Reincarnation Posted 6 hours ago Posted 6 hours ago (edited) Before I begin, I appreciate that I already have a post in this category, but now we're about to step foot on that finishing line, I'd like to open a fresh thread that has serious depth that supports both RPG users and Dev's. You're welcome to delete my old thread if requied! Hey everyone, I've been lurking around the MWG/PBBG space for a long time, probably from around the age of 13 if anything. Playing a lot of the games you've all played. I love this genre. But let's be honest — most of what's out there was built in 2005-2010 and looks like it. I wanted something that felt modern, looked premium, and played like a game built in 2026. It started off as a side hustle to my Web Development/Design business(something I fell into from a young age, McCodes is the real root to branching onto that as a legitimate business and where I learnt many things). The Fifth Family is a browser-based mafia RPG launching this Saturday, March 22nd. I built the entire thing from scratch, my own Custom-Built engine - inspired by the soul of McCodes. Every feature, every system, every line of code — built, debugged, and connected by hand. No templates. No clones. No other engine. From zero to a fully playable game. I take a lot of pride in that. It started off close to post-covid, messing around and seeing what things I could do - no seriousness to it, but I'd come back to it every few weeks - just a little later last year I took it upon myself to decide if these games can survive release still and really go for it. I believe they can - but it's 2026, modernisation is the key. I believe this game has exactly that. The real barrier - marketing. I have a solid chunk of money saved up to market, however this will be my biggest learning curve and challenge - if you have any suggestions then I would sincerely appreciate it. For Players — What You're Walking Into This isn't a bare-bones launch with promises of "more coming soon." This is what's live on day one: Crimes & District Progression 36 unique crimes across 6 districts (Downtown, The Docks, Red Light, Chinatown, The Marina, Uptown) Item-gated crimes, loot drops from 12+ crime-exclusive items, 5% Collection Set piece drops District Mastery (Bronze → Platinum) with cash and gold bonuses per tier Dynamic Heat system — escalating police response at 25/50/75% thresholds Bribe Cops to reduce heat 6 Boss Fights Stamina-based combat with unique loot drops and cash rewards per boss Boss gates replace level requirements — beat the boss to unlock the next district Cinematic results screen on victory Smuggling Volatile live market with fluctuating prices and trend indicators (+/- %) Scaling customs interdiction risk based on bag volume with threshold markers (Searches/Patrols/Seized) NPC Smuggling Buyers offering 85%–160% of street value Origin-based contraband — travel to source district, sell at destination Profit/loss tracking against wholesale price Chop Shop → Garage → Street Racing Steal cars, upgrade stats (Speed/Handling/Accel), repair durability Car classes: Beater → Tuner → Muscle → Super → Exotic → Hyper (colour-coded tiers) Full street racing minigame with animated race and dramatic results splash Pre-flight checks — can't race without Nerve, with a totaled car, or from jail 6 Careers Street Dealer, Bouncer, Driver, Enforcer, Hitman, Smuggler 5 ranks per career with unique perk unlocks — Rank 5 grants a career-exclusive Epic item Overtime (2x energy, 3x pay, fumble = fired 1hr), shift streaks, shared cooldown across all careers Street Intel Dynamic intel opportunities with expiry timers and 38 unique environmental modifiers Scout (spend Nerve for odds) or Go Blind (higher risk, no intel) Recent Operations history log Mansion 8 upgradeable rooms (Vault, Private Gym, The Lab, VIP Lounge, Medical Wing, Legal Office, Armory, Intel Room) Each room up to Level 10 — bonuses stack on bank interest, gym speed, crime success, energy regen, hospital/jail time, attack damage, recon accuracy Estate XP and prestige levels Rackets 17 rackets across 5 tiers (Street Level → Empire) generating passive income every 12 hours Intimidation levels, raid chance, heat gain scaling — from Corner Store to Media Corporation Stock Market Live price movements with charted history across multiple time ranges Buy/sell shares, portfolio tracking, average cost, P/L per holding Quick-buy buttons (10 / 100 / 1K / MAX) Casino 4 games — Blackjack (live multiplayer), Roulette, Slots, Video Poker Daily loss limit, max bet caps, chip tracking Offshore Bank 10 upgrade tiers (up to $50M cap), daily interest (0.1% base, 0.2% Platinum + Mansion bonus stacking) Vault protection percentage, transaction logs, Mafia Gold upgrade costs Equipment & Inventory 7 slots (Weapon, Armour, Helmet, Gloves, Belt, Necklace, Special) + Vehicle from Garage Full rarity system (Common → Legendary) with colour-coded stat badges Shopping & Trading The Fifth Shop — Full NPC store with category tabs, rarity borders, stat breakdowns