !!
Welcoming Martin Capel as Creative Director
A major part of this transition is the addition of Martin as Creative Director on Project Kingpin.
Martin joined the project in mid-April and has already had a major impact on the direction of the game. His role is helping us sharpen the creative vision, clarify the design pillars, and turn a broad collection of ideas, prototypes, and systems into a more focused development roadmap.
Martin’s experience includes work on Gangsters: Organized Crime (YES THATS RIGHT), Killzone, and several major Assassin’s Creed projects at Ubisoft.
Under Martin’s guidance, we completed a full project summary — a concise creative and design overview that captures the intended scope, vision, and long-term direction for the game.
That project summary became the foundation for our next major planning step: the MVP roadmap.
The roadmap is now helping the team align around the systems, features, and player experience that matter most. It gives us a clearer path from where we are today to where we need to be for our first real player testing milestone. Yes, you read that correctly…. Player testing!
In simple terms: Project Kingpin now has a sharper target, and we are very excited to share more with you soon !!
From Prototype Exploration to Crime Strategy MVP
The biggest theme of April was focus.
Instead of continuing to build isolated features or explore disconnected ideas, the team began evaluating Project Kingpin as a full game. What systems already exist? What can be reused? What needs to be refactored? What needs to be rebuilt from scratch? What is missing entirely?
This kind of work is not always the flashiest part of game development, but it is critical.
A strong MVP is not just a feature list. It is a playable version of the core experience. It needs to prove the foundation of the game: the fantasy, the strategy, the decision-making, the tension, and the systems that make the city feel alive.
For Project Kingpin, that means building toward a crime strategy game where players are not just managing numbers on a screen. They are stepping into the role of a rising crime boss — assigning crews, expanding influence, managing risk, gathering intel, and surviving the consequences of their decisions.
April was about making sure the foundation supports that vision.
Building the Core of a Crime Management Sim
At the heart of Project Kingpin is a simple but ambitious goal: create a strategy game where players feel like they are running a criminal organization, not just clicking through isolated missions.
That means the game needs to work as both a crime strategy game and a management sim. Players should be thinking about territory, crews, money, risk, information, law enforcement, rival factions, and the long-term consequences of their decisions.
The fantasy is not just about committing crimes.
It is about building the machine behind them.
Who do you trust? Where do you expand? Which neighborhoods are worth the risk? When do you push harder, and when do you lay low? How much do you know about the city, and how much are you guessing?
Those are the kinds of questions we want Project Kingpin to create.
As a criminal empire management game, the project is being built around the pressure of leadership. Every move should feel connected to a larger strategy. Every opportunity should carry risk. Every decision should have consequences that ripple through your organization, your territory, and the city around you.
That is why the move from prototype to MVP is so important.
The MVP roadmap is not just about adding more features. It is about proving that the core loop of a crime management sim can feel strategic, tense, reactive, and rewarding.
April Sprint Focus: Commands, Combat, Intel, and Systems Analysis
During the April development sprint, the team focused on two major areas: gameplay prototyping and full systems analysis.
The first area was prototype development. We worked on early prototypes for several important gameplay systems, including combat, commands, and intel. These systems are central to the kind of crime strategy management experience we are building.
The command system is especially important because it sits at the heart of Project Kingpin. In a criminal empire strategy game, the player should feel like the boss of an organization. You are not personally handling every job. You are making decisions, assigning crews, choosing targets, managing risk, and dealing with the results.
Intel is just as important. In a crime management sim, information should be power. Players need to understand what is happening in the city, what they know, what they do not know, and what risks they are taking when they act on incomplete information.
Combat, meanwhile, is being explored as part of the broader power and consequence layer. Violence should feel risky, strategic, and connected to the larger systems around territory, law enforcement, reputation, and survival.
The second major focus was systems analysis.
The dev team compared the current prototype against the new project direction and MVP roadmap, identifying what could be reused, what needed refactoring, what needed to be rebuilt, and what needed to be created from scratch.
That analysis covered a wide range of core systems, including production, crews, logistics, commands, police behavior, crackdown, reputation, fog of war, intel, UI, save systems, and more.
This is foundational work, but it is also what allows a game prototype to become a real strategy game.
Why This Matters: The Road to Player Testing Starts Here
For players following the project, April may not look like the loudest month from the outside.
But internally, it was one of the most important months we’ve had to date.
This was the month where Project Kingpin began shifting from prototype exploration into a focused crime strategy game with a clear path forward. The team is no longer just testing ideas in isolation. We are now building toward the first version of the game that players will be able to experience, challenge, and help shape.
That is a big step.
The work completed in April gives us the foundation to start moving faster and showing more. The core fantasy is coming into focus: running a criminal organization from the top down, reading the city, managing crews, expanding territory, gathering intel, making dangerous decisions, and dealing with the consequences when things go wrong.
This is the version of Project Kingpin we are now building toward.
And over the next few months, we plan to start opening the curtain.
That means the all-new 762 Interactive website, the first public pieces of our MVP roadmap, deeper looks at core gameplay systems, more behind-the-scenes development updates, and our path toward player testing.
We are not ready to show everything yet.
But the next stage is where Project Kingpin starts becoming much more real.
The prototype phase helped us find the game.
Now we are building it.
More soon !!!!!!
If you missed it, you can also check out our previous development update for more on the project’s recent direction !
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