Week 2 of building My Life as a Spy delivered something nobody expected this early: a fully working fog of war Unity multiplayer system, tested live across three different countries in real time. We are five weeks ahead of schedule with only two weeks of development behind us. We originally planned to build this system in week seven, but the team delivered it five weeks ahead of schedule. And We delivered it in week two.
I am Frank Salas — game producer and founder of Rather Clever, a fully remote indie studio rebuilding My Life as a Spy, a 25-year-old espionage RPG, from scratch in Unity. This is Devlog 03. This week I was producing a full game sprint, physically relocating from Lima, Peru to Medellín, Colombia, hiring a replacement developer, and running my staffing company all at the same time. This is what building an indie game studio actually looks like.
Quick Recap — Where Week 1 Left Us
Week one ended with a working multiplayer server, player movement, and a fully walkable district. We also lost a third developer during that first week and, surprisingly, shipped faster as a two-man team than we had as three. If you missed Devlog 02, go watch that first — this episode builds directly on it. Watch directly on Youtube.
Watch complete Devlog on YouTube:
Three Jobs, One Week
Before diving into the development breakdown, I want to be honest about the challenges we faced this week. I was running three jobs simultaneously.
Job one was producer on the game. Second Job was recruiter — replacing the developer we lost in week one. Job three was running Salas Staffing, my day-job staffing company. My recruiters handled all the initial screening interviews, running back to back every twenty minutes. They sent me recordings. I pulled the transcripts, ran them through AI to identify strong candidates, reviewed the video, and made the final call on who I would personally interview.
I have to be real here. Splitting my attention across these three priorities nearly cost me a long-term staffing client this week. Launching a new venture while running an existing business comes with real trade-offs. It forced me to immediately hire additional support at the staffing company so the game studio would not create damage to the business that funds it. That is what growing pains actually look like. This is not the polished version of a startup story. This is the real one.
Phase Zero Complete — Five Weeks Ahead of Schedule
I want to make one thing clear before anything else. This week, the team completed Phase Zero—the entire foundational build—even though we originally allocated five weeks for it. We completed it in two.
We originally planned to start building the Fog of War Unity multiplayer system in week four, but the team completed it much earlier than expected. Phase two overlaps with phase one slightly by design — we build certain systems in parallel — but the speed at which this team has moved goes beyond anything the production plan projected.
Each phase of this project has its own checkpoint. Every system in that phase must work correctly before the team advances. No exceptions. Phase Zero checkpoint: passed cleanly. The project has now entered Phase Two, and we expect this stage to take between four and ten weeks. Based on the pace this team has set, it will not take that long.
Implementing Fog of War Unity Multiplayer — The Full Week Breakdown
Monday — The Vision Cone Takes Shape
The fog of war work actually started during the previous Saturday’s free exploration session, so the team came into Monday with a head start. The first task completed on Monday was combat logging — the mechanic that keeps a player’s character present in the world for roughly thirty seconds after they disconnect or log out. In an espionage game, this mechanic is fundamental. It closes the escape hatch of logging out to avoid being killed and looted.
Alongside that, the fog of war Unity multiplayer vision cone began developing into something real. One developer also logged into the classic version of My Life as a Spy to take reference screenshots of the black HQ layout, feeding that intel directly into the rebuild so our version stays faithful to what made the original work.
Tuesday — All Five Agents, All Three Bases, Phase Zero Done
By Tuesday night, Phase Zero was completely finished.
The team built out the red base and the green base. The team added all five color agents—purple, white, red, black, and green—to the game and got them moving correctly. We also implemented a save system that lets players log out and return to their session, and we placed dropboxes throughout the map. These are a core gameplay mechanic: players pick up documents from their headquarters, sprint to dropboxes placed across the district, and drop them off to earn money and training points. The act of going out into the world to complete a document run is what forces player-to-player encounters, which is the engine that drives all of the espionage and combat in the game.
I was also spending late nights building 3D vendor models — weapons vendors, gadget vendors, and armor vendors — because placeholder graphics were slowing down the team’s ability to design around the real layout of the spaces. Not polished. But functional.
Wednesday — Fog of War Goes Live Over the Internet
Wednesday is when the fog of war Unity multiplayer system became something real and testable. The vision system was running live over the internet with developers connecting from different countries. At the same time, the team added agency identification by placing a small color-coded circle above each player, making it easy to recognize which faction they belong to. You can see who is on your own team at a glance. Which agents are on enemy agencies is something you have to go out into the world and discover. That information gap is intentional. It is a core part of what makes this game work.
The team was still working through the camera perspective issue that had been frustrating them all week. A field of vision distortion was making walls of equal length appear to have different sizes depending on the camera angle. This would take the rest of the week to solve.
Thursday — New Developer Joins, Agency Screen Gets Art Direction
The new developer who was hired to replace the one lost in week one officially joined on Thursday. Late that night and early the following morning, I had to map out exactly what this person would own for Thursday, Friday, and Saturday so there was no gap in momentum.