The Black Market — Rotating contraband stock for Mafia Gold, limited quantities with pulsing low-stock urgency, quantity selector Item Market — Player-to-player trading with search, sort, category counts, NPC price reference, rarity glow, expiry timers, sales history The Fence — Sell items for Mafia Gold Bloodline & Vigilantes Bloodline system with legacy progression and stat bonuses Vigilante Fragments dropping from crimes, smuggling, and bosses Families & Territory War (Open after Pre-Season) Create/join families with chat, roles, and hierarchy Full SVG interactive War Map — 20 districts, road adjacency raiding, 4 Sentry Towers gating Don Hall Sentry Towers: 10min pre-unlock, 15min raid, 24hr peace shield. Don Hall: 2hr raid, 48hr peace shield, $100K/hr to family vault Resource gathering nodes (Bricks/Steel) with auto-respawn Territory perks stacking bonuses across all gameplay systems Season-based — Season 1 launches once critical player mass is reached Government Ruling Don sets City Tax (0–10% on all crime earnings), appoints 9 stat-buffing roles, issues Proclamations, places Bounties Fight Club Target Radar with online/offline status, difficulty indicators (Easy/Fair/Danger), level filters Combat Log, Top Fighters leaderboard with gold/silver/bronze podium glow, personal position tracker Economy Sinks Daily Protection Fee — level-scaled, debt accumulates if unpaid Wealth Tax — 0.1% daily on net worth above $500K Communication In-game Chat with live online player count Mail system — inbox, compose, reply Notifications with mark-all-read Admin Announcements Player Systems Player Profiles with stats, equipped items, vehicle, achievements, family Player Search Game Settings (email, password, preferences) Travel between all 6 districts Emergency Services Jail — countdown timer, bail cost, inmate list, bail out other players Hospital — countdown timer, heal cost, patient list, heal other players Progression Achievements & Badges with full tracking across all systems Leaderboards — 8+ categories plus Family rankings Referral system — unique codes, recruit tracking, rewards New Player Tutorial 10-step guided walkthrough with the Underboss character God mode protection during tutorial Soldier's Welcome Pack on completion Support In-game Support Tickets (player UI + admin backend) Staff Applications with public Staff Directory Comprehensive Game Manual — 65 entries, 18 categories Monetisation Mafia Gold + Platinum dual currency Platinum Store — 5 pack tiers ($4.99–$99.99) with Platinum, Gold, VIP days, exclusive items/vehicles Platinum Membership with regen bonuses Also: Hitlist — Place and claim player bounties Syndicate Pass — 8 daily + 5 weekly missions tracking crimes, fights, gym, smuggling, chop shop, careers, casino, racing — Cash, XP, and Gold rewards Seasonal Battle Pass — Tiered reward track with seasonal progression Wheel of Fortune — Daily free spin + Platinum spins with prize pool Cosmetics — Purchasable name glows (Neon Genesis, Toxic Sludge, Ice Cold) Events — Daily, weekly, special, and seasonal timed events with cash, XP, and Mafia Gold rewards Collection Sets — 6 district sets with vault storage, permanent bonuses on completion, dynamic progress tracking on the crimes page Consumables — 9 items with timed active effects tracked via dedicated system Real Estate — Property ownership across districts with passive income and upgrade tiers Gym — 6 training tiers per stat (STR/DEF/AGI/DEX), timed routines, stat gain previews, category quick-scroll, gym gains breakdown in HUD Academy — 48 courses, 8 degree paths, perks including combat defence, casino luck, heat reduction *The UI* This is probably what sets it apart most. No spreadsheets. No plain HTML tables. Premium dark glassmorphism aesthetic throughout — glowing cards, visual progress bars, icon-driven panels, cinematic splash screens, collapsible sections. It looks and feels like a modern game, not a database with a dark background and spreadsheet style tables everywhere. Meet our vigilante's. Droppable fragments from many game actions as well as fragment purchase options. Game Previews All previews available on the pre-launch page. For Developers — Under The Hood I know this community appreciates the technical side, so here's the full breakdown for those who care about what's powering it. Stack Hetzner VPS / CloudPanel / NGINX / PHP 8.3 / MariaDB 125+ files, all hand-wired Unified Heartbeat polling at 5-second intervals PWA manifest with full favicon set SFTP deployment workflow Architecture Centralised game engine functions — add_xp(), get_city_bonus(), stat cap seeding via window._initStats from PHP Global Game.post() using promises (.then() syntax) for all AJAX interactions Instant stat updates via a post() interceptor — no page reloads AJAX panel loading system with a global JS interceptor that converts forms and links into async requests Staff panel utilises full screen width with auto-wrapped scrollable glassmorphism containers Inline JS execution pattern to bypass AJAX <script> tag blocking — all dynamic JS via HTML attributes or onerror injection with proper htmlspecialchars(json_encode()) escaping Currency abbreviation system (K/M/B) across all displays Cron jobs running on explicit /usr/bin/php8.3 paths (CloudPanel requirement) SEO & Performance Meta/OG/Twitter cards on all public pages Schema.org markup (VideoGame + FAQPage) robots.txt and sitemap.xml with canonical www URLs Google Search Console verified and Google Analytics wired in NGINX-level GZIP compression, browser caching, and bad bot blocking WebP image optimisation throughout Desktop Lighthouse score: 91 / 100 / 100 / 100 Security — The Full Breakdown I know MWG cares about this, and honestly most games in this genre ship with almost none of it. Here's what's locked down from day one: Authentication & Session Security Minimum 8-character password enforcement across all entry points (registration, reset, change) Brute force lockout system — repeated failed logins trigger automatic temporary bans Session fingerprinting — sessions are bound to device characteristics, preventing session hijacking CSRF token validation on all state-changing requests, correctly placed after session initialisation Rate Limiting & Abuse Prevention Rate limiting on all sensitive endpoints IP ban system with automatic banning on detected abuse patterns Automated cleanup via hourly cron job Server Hardening Full HTTP security headers including Content Security Policy (CSP) display_errors locked off in production — no stack traces or path leaks exposed to users CLI guards on all cron scripts — they cannot be triggered via browser Webhook secrets hardened require_free() lockdown function for maintenance/emergency mode Admin Tooling Security Dashboard in the staff panel with real-time event monitoring Full security event logging — every login attempt, ban, suspicious action recorded Admin-accessible IP ban management Complete file audit performed across all 125+ files Data Discipline No raw database column names, internal identifiers, or backend terminology exposed in any user-facing UI, notifications, or error messages — everything is human-readable labels only The Story I built this entire game since going full time (8-14 hours a day on average) in around 400 hours. I came up with the vision, the systems, the connections between everything, the UI direction, the game feel. Every bug, every edge case, every broken AJAX call, every encoding issue — I sat there and worked through it, all 125 files and counting. I'm not saying this to brag. I'm saying it because this genre deserves better than what's out there, and the barrier to building something great is lower than it's ever been for Persistent/Text based RPG's, this game fits in that genre - but make no mistake, some of the features within are 2.5D - making it a real hybrid that dips it's feet into other genre's too. If this game proves anything to me, it's that the bottleneck was never code. It was always vision, persistence and modernisation. Launching Sunday, March 22. Available on Desktop, Mobile Browser, iOS and Android. 🔗 thefifthfamily.com I'd love feedback from this community on launch. You lot have been building and playing these games longer than most. Tell me what you think. Edited 2 hours ago by Reincarnation Inclusion of full feature list Quote
gamble Posted 3 hours ago Posted 3 hours ago Good luck with the launch! Couple things I can see happening (just a fair warning) - The classic "Great another Mafia game" - Lack of retention. There doesn't seem to be anything to keep you playing. There's 5 things to do judging by the post and previous screenshots. What's the point of training there's seemingly no attack outside territory wars maybe? Along with that there seems to be no player to player interactions outside of territory wars and a chat. This issues compounds with the family system being locked behind player activity as you stated. I assume boss fights are also multi-player based so that's functionality is effectively dead until a player base is built, so 2 key features from your post are dead on arrival - I understand what you're trying to do with the mccodes comparison but that's only going to harm you. I'd just leave that behind as it gives more fuel to my point 1 above - URL is terrible in my opinion. "The" in a URL is silly but I understand fifthfamily.com is taken. In my mind I'd never type the in the URL when trying to get the Fifth Family. Mostly because id just call it fifth family. I'd suggest maybe going modern and trying a special TLD so a good example for you fifth.family - Be prepared for the iOS app to be taken down or not accepted. They typically only allow native apps (things like flutter and react native compile to native just to clear up confusion there). They specifically mentioned in TOS and the Developer license that PWAs are not accepted or allowed. If you have a native app awesome! I am just making assumptions on it being pwa only. Even using a wrapper to publish the pwa is typically taken down pretty quickly since it falls under their "web browser" rules. I could be wrong on all this and please don't take this as hatred from me. I have just been around long enough to see players with the above complaints. I hope you succeed! It's a dying genre of games and I hope you find success in it! I'll be playing myself to see what it's all about! Sorry if the came off critical I'm just trying to give some constructive criticism based off the information I have. Quote
