New York, 1931. You start as a nobody on the Lower East Side with 15 turns a night, climb from Runner to Underboss one Capo at a time, and eventually take a shot at the Godfather. Kill him and you lose almost everything, keep one permanent point, and climb again faster. Turns are gone whether you use them or not, so a session is 10–20 minutes, and the whole server's night rolls at the same time (8 pm Eastern) so there's a rush hour when the speakeasy fills up.
What I'm doing differently from the usual crime game
Text is the graphics. Every enemy has four lines of flavor, every job and random event is written with a voice, and the city prints a daily paper with last night's hits, deaths and weddings.
Hidden systems: a mood stat the player never sees as a number, a Fed file that follows them, an informant score that quietly closes doors. Learned by feel, not by tooltip.
PvP targets logged-out players who didn't rent a room, so banking and sleeping safe is a nightly decision.
Hard no on pay-to-win. Money buys cosmetics only.
Mobile first; it's a one-page game so it works on anything.
The stack
Laravel 13, Livewire 4, PHP 8.5 in dev with an 8.3 floor. One page component renders location text, nav and stat bar; nav links are real GET routes with wire:navigate so it degrades to plain links. A small priority-ordered hook dispatcher sits over Laravel's events so every location, fight round, shop and night roll fires a named hook. Content (enemies, items, events, Capos) is data, edited in an admin panel, not hardcoded. New Night rolls lazily on first page load after the roll time with the scheduler as the fast path. Spatie permission, settings, activitylog and backup; backups go off-box nightly.
Where it is
Core loop, Streets, fights, shops, bank, Capos, death and the speakeasy are in. Working on random events, crews, and the Godfather fight. New York is the first city; Chicago, Detroit and Vegas are planned.
What I'd like from you
Play a few nights and tell me what's broken or dull, especially the first five minutes. Devs: I'm happy to go into the hook system or the lazy night-roll if anyone's interested.
I'll update this thread as things ship.
New York, 1931. You start as a nobody on the Lower East Side with 15 turns a night, climb from Runner to Underboss one Capo at a time, and eventually take a shot at the Godfather. Kill him and you lose almost everything, keep one permanent point, and climb again faster. Turns are gone whether you use them or not, so a session is 10–20 minutes, and the whole server's night rolls at the same time (8 pm Eastern) so there's a rush hour when the speakeasy fills up. What I'm doing differently from the usual crime game Text is the graphics. Every enemy has four lines of flavor, every job and random event is written with a voice, and the city prints a daily paper with last night's hits, deaths and weddings. Hidden systems: a mood stat the player never sees as a number, a Fed file that follows them, an informant score that quietly closes doors. Learned by feel, not by tooltip. PvP targets logged-out players who didn't rent a room, so banking and sleeping safe is a nightly decision. Hard no on pay-to-win. Money buys cosmetics only. Mobile first; it's a one-page game so it works on anything. The stack Laravel 13, Livewire 4, PHP 8.5 in dev with an 8.3 floor. One page component renders location text, nav and stat bar; nav links are real GET routes with wire:navigate so it degrades to plain links. A small priority-ordered hook dispatcher sits over Laravel's events so every location, fight round, shop and night roll fires a named hook. Content (enemies, items, events, Capos) is data, edited in an admin panel, not hardcoded. New Night rolls lazily on first page load after the roll time with the scheduler as the fast path. Spatie permission, settings, activitylog and backup; backups go off-box nightly. Where it is Core loop, Streets, fights, shops, bank, Capos, death and the speakeasy are in. Working on random events, crews, and the Godfather fight. New York is the first city; Chicago, Detroit and Vegas are planned. What I'd like from you Play a few nights and tell me what's broken or dull, especially the first five minutes. Devs: I'm happy to go into the hook system or the lazy night-roll if anyone's interested. I'll update this thread as things ship.