Thursday also brought the agency selection screen to life. Choose your agency, get spawned into their headquarters, and play as their color. The first version was rough — basic layout, placeholder art. Through several rounds of art direction from my side, including delivering the right assets and setting clear visual standards, it became something genuinely presentable for a pre-alpha test. This is where a producer who also handles creative direction earns the role.
Friday — The Vision Cone Gets Refined
By Friday, the fog of war Unity multiplayer vision cone had gone from a hard, geometric shape to something that felt natural and cinematic. Agents and objects now fade into visibility gradually as they enter the player’s line of sight, then fade out rather than snapping off. All three developers connected to the server simultaneously to run a proper multiplayer test — playing hide-and-seek behind doors and around corners to stress-test every edge case in the system.
Corner mechanics were among the specific things tested. The ability to step in and out of a corner and have the visibility system respond correctly in real time is not optional in a spy game — it is the difference between a mechanic that creates tension and one that feels broken. It passed.
Saturday Free Exploration — The Breathing Effect
On Saturday, the developer who led the fog of war work wanted to experiment with something he described as a breathing effect — a subtle, rhythmic pulse in the vision field. The initial question from the team was simple: when would we actually use this?
After discussion, the list of use cases became obvious. Smoke bombs. Poison status effects. Low health. Low stamina. Every one of those gameplay states could use a variation of this same visual system. That is the Rather Clever studio philosophy: everything we build should be scalable and reusable. Whatever we develop for My Life as a Spy should be portable to any future project in the studio’s catalog — a sequel, a mobile game, something in a completely different genre. The technology belongs to the studio. Not to a single project.
Saturday also produced the most visible improvement of the entire week: the new developer fixed the character animations completely. By giving every character a proper humanoid skeleton, the entire Unity animation library became available. The before and after was dramatic. The characters no longer move in a way that has been generously described throughout these devlogs as unusual.
The IP Drama — What Really Happened
This section deserves its own space, and the full story will be told in a future episode — possibly a documentary format if the game reaches the audience it deserves.
The original creator of My Life as a Spy sold the IP. For over sixteen years after that, the previous license holder kept the game running out of genuine love for it and dedication to the community. That community is small, tight-knit, and deeply invested in a game most of the world has never heard of.
On April 9th, I reached out to the previous license holder as the new IP owner. The message was respectful and collaborative. The goal was to keep the classic version stable and accessible to the community while the new Unity rebuild was being developed, and do it together.
The response was not what I hoped for. The Discord server was shut down and the classic game was taken offline completely. The community that had been playing this game for years lost access to it overnight.
The door remains open on my side. I have been collaborative from day one. I feel genuine sadness for the community members who lost their home. They did nothing wrong and they are exactly the people I am building this for.
Right now there is no classic version of My Life as a Spy available and no new version is ready. The rebuild fills that gap. On the official Discord for the new game, daily development updates go out because it is difficult to trust something you cannot see. The community is growing slowly and beginning to heal. The Unity multiplayer system we are building today will eventually help give those players a new home. That matters more than any schedule milestone.
Week 2 Results — The Summary
Five weeks ahead of schedule. That is the headline.
Here is what was specifically delivered this week:
We completed Phase Zero in just two weeks despite planning five weeks for it. The team implemented, refined, and tested the Fog of War Unity multiplayer system live over the internet with three remote developers connecting from different countries. We built all five agency headquarters and brought all five color agents into the game with proper movement. The team designed an agency selection screen and transformed it from a placeholder into a pre-alpha experience. We implemented a save system, prototyped and tested the document run loop, and added combat logging. We also completely fixed the character animations with a proper humanoid skeleton. In the middle of the sprint, we hired and onboarded a new developer without sacrificing a single day of productivity.
What Is Coming in Week 3
A fourth developer joins the team in week three — hired during week two but starting now. The development focus shifts toward the economy layer: how vendors function, how money flows between players and systems, and how the quality of those interactions matches what the gameplay loop requires.
Community outreach continues on Discord with daily updates. More people are joining every week as the progress becomes visible. If you are in the Discord when the pre-alpha opens, you will be among the first to play the rebuilt version of My Life as a Spy.
The fog of war Unity multiplayer system will continue to be tuned in week three alongside the new economy work. By the time week three concludes, the game will have a functional economy layer sitting on top of the multiplayer and visibility foundation already in place.
Subscribe to the channel and join the Discord — the link is in the video description. If you are building a game and need a development partner, visit SalasGames.com.
Final Thoughts
When you add it all up — fog of war Unity multiplayer running live across three countries, five playable agencies with their own headquarters, a document run loop, combat logging, a new developer joining the team mid-sprint, and the completion of an entire phase three weeks ahead of schedule — the conclusion becomes obvious.
Small, aligned teams with clear scope and genuine belief in what they are building will consistently deliver more than larger teams without those things. Week 2 proved that again.
The foundation is solid. The pace is real. My Life as a Spy is being built, and it is being built right.
See you in Week 3.