Reincarnation Posted 2 hours ago Author Posted 2 hours ago (edited) 1 hour ago, gamble said: Good luck with the launch! Couple things I can see happening (just a fair warning) - The classic "Great another Mafia game" - Lack of retention. There doesn't seem to be anything to keep you playing. There's 5 things to do judging by the post and previous screenshots. What's the point of training there's seemingly no attack outside territory wars maybe? Along with that there seems to be no player to player interactions outside of territory wars and a chat. This issues compounds with the family system being locked behind player activity as you stated. I assume boss fights are also multi-player based so that's functionality is effectively dead until a player base is built, so 2 key features from your post are dead on arrival - I understand what you're trying to do with the mccodes comparison but that's only going to harm you. I'd just leave that behind as it gives more fuel to my point 1 above - URL is terrible in my opinion. "The" in a URL is silly but I understand fifthfamily.com is taken. In my mind I'd never type the in the URL when trying to get the Fifth Family. Mostly because id just call it fifth family. I'd suggest maybe going modern and trying a special TLD so a good example for you fifth.family - Be prepared for the iOS app to be taken down or not accepted. They typically only allow native apps (things like flutter and react native compile to native just to clear up confusion there). They specifically mentioned in TOS and the Developer license that PWAs are not accepted or allowed. If you have a native app awesome! I am just making assumptions on it being pwa only. Even using a wrapper to publish the pwa is typically taken down pretty quickly since it falls under their "web browser" rules. I could be wrong on all this and please don't take this as hatred from me. I have just been around long enough to see players with the above complaints. I hope you succeed! It's a dying genre of games and I hope you find success in it! I'll be playing myself to see what it's all about! Sorry if the came off critical I'm just trying to give some constructive criticism based off the information I have. I appreciate your feedback, honestly - I've been needing some. I didn't include the full deep dive of the content, I have updated the thread, please do revisit and provide further feedback in that aspect there are over 8 core system generating daily/weekly pull and no doubt more to follow. Good point raised on PWA's. I have an amateur friendly Dev Log on my landing page right now & it does give more detail on the iOS/Google Play route. We're wrapping with Capacitor which produces a native binary - no PWA bookmark. The web version is PWA-enabled for browser users but the store releases will be legitimately native-wrapped apps. I could absolutely do with grabbing at least an additional URL to hit "the" on the head too and use the current to redirect to it, I don't think it will be a huge issue IMO as my main area of succession is aimed to come from the App Stores, but it's something I need to think about for sure; very valid point. Thinking of it as I typed this though - when you look at the target audience, it's people who grew up on .com domain games, fifthfamily.com is taken so I'm limited. I absolutely hate these new domain abbreviations - but for the sake of a few £, I may as well go grab one. I do want to say though, I don't believe it's a dying genre at all. There are still a small handful of games out there thriving and the obvious one (Torn) has 90,000+ active users daily - the one's dying are low effort clones or they're absolutely text filled, that's never going to work anymore. Torn can do it still, because they have partially moved with the times, forever adding more content and have a very loyal userbase. There is a gap I feel and that's why I built this! Edited 2 hours ago by Reincarnation Quote
