The Henchmen Windows, Mac, Linux game

Hello everyone! This time we're talking about the City in which the game takes place, and we're going to talk about the Plot of the game.

The Plot

The Henchmen is set in both the late 1970s and early 1990s in the fictional American city of New Queens, as you partake in the gang conflicts that dominate the city from a different point of views.

Many parties want to have control of the city, and gangs rise and fall with the passing of the years.

A key character in the city (and the game itself) is Anthony Castellano, the head of the Castellano Mafia family: He has the uttermost control on the drugs, weapon and the sex rings in the city: If you step into the city, you step in his territory.

During the mid 70s the Yakuza managed to get some grip on the city under the command of Homura, a man who nobody seems to know anything about, and has since then become Castellano's number one enemy by taking control of some of his territories and starting production of their own crack, which is then sold on the street competing with Castellano's imported drugs.

Other parties also exist and they too want a piece of this violent cake: The Irish and the Mexican Cartel produce products outside of the city, which get then imported in New Queens and sold to Castellano, Who gets them circulating on the streets, where ulterior conflicts arise: both the upstate and downstate (temporary, placeholder gang names) want to be the only ones to have the privilege of selling the drugs on the street for either Castellano or The Yakuza, depending on who destroys the other first.

Of course, the control of the city shifts between the game's two timelines, but that is for you, the player, to discover once the game is out.
As mentioned earlier, you get to play different characters, who have their own different stories united by the criminal underworld of New Queen:

One point of view is Rachel's, a young single mother woman who wants to leave the world of crime for the safety of her daughter, but is in too deep to leave, as both she and her partner Leo, (a man who hasn't got much going for him other than his job) are Castellano's best Henchmen.

You will also get to play as Slim and Playboy, two one-bit gangsters who feel are on a climb to become the next feared, city-ruling gangsters, but can't even manage to pay for their weed.

There are also Ichiro and Mitsuko's pov, as they are Homura's son and daughter, and his most valued assets.

This game is heavily story-driven, and for a good story, you will need an experienced writer: enter Tiziano Ottaviani, our second main team member. Tiziano runs an Italian storytelling blog "Scripta" and is currently finishing the first book out of 6 of his massive fantasy novel "Saga" (that's the name of the book by the way): Tiziano works on the story and dialogues, lifting a weight from me as I work on pretty much everything else and simultaneously does a better job at it than I ever could.

Sufficed to say, we are incredibly excited on the prospect of having you guys experience what we're building.
Other than main story missions, there will be more activities, of which we will talk about in later articles.

The World

The real protagonist in every open-world game is, well, the world. So let's talk about it.

As mentioned before, New Queens is a fictional city: a generalization of America's metropolises, a blank state for our narrative to unfold: unlike other games, such as Grand Theft Auto, New Queens is not a parody of a real, existing city.

The city is divided into multiple neighborhoods and three main districts: The Industrial district (currently named Greypoint Flats), The commercial district (Currently called Kingford Heights) and the Suburban district (currently called Laguna Hills) While the city isn't very big, each building is handcrafted with their own unique textures and meshes: what this means is you will very rarely find two buildings that look alike or share assets.

We are also designing streets in such a way to increase the perceived size of the level, and we are trying to avoid very long streets that cover a relatively big part of the city. This technique is very important, as it is what made maps that are actually pretty small feel huge: Rockstar Games did this beautifully with PS2-era GTA games, as many people even today swear that GTA: San Andreas had a bigger map than GTA V.

Screenshot: The City map turned out one-year-old this month, as the work on the city was started in early September 2018. This is a screenshot of last year versus now.

New Queens is currently around 50% complete, as every building and road exists, but most of the city is completely devoid of details. This is also the reason why, in the videos and screenshots we've released, we have only shown the same area of the city.

This is all for now, if you're interested in the game

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