DAY ONE

From day one, I could see the Wise Guy in my head cartoony but mean, full of attitude.
That look, that energy… I knew exactly what I wanted. BUT I don’t have the art skills to draw him cleanly, and I didn’t want to burn time making bad concept art that didn’t match what was in my head.

So instead of drawing him first, I jumped straight into ZBrush and decided to block out the first wise guy. To be honest, part of that decision was also fear, I’d wanted to make a multiplayer game for so long, but it scared the shit out of me. So instead of confronting that monster, I kicked things off by blocking out this rough Wise Guy and trying to find the stylized, angry feel I wanted from the character.

Once I had a basic character blocked out, I rigged him up and dropped him into Unreal. To start testing multiplayer, I needed to register the game on steam, so I paid the $100 Steam fee and officially registered the game under the codename PROJECT RICO.

And that made it real. I’d invested money. My family and friends knew about it. Now I had to do it.

I set up the Steam subsystem, made a basic main menu with host and join buttons, and uploaded the starter map to Steam.

MULTIPLAYER HELL BEGINS

For the first time ever, I hosted my own game… and a player joined. Super basic voice worked, basic movement worked, and suddenly there’s my rough Wise Guy running around, controlled by one of my mates. It was such a cool moment. Surreal, honestly. But it also exposed how little I knew about multiplayer.

The starter project in unreal engine come with a basic pickup weapon, and very basic controls, i setup multiplayer, now it was time for us to shoot at each other.

But when players would pick up a gun… nobody else could see it. The host could fire a gun… but the clients saw nothing. Animations weren’t updating with each action, ragdolls were stretching. Nothing was syncing. It was such an overwhelming mess so early on and I hit a crossroads that im sure all indie devs hit.: “This is going to be so much work. Is it worth it?  Can I even do this? Should I give up?”

But I’d already been annoying my family and friends for weeks talking about this game, how I was going to make it… so giving up was no longer an option. So i said Fuck it. And down the rabbit hole we go.

To avoid drowning, I set small goals for myself:

• Make the gun show for all players
• Make shooting work for all players
• Make ragdolls replicate properly

Simple on paper. Absolute hell in practice.

So much research, so much trial and error, so many moments of overwhelming burnout. And when I hit that burnout wall — something I've learned over the years, I switch gears.

When one thing is frying my brain, rather than take a break from the project, I go work on something else.

THE NEW WISE GUY

I could see Wise Guys in my head, but I had trouble conveying the idea to my friends, so I needed to lock in the tone as early as possible, I wanted them to feel like they were playing as mobsters from the moment they see the characters, my plan was to nail that down then everyone could see what i have cooking in my head. So with the multiplayer burnout, I went back to the Wise Guy.

I took the original blockout and started sculpting.. And the result was far better than I expected.

I focused a ton on the face topology as I wanted them to have cool facial animations talking, reacting, raising eyebrows and I wanted their eyes to track players, similar to R.E.P.O. Those tiny details are weirdly immersive and really bring a character to life.

A couple of days later, I had a new Wise Guy, some basic animations for walking and shooting, and even some fun expressions. I even modelled a nice lil snubby revolver for the wise guys to use. Creating the new Wise Guy fired me back up and I was ready to drop him in the game, I blocked together a basic map, I set some colored lights for each corner of the map. inspired by the OG Mario Kart then I sent my friends some keys. The time has come, it was time for a  classic deathmatch DEATHMATCH GAMEPLAY

This moment was massive. I was nervous, excited, second-guessing everything.

But when we jumped in… my friends were having a blast. Just running around, shooting each other, laughing, causing chaos — even though it was all incredibly basic.

For weeks, I had been obsessing over this idea, bouncing concepts off everyone… and watching them actually have fun with the first barebones version of Wise Guys…

That’s when it hit me: This was no longer just an idea. It was becoming a game.

If you like the look of WISE GUYS please consider wishlisting the game on steam.

In the next episode, I begin building all of the core mechanics of wise guys, creating new weapons, an awesome melee brawling system and also introducing you all to the BOSS and of course THE RAT. 

Catch you in the next one!

Cheers!

Stonie.