gamble Posted 25 minutes ago Posted 25 minutes ago 1 hour ago, Reincarnation said: I appreciate your feedback, honestly - I've been needing some. I didn't include the full deep dive of the content, I have updated the thread, please do revisit and provide further feedback in that aspect there are over 8 core system generating daily/weekly pull and no doubt more to follow. Good point raised on PWA's. I have an amateur friendly Dev Log on my landing page right now & it does give more detail on the iOS/Google Play route. We're wrapping with Capacitor which produces a native binary - no PWA bookmark. The web version is PWA-enabled for browser users but the store releases will be legitimately native-wrapped apps. I could absolutely do with grabbing at least an additional URL to hit "the" on the head too and use the current to redirect to it, I don't think it will be a huge issue IMO as my main area of succession is aimed to come from the App Stores, but it's something I need to think about for sure; very valid point. Thinking of it as I typed this though - when you look at the target audience, it's people who grew up on .com domain games, fifthfamily.com is taken so I'm limited. I absolutely hate these new domain abbreviations - but for the sake of a few £, I may as well go grab one. I do want to say though, I don't believe it's a dying genre at all. There are still a small handful of games out there thriving and the obvious one (Torn) has 90,000+ active users daily - the one's dying are low effort clones or they're absolutely text filled, that's never going to work anymore. Torn can do it still, because they have partially moved with the times, forever adding more content and have a very loyal userbase. There is a gap I feel and that's why I built this! If the custom TLD doesn't appeal fifthfam.com is available! Could be a good middle ground. Just to play devils advocate or whatever here: What makes your game different than let's say torn? You seem to have territory wars, similar load out strategy, bosses (torn has Duke and all those), same 4 stats, same crime mastery, etc. what makes it not a torn clone with makeup? Quote
Reincarnation Posted 2 minutes ago Author Posted 2 minutes ago 4 minutes ago, gamble said: If the custom TLD doesn't appeal fifthfam.com is available! Could be a good middle ground. Just to play devils advocate or whatever here: What makes your game different than let's say torn? You seem to have territory wars, similar load out strategy, bosses (torn has Duke and all those), same 4 stats, same crime mastery, etc. what makes it not a torn clone with makeup? Fair question — on the surface yeah, the genre has shared DNA. Stats, crimes, bosses, territory. But that's like saying every FPS is a CoD clone because it has guns. Those are genre staples. What's actually different: everyone starts on day one together. In Torn you're joining 15+ years of compound progress you'll never catch up to. That fresh start window doesn't exist there and never will again - that is a big reason why people try new games too. The game has 36 unique crimes spread across 6 distinct districts, each with their own boss fight, mastery tiers from Bronze to Platinum, and collection sets that give permanent passive bonuses. There's a real sense of geographic progression — you're not just sitting in one city grinding the same list. Smuggling isn't a travel-and-buy system. It's a volatile dynamic market with fluctuating prices and customs interdiction risk that scales with your bag capacity. It's its own mini-game with real consequences. It still needs further depth, but that comes with time. There's a full Academy with 48 courses across 8 degrees that unlock perks like combat defence, casino luck, and heat reduction. A Chop Shop where you steal cars, a Garage to maintain them, and Street Racing with an actual minigame — not just a button press. A Stock Market with live portfolio tracking. Real Estate generating passive income. The Fence for selling loot. 7 equipment slots with a full rarity system from Common to Legendary. Consumables with timed effects - even more consumables that give temporary boosts to crime chances/money received. An Achievement system. Careers, Bloodline progression, a Mansion, Rackets. Then the Territory War Map — 20 districts, 4 Sentry Towers gating a central Don Hall, resource nodes, road-based adjacency for raids. The Don sets city-wide tax affecting every player's crime income, appoints 9 government roles with stat buffs, issues proclamations, and places bounties. That's political gameplay layered on territory control that Torn simply doesn't have. This isn't a Leaflet.js territory map like Torn's, it's graphical, meaningful and has serious gameplay mechanics that Torn doesn't offer because Leaflet.js is too limiting. And accessibility. Torn has 20 years of feature bloat and a brutal learning curve. I built a guided 10-step tutorial with an actual character walking you through. You're doing meaningful stuff within minutes, not spending your first week lost. Vigilante's.. I don't need to say anymore, they don't have such thing. I'm not trying to replace Torn — being compared to it is a compliment if it even comes to that. But there's room for more than one game in this genre and I'm not throwing text results everywhere like it's 2010. I've tried to build every action so it connects with the user - E.G Loot Drops/Collectables from crimes using visual loot feedback. The only replication is names of certain features are identical, but what's built inside is thoroughly different. Quote
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