One of the issues I encountered in the game, at least in the current state, was the game’s fun factor in its initial stage. As this is the beginning of the game, and the game needs to immediately entertain the player this was one of the most important tasks.
The player has options but will they be understood by the player when they initially turn on the game?

While the game featured a couple of interesting mechanics later on, in its middle and towards the end of a game scenario, mechanics like taking over buildings, getting good relationships with politicians, destroying other gangs by force or wit, improving your illegal businesses, assassinating key members of other gangs, the early game sees the player starting from the bottom and as such limited options are available when you’re at the bottom. The moment you’re just starting out as the criminal, your only options are to either improve yourself while doing criminal jobs, so you can do better criminal jobs or more lucrative paying jobs, do criminal jobs for small amount of money, produce alcohol or other illegal goods, and sell this illegal goods to interested parties. While these mechanics are all interesting, they weren’t as interesting as the later game mechanics. There was also the issue of the player starting with all these initial mechanics available to them from the start of the game, without any easing in, without much info about them, so they had the chance to overwhelmed the player.
There is always money in the distillery *ck* *ck*

While the solution might seem obvious to some of you, my approach to creating games was always to put things in what greatly benefit the game, rather than adding features to list on your product page on Steam. Now, of course, I didn’t always succeed in that approach, as ideas differ when you put them on something concrete. My solution was simple for this problem was simple, introduce a character that will act both as an advisor and as a real character, further rooting you in the place, period and in your character life. Inspired by books, movies and other media relating to crime and criminals, I named this character “Uncle”, and I think this decision was a very good one. The “Uncle” character would be able to provide tips to the user, ease them in when they’re starting out, provide additional tangible rewards to the player, and guide them to the mechanics that might be a bit harder to understand when you’re starting out. Below you can see this uncle character in action

Get a tooltip regarding the current task

Your uncle guiding you in to the family business

Your uncle guiding you in to the family business