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Interview i am gangster code#
There’s little coincidence that the first code for Project Highrise started a month after I moved back to Chicago. On one hand, sort of minimalism and international style, different schools of architecture–which our wonderful city has so many great examples of. We really dug into the mid century modern look and feel of things. Of course, with a high rise building, visually, and in terms of the setting, our inspiration was Chicago. But also other building simulation games, like Theme Hospital and Theme Park, and others like Dungeon Keeper, games where you build an ecosystem of characters that walk around and do stuff, and you have to keep everybody happy, so that’s the inspiration we had for this. Project Highrise was very much inspired on one hand by games we remembered from the ‘90s, so Sim Tower comes to mind of course. We’d done design and planning ahead of time, rough and high-level, to see what it was gonna look like and we worked up to a year or two and a half years ago, so we couldn’t do it as a first game, because we wanted to make something that was within a reasonable scope–something we could do and see if this whole ‘going indie and making a game’ thing could even work, right? Fortunately it did work with our first game, so we were selling the first game and porting it while working on the second game.
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So, Project Highrise was the game we wanted to make first, as Matt mentioned, but it was definitely a large scale kind of game. ROB: What did I do? *laughs* Screenshot: 1849 Then after that, we started looking at Project Highrise, and Rob can talk a little bit about what led him there. So we made 1849, that came out in 2014, in about the year we had to develop it. We were looking at all the old gold rush cities and thinking “Those were all built real fast…so how did that work?” How did the Gold Rush look from the perspective of building cities and managing the systems that went on behind the Gold Rush. The second idea was a game called 1849 which was inspired by our drive back from Thanksgiving, going through California’s gold country. Our first idea was the game that became Project Highrise, but we looked at it and said “That’s going to take more than a year” and so we put that aside and looked at our second idea. So we decided we were going to start, and we looked at our savings and what we had to fund the studio and said “We’ve got about a year to make this work, so what game can we make in a year?” We really wanted to make our own games and work together, and start a studio making the kind of simulation games that we really wanted to play but weren’t seeing made that much anymore. I was the communications director of a big non profit in San Francisco where we were living at the time and we had been planning to do this for a while.
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Rob had been in the games industry for a long time before that. Recently, we caught up with the two of them and discussed everything from how SomaSim came to be, to their success with Project Highrise and most excitingly, all the details we could uncover about City of Gangsters. It’s a new take on an incredibly evocative era, and we’re extremely lucky to have been able to sit down with devs Matt Viglione and Rob Zubek to talk more about sim games, SomaSim itself, and upcoming City of Gangsters, which we think you’ll be as excited to get your hands on as we are, once it’s unleashed on the world.
Interview i am gangster how to#
Instead of focusing on action and combat, their recently announced new game, City of Gangsters, puts the sim spin on the drinkin’ and sin, turning player focus to managing a complex criminal organization, asking the more interesting question of how to build a suddenly illegal business from the ground (or the basement, in this case) up, how to build a network of trust with vendors and potential customers and how to really people manage those hotheaded gangsters. Local devs SomaSim, lovers of sim games and creators of the excellent skyscraper sim Project Highrise, challenge that notion and look at Prohibition-era Chicago in a different way. So you might be tempted to think you know what a game set in Prohibition-era Chicago would be like. It’s no wonder so many games have tread this territory before, with the secrecy and explosive combat being big draws.
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It’s got so much imagery attached to it, too–the suits, the dresses, the speakeasies and tommy guns, gangsters and gang wars. 1920s Chicago is an era that invokes a lot of immediate images and has inspired even more movies, books and games.