Hi all,
As we approach Chicago Rum’s second anniversary, I wanted to pull back the curtain on what we’ve been working on over the last couple of months—and why we haven’t met some of our previous development targets.
One of our biggest goals was the development of a mobile app. As we began experimenting with proof-of-concepts, it became clear that Chicago Rum needs a major overhaul in how the game is built under the hood. The current UI isn’t easily exportable to a mobile app, and there are several other structural challenges that make incremental fixes impractical.
At the same time, we’ve taken a hard look at our existing features. Many of them are strong ideas, but they need more content, more depth, and better integration. More broadly, the game itself needs significantly more content and features to support where we want Chicago Rum to go.
So what’s been happening behind the scenes?
We’ve been working on a major overhaul of Chicago Rum. This includes substantial upgrades to core systems, reworking foundational functionality, a completely new desktop and mobile UI (including a proper app), and the introduction of several brand-new features.
You might be thinking sounds great, but this sounds like a 3 year project. I’m happy to announce that we are over 50% complete already, and the game is already playable today, and we’ve been testing things. We’re building extremely rapidly, and there is a very large amount of new content with more to come.
While I won’t get into every single feature today, I want to show a little preview of what I mean by “major overhaul”. I want to point out that this is simply one feature, and we’ve done this for all major features.
City Hall
City Hall has been reimagined from the ground up, with specific politicians you can intimidate for account enhancements including passive and active abilities. These abilities augment other features by giving you extra earnings, faster production or other benefits.
We’re internally calling this rebuild CHICAGO RUM 2.0, and I wanted to talk a little about the transition. Given the magnitude of changes, and the fact it’s on a totally separate technical platform, we are not able to partially give you 2.0 features until everything is complete. It’s a little premature for us to commit to a specific timeframe, however being 50% complete we expect to transition from the current build to 2.0 within the next handful of months.
Some of you have rightly pointed out that development in the current build has slowed down, and you’re right. We want to rebalance that a little bit and continue to provide updates, and perhaps backport some newer content to the game while you’re waiting for the big switch. We’ve started that process with Mission 4: Revenge from the South and will continue to dedicate some of our attention to our original roadmap, while working on the 2.0 project. We will keep you informed every 2 weeks on progress.
Thank you,
Mark & the staff team