ColePowered Games Ltd.

Shadows of Doubt is a detective management/simulation game set in a procedurally generated and fully simulated city. As head of the police detective department, it’s your job to organise your sleuths and track down AI serial killers before they strike again! Read previous dev blog entries here.

Sometimes you can judge how hard I’m working on the game by lack of my blog updates, it’s fair to say that’s been true recently. I’m rallying to get something presentable and playable to some extent by late summer.

It’s always been my personal game dev philosophy that I’d rather make games that are too ambitious for their own good, rather than under-ambitious. This project is not an exception. Despite my enthusiasm, however, so far the ‘game’ part has always seemed off. I love a good management game, but I guess a big reason why detective games and management games haven’t crossed paths before (to my knowledge) is that… Well, it’s pretty fun for the player to do the detective work, not leave it to a team of minions!

The game needed an injection of excitement in order for me to clarify where my ideas were heading…

In the last update, I mentioned about putting a first person controller inside the 3D city that I’ve constructed, just to get a sense of what it would be like to explore the city from street level. Although my original idea for the game certainly didn’t require that, part of what makes development fun for me is trying out those ideas. It’s been a huge amount of work to create this simulated city and population, and I thought it a shame that you can’t really feel ‘among’ it with a top-down camera perspective. I only really started with the overhead perspective because it’s typically part of the management game genre. Often the reason for that is because the player is required to build things– that’s not the case here, so it seemed ripe for experimentation.

This is about the latest in the project I can comfortably change something as fundamental as this without having to remake a lot of things. The first person perspective is more of an addition than a change. I still want to keep the framework that I’ve made involving the procedural cases, population etc and even most of the management aspects. You can still pause the game at any time and interact with all the case files, as I’ve shown previously. The key difference being the player is now the detective. You’ll still need your team of professionals to complement you- (eg forensics experts, ordering DNA tests, autopsies etc). But you’ll be visiting the crime scenes, questioning and pursuing suspects yourself and generally being more a part of the world in addition to having that slightly lighter management role.

This, of course, is a lot more work on my plate. As a bit of a visuals enthusiast though, I’m having a lot of fun making some of the early assets. I’ve chosen to go for a hybrid of pixel art and voxels to make the creation process relatively easy. I’m loving working with voxels- it’s like working with Lego. I have a huge catalogue of building models from Concrete Jungle which I can adapt and ‘voxelize’- it’s saving me a decent chunk of time and because the art style is so different it doesn’t feel like a cheat.

Because of my ‘everything-is-simulated’ approach, the procedural generation means shadow baking is unavailable to me. The lighting is going to be a bit primitive as a result, but luckily this works fine with my low-fidelity art style. It also means all the interiors have to exist in some state– when I’ve got skyscrapers with 20+ floors, this is a challenge.

This is my custom-built floor editor. As you may be able to deduce, buildings floors are planned using a 5×5 grid. I need to keep these aspects of the game as simple as possible, as the game needs to handle a lot of pathfinding to simulate the citizens. I can designate zoning to each room (for example street-facing ground floor rooms may be retail/shops, floors above may contain residential apartments). The game will populate these rooms with businesses or apartments as appropriate when the city is generated in a similar way to SimCity. The different occupant types are also contained within presets (Unity scriptable objects). I can use different floor presets to generate buildings that are different from each other internally, while keeping my workload manageable. It’s all about those nested presets! Interior decor will be a whole other layer to this, but that’s not so important right now.

I’m really excited to show more as the game progresses!

 

Shadows of Doubt is a detective management/simulation game set in a procedurally generated and fully simulated city. As head of the police detective department, it’s your job to organise your sleuths and track down AI serial killers before they strike again! Read previous dev blog entries here.

In this dev blog I’ll be talking about the design of the game’s interface.

Last week I switched over to making some art as I was getting slightly frustrated with the coding- not because it was going badly, but because without graphics the game feels like it wasn’t progressing. I needed that change of pace, and seeing the visuals start to come together a bit has given me some more confidence in the project.

Selecting fonts has been interesting- since I’m working with bitmap pixel art fonts on this project, I can’t scale them properly without them looking awful. Therefore I’ve had to stick to 1x, 2x or more their designed size in order for the pixels to remain consistent sizes. It’s not a design challenge I had prepared for, but with some extra time and attention, I’ve managed to find some great fonts that are the size I need and most importantly remain clear. Font artists who provide affordable or even free fonts for commercial use are the unsung heroes of game development! A big thank you to Zacchary-Dempsey-Plante, Yusuke Kamiyamane, ‘NAL‘ and Chase Babb for the fonts I’m using here.

I’m taking a skeuomorphic approach to the interface design- that is the elements look like their real-world counterparts. For example, the evidence information windows look like case files, the clock in the corner of the screen looks like a retro digital watch (the game takes place in the late 70s through to 90s) and the corkboard interface looks like, well, a corkboard.

Many games feature this design style, the one that springs to mind off the top of my head being Papers Please. I tried to touch a little on this in Concrete Jungle too- my games tend to be interface heavy, so why not make the interface as fun to use as possible? It’s the attention to detail that can go a long way- especially in combination with satisfying sound design (eg. rustles of paper, or the ‘stamp’ sound when you purchased a new card in Concrete Jungle). A good UI the player will never really notice because ideally, it presents no barrier to interaction and immersion with the game.

The interface also needs to be intuitive. This is a really complex game that will no doubt require a fairly in-depth tutorial, but that’s not going to stop me trying to communicate as much as I can about how to play the game through the interface design. One super obvious thing that I really like in games like this is the use of tooltips. Mouse over something for a second or so and you’ll get a small popup window explaining what it is and its place in the game. In absence of a tutorial, I’m relying on tooltips to communicate to players almost everything right now.

The corkboard itself is a familiar detective trope that everyone knows from movies and tv shows, and within the game has even more functionality. At the moment the corkboard also displays the core mechanic behind the game logic recognising incriminating evidence.  Incrimination is passed along from one evidence item to another via connections (represented by the string). For example, the source of incrimination could be a dead body with a stab wound. The connection to where it was found (in this example lets say an apartment) will pass a sizable portion of that incrimination from the body along to it. From there you could discover that someone other than the victim lives in that apartment- again a portion of incrimination from the apartment is passed along to that person via the connection.

This means the incrimination spans outward from the key evidence of the crime and is also visualized really well with the corkboard interface. Recently I’ve added animation to the strings so you can clearly see which way the incrimination is ‘flowing’. String colours range from white to red the more incriminating a connection is. The strings also vary in width depending on how reliable a connection is.

I’m focusing on these seemingly minor details now as they have a knock-on effect of streamlining how you play the game. Whenever I run a build, I don’t know what’s going to happen. The clearer the interface is, the easier it is to understand what’s happening within the game.

I’ve really been enjoying the UI work- next I hope to start moving onto some 3D stuff. Exciting!