What happens when trouble catches up

The chase that costs nothing

The standard arrangement is that crime is a minigame with a timer. You do something, a meter fills, cars arrive, and then either the meter empties or you are caught, pay a fine, lose a few seconds, and stand up outside a station with your evening intact.

It is designed that way for a good reason. A single-player open world cannot take much from you, because everything it takes is something it then has to give back before you get bored. So the penalty shrinks until it is basically a fee for the entertainment, and the chase becomes the reward rather than the risk.

The tell is how players behave. When getting caught is cheap, the optimal play is to get caught, and you can watch people drive straight at the police to reset the meter.

A shared city can charge you properly

The thing that changes in a persistent city with an economy in it is that there is finally something worth confiscating, and it is not money.

It is time. Your shift is at a certain hour, your rent is due, the interest on your balance accrues while you are away, and your friends are online now rather than later. A penalty measured in minutes of your actual evening is the only one a player genuinely tries to avoid, because it is the only one that cannot be farmed back.

So getting caught in Craze City means doing time in Iron Bay Prison. Not a fine, not a fade to black, and not a five second stand-up outside the station.

Which makes the small crime interesting again

This is the part that surprised us in design. Raising the penalty did not make people stop committing crimes, it made the cheap ones worth thinking about.

Robbing a register is a small amount of money and a real amount of heat. With no consequence that trade is free and everybody takes it constantly. With a sentence at the end of it, the same decision suddenly has a shape.

Is it worth it

A till against an evening. Most of the time the answer is no, which is what makes the times you do it feel like something.

Can you get clear

Outrunning the heat becomes the actual skill, rather than a formality before the meter empties on its own.

Who is with you

A second player is a distraction, a driver, or a witness. Crime is the part of the city that most rewards having someone else in it.

What you were carrying

The same logic as the walk back across the bridge. Getting caught while holding a good day is worse than getting caught while holding nothing.

The obvious objection, and it is a fair one

A sentence a player cannot skip is a sentence that punishes the person, not the character, and on mobile that is a serious thing to do. Someone playing on a twenty minute break does not have an evening to lose.

We do not think the answer is to sell a way out, because a penalty you can pay to remove is a penalty only some players have. That is the same reasoning that keeps everything else in the city earned rather than bought.

The answer we are building toward instead is that prison has to be somewhere rather than nowhere: a place with people in it and things to do, so that serving time is a different part of the game rather than an absence from it. Whether that lands is a question for players, not for us, and it is the part of this design most likely to change before launch.

What it is not

Worth being precise, because crime searches attract a specific expectation. This is a city with police, heat and a register you can rob, not a heist game. There is no vault, no crew planning screen and no bank job.

Craze City is an online open-world life sim for mobile where crime is one thing the city lets you do alongside nine careers, property and the quarantine island. It has not launched. The waitlist is how you hear when it does.