I first picked up a copy of Gangsters: Organized Crime in 1999, and it just clicked. Something about that mix of strategy, management, and the gritty 1920s vibe kept pulling me back every few years. In 2016, I decided to try making my own version. Something that kept the spirit of the original but reworked the mechanics and feel into something a bit more modern.
Fast forward to now (nearly a decade later) and I’m finally taking a real shot at it. Not a weekend project or a quick prototype, but building it out properly and figuring out the right tools along the way.
Like most indie devs, I started with C# and Unity. It got things up and running fast, but for a systems-heavy sim game, it didn’t feel quite right. I needed more control and better performance. So I switched to Unreal and C++. Unreal was powerful, no doubt, but it also came with a lot of overhead. Blueprints are great for some stuff, but once things get deep, they get messy fast. I could’ve gone full C++ but… it’s slow to prototype and the verbosity starts to wear on you when you’re just trying to test ideas.
Then I made a bit of an odd call: Python with SDL and later OpenGL. Not exactly your typical game dev stack, but it made sense for what I wanted. Python lets me move fast – no compile times, no fighting an engine just to draw a few sprites. OpenGL gives me full control over rendering, which is key for performance and keeping things lean. For the heavy lifting, I’ve been using Cython to compile the bottlenecks down to C – so I still get the speed where it matters.
For visuals, I went with pre-rendered assets in Blender. Everything’s rendered out isometrically, which gives me that classic strategy game look without the overhead of real-time 3D. I’m leaning into the early 2000s aesthetic here – warm tones, sharp UIs with a bit of old-school charm.
Gameplay-wise, I’m staying close to what made G:OC great. It’s all about running a criminal empire – assigning orders to crew, managing territory, handling rivals, and watching your plans unfold over time. A proper gangster management sim, just modernized with some new tech and cleaner systems.
So yeah – I’m finally doing it. Building the game I’ve been thinking about for years, just with tools I never expected to be using. If there’s a takeaway here, it’s probably this: the “best” tools are the ones that keep you moving. Not the ones with the biggest marketing or the flashiest editor – just the ones that let you build.
Let’s go!