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ColePowered Games Ltd.

The Game development adventures of Cole Jefferies.

Shadows of Doubt DevBlog #37: The Road to New Content

Shadows of Doubt DevBlog #37: The Road to New Content

July 21, 2023 colej Comments 2 comments

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!

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Shadows of Doubt DevBlog #36: A Roadmap Update

Shadows of Doubt DevBlog #36: A Roadmap Update

June 30, 2023 colej Comments 3 comments

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!

Hello detectives! Welcome to the latest instalment of the dev blog.

I’m writing an update today to talk about progress and what you can expect from the project in the near future. It’s continued to be really busy; I’m really pleased with the number of bugs we’ve been able to fix since the initial launch but am also aware that there’s still a bunch more to go. We’ve decided to prioritise the bug fixing over new content, at least during this initial phase. It feels like we should aim for a solid foundation for new content as possible, and while we’re super excited about all the ideas we (and you) have about expanding the game, it’s sensible to not try and rush too many things into it right away.

We’re settling into a rhythm of releasing experimental patches, then pushing them to the default branch a week or two after. Josh has been working at increasing performance and reducing the obstacles to a smoother gameplay experience; this is a work in progress and you’ll likely see small gains as we continue to roll out the patches. Meanwhile, I’ve mostly been focused on fixing gameplay bugs: The reports you’ve been submitting are super useful and contain most of the info we need to track things down.

A quick note on new builds; occasionally changes we make can affect how the game generates a city using a seed. For example, if we added a piece of furniture, the game will generate a city featuring it whereas previous versions wouldn’t; this can have a knock-on effect that changes other things in the city if you compare it to one that was generated with a previous build with the same seed. Therefore it’s worth stating that city seeds themselves often won’t be fully forwards or backwards compatible with previous versions. What does this mean? Not much in effect; if you have your previously generated city file any save games that use that city will continue to work with it (unless we state otherwise in an update- but we’ll try and keep this to an absolute minimum).

It only really matters if you were to delete the city file a save game uses, and then try to load that save game with a newer version: It will attempt to recreate the city using the seed saved in the save game file, but the city generated could be slightly different, therefore causing inconsistencies. I don’t foresee this as being a big problem, but I’ll be looking at ways to mitigate this in the future or at least communicate it in-game.

TLDR: Don’t delete your city files for save games you still want to play on.

A work-in-progress shot of a new location that may be featured in the first content update!

A last bit of news: I’m looking for another Unity developer to work with on Shadows! If you’re interested or know somebody who does, have a look at this job page for details.

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Indie Games developer, currently working on detective simulator game ‘Shadows of Doubt’. I also made Concrete Jungle.

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