Shadows of Doubt DevBlog #37: The Road to New Content
Shadows of Doubt is a detective stealth game set in a fully-simulated sci-fi metropolis! There’s been a murder and it’s up to you to solve it by any means necessary, with the condition that you keep a low profile. A unique mix of procedural generation and hand-crafted design enables every room of every building to be explored. Be sure to wishlist on Steam, join our Discord or read previous dev blog entries here!
I’ve got some exciting news to share in this one, it’s probably about time we talked about the changes to our roadmap. Due to a couple of factors (including the success of the game) we’ve decided to extend and revise our initial Early Access plan: The timeline will now be roughly a year, but we’ve also added some stuff to it based on the feedback from the community. This is what our new roadmap looks like:
Out of the gate, it became apparent that our main focus should be on sorting out bugs; this is a complex game with so many moving parts and as a small team it does take time to tackle everything. This pushed back the initial content update a little. We’re getting through them though and fixing bugs will remain a high priority: You’ll continue to see frequent patches every couple of weeks interspersed with less frequent content updates.
Secondly, there has been quite a high demand for modding. We’re eager to respond to that, so we’ve added a focus to it in our roadmap as a second content update due towards the end of the year. More on that in future blogs.
With that said, we can start to look forward to our first content update ‘Cheats & Liars’, which will arrive in September!
Another thing I’m working on is compressed save games and city data files. At the moment they tend to be quite large; sometimes well over 100mb (especially in the case of larger cities). Because of this, currently, only the save games are stored in the Steam cloud and not the city data files.
This can potentially cause problems because if you were to try and load a save game on another machine without also having the generated city file, the game will try and recreate the required city from the city seed. This is fine if the game is on the same or similar version, but if the city was created on an older version of the game there can be differences in what cities feature: Which can of course mean issues when you load in the game.
The good news is that compression reduces the file sizes quite a lot, in some cases around 10x. This means the file sizes become more manageable and we can open up steam cloud to include city data as well as save games. This will go some distance towards mitigating the problem as Steam will be syncing both city and save data across devices.
In an ideal world, we’d have it so new versions of the game are capable of recreating identical cities to what an older version of the game would generate if needed. This isn’t an impossible thing to implement but it is quite tricky as it would involve storing multiple past versions of the game’s configuration files for things like furniture and items (as the city generation process relies on this). We may revisit this idea in future if needed, but for now data compression will start to roll out over the next few experimental branch patches.
That’s it for this update, hopefully, you are looking forward to what’s to come!
