Welcome to the first official Racketeering development blog! Forgive me in advance as this is an info dump.
We’ve been hard at work building the foundations of the game, and we’re excited to finally start sharing more of that work with you. This first update is a look at what Racketeering is, what’s already taking shape, and the features we’ll be focusing on next.
Development is ongoing, so everything shown and discussed may continue to change as we test, improve, and expand the game. We want to bring you along for that process—and your feedback will help us shape what Racketeering becomes.
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Racketeering is an open-world criminal empire game built around progression, ownership, and cooperation.
You’ll start small, establish your first operation, and work your way towards controlling a growing organisation. Cultivate and process products, manage property and equipment, use vehicles to move around the countryside and city, and build a network capable of making serious money.
But growth brings new problems. Rival gangs, reputation, territory, employees, customers, and legitimate business fronts will all become part of running your organisation. Racketeering is being designed from the ground up for multiplayer co-op, so you’ll be able to build that empire alongside your friends.
The long-term goal is a living criminal sandbox where your choices, properties, people, and reputation all contribute to the story of your rise.
Our building, placement, and ownership system is now complete.
Small items that would be impractical to simulate individually are handled through the inventory. Larger objects remain physical—you pick them up, carry them, and place them yourself. This includes bulk drugs, production equipment, storage, and the buildables used to create factories and grow houses.
Shelves help keep products and supplies organised, while compatible physical objects can also be transported in vehicles.
Production upgrades use the same hands-on system. Carry an upgrade to a compatible workstation, such as a trimming table, and install it to improve speed, output, or waste recovery. Some advanced upgrades may also require power.
Everything is built around ownership, saving, and multiplayer, so placed objects and installed upgrades stay synchronised across a co-op session. Vehicle cargo tests
Early inventory concepts - non-functional
Growing is more than placing a plant and waiting for a timer.
We’re developing an environmental system that allows the conditions around a plant to matter. The goal is to give players meaningful control over their growing spaces and make a well-designed operation more valuable than a room filled with randomly placed equipment.
This system will form the basis of a deeper cultivation loop, with room for different setups, strategies, upgrades, and levels of efficiency.
Room Themostat to control the enviroment
Developer tests of a room volumne
Different strains will give players something to discover, collect, and improve as their organisation grows.
Common strains will provide a starting point, while rarer strains will require more effort to obtain. We want valuable genetics to feel earned through progression, exploration, contacts, and other opportunities within the world—not simply handed to the player at the beginning.
Over time, your collection of strains should become another sign of how far your operation has progressed.
As your operation grows, so does the risk. Police and rival gangs may raid your properties, threatening your stock and everything you’ve built. 132 Strains of Weed - And thats just Weed
Harvesting is only one stage of the production process.
We’re working on drying, trimming and packaging systems that turn a finished crop into a product that can be stored, transported, and eventually sold. These steps help connect cultivation to the wider business loop and give players more decisions about how their operation is organised.
Our goal is to make production feel physical and satisfying without burying players beneath unnecessary busywork. Players can purchase mechanical trimmers to automate the process, trading hands-on upgrade benefits for convenience.
Testing the basic Trimming bench with a few upgrades
The map is being designed to support the game’s systems, not simply act as empty space between objectives.
Properties, roads, businesses, neighbourhoods, and points of interest all need to create opportunities for players. A useful location might offer better access, more room to expand, a faster route across the city, or a different balance of risk and reward.
We want the world to reward exploration while remaining practical to navigate. The current map will continue to grow and change as more gameplay systems come online.
A believable city needs movement, activity, and people who appear to have somewhere to be.
Traffic and NPC AI are important parts of making the world feel alive. We’re laying the groundwork for vehicles and characters that can navigate the map reliably while interacting with the wider game world.
This technology will also support several future systems, including customers, workers, recruits, rival gangs, and law enforcement encounters. It’s a large area of development, but one that will affect almost every part of the final experience. Development Tests of our vehicle traffic system at a major junction.
Racketeering is being built with multiplayer co-op in mind from the beginning.
Ownership, placement, interaction, vehicles, production, and progression all need to behave correctly when several players are working together. Building these foundations early is essential if we want co-op to feel like a natural part of the game instead of something added later.
Our vision is for friends to divide responsibilities, share resources, travel together, and build one organisation as a team.
Vehicles are a key part of moving through the world and running an expanding operation.
They’ll help players travel between properties, transport goods, and respond to opportunities across the map. They also need to work alongside multiplayer, traffic, and AI systems, which makes them another important piece of the game’s technical foundation.
As development continues, vehicles will become increasingly connected to the economy and the day-to-day running of your organisation and eventually may even take you across the water or across the sky.
We’ll continue developing traffic and pedestrian behaviour to make the countryside & city more believable and dependable. This work is also necessary for many of the larger gameplay systems planned for the future.
Growth shouldn’t happen without resistance.
Combat will introduce direct conflict with rival gangs, while reputation will influence how the city and its criminal organisations respond to you. Your actions should affect who respects you, who fears you, and who decides that your organisation has become a problem.
As our core systems become more established, we’ll continue expanding and refining the world.
New areas will create room for additional properties, businesses, opportunities, and conflicts. We want each part of the map to have a reason to exist and something useful or memorable for players to discover
Production needs a market.
Selling systems and NPC customers will complete more of the core business loop, giving players a way to turn their products into income. Our goal is to create customers with needs and behaviour, rather than treating selling as a single button disconnected from the world.
As rivalries develop, players will need people who can protect their interests.
Recruitable soldiers are planned as part of the organisation system. They’ll help players defend their operation and take on threats that become more serious as their influence grows.
A successful criminal organisation needs somewhere to invest—and sometimes hide—its money.
Legitimate businesses are planned to expand the economic side of Racketeering. They’ll give players new ways to earn income, build influence, and connect their criminal activities to the wider city.
This is only the beginning.
Right now, our focus is on building dependable foundations: placement, ownership, cultivation, processing, multiplayer, vehicles, the map, and AI. These systems need to work together before we can fully realise the larger criminal sandbox we’re aiming for.
We’ll share more detailed looks at individual features as development continues. Future blogs will dig further into our systems, show how they’re changing, and explain the decisions behind them.
Thank you for following the development of Racketeering. If you want to keep up with the latest progress, ask questions, or share your ideas, join us on Discord: https://discord.gg/xg3vdra2zX
We’ll see you in the next development blog.