ColePowered Games Ltd. – The Game development adventures of Cole Jefferies.

Shadows of Doubt DevBlog #40: Writing Claw of the Fathoms

July 31, 2024 colej Comments 5 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!

For this blog post we have a few words from our talented writer, Stark Holborn, in which they explore the process behind one of the more unique parts of the project: The fan-favourite in-game tv crime noir show! Without further ado, I’ll hand you right over…

Whenever anyone asks me what my favourite part of working on Shadows has been, my answer is always: all of the things we didn’t have to do, but did. To be clear, I mean that in the loosest sense: things that wouldn’t make the game fall over if we took them away, but which – I believe – have a huge impact on the game’s atmosphere as a whole.

One of these is the screenplay for Claw of the Fathoms, the noir film that can be heard playing on TVs throughout the world. A bit of background: from an early stage, Cole wanted the televisions in the world to be interactable: there’s something so atmospheric about hearing the sound of someone’s TV through the wall, or the switching on a black and white set in a dark room in the middle of the night. In early internal builds, we used audio from a Public Domain movie called The Big Combo. That had the right tone, but didn’t necessarily fit the alt-history 1970s dystopian world we were developing for Shadows.

The solution? A totally ridiculous one in some ways. We’d write our own.

It’s something some developers or publishers might have dismissed as too extra; too much work for something that has no direct impact on gameplay. But not Cole or the Shadows team. Which is good because the script for Claw of the Fathoms remains one of my favourite examples of worldbuilding in the game, and is one of the best writing jobs I’ve ever had.

When it came to a starting point, I’d already developed a range of crime noir novels (with synopses) that can be found on bookshelves throughout the game: the Decka Gill mysteries by Madagan Fitch. So I took the basic building blocks of noir tropes – a jaded, world-weary PI, a gruff cop, a psychopathic gangster, some stolen art, a snitch – and Shadows-ified them. In-keeping with the diversity ofthe world, I gender-flipped the traditional private eye role, and made the central conflict one that revolved around the Fathoms/Echelons social division within the city.

For all those interested, here’s the cast list I ended up with:

Decka Gill: Private Eye

Leonid “Lennie” Blaise: Police Detective

Angel Harris: Crime Boss

Samuel Delaney: Crooked Art Dealer

Gruff Man: Mysterious Informant

Trent Franklin: Low-life Hood and Snitch

Then it came to writing the script. Obviously, I would have loved to write the entire screenplay for Claw but that was a bit much, even for us. We decided we needed around fifteen minutes of run-time.

I wanted the scenes to have that organic, just-switched-on-in-the-middle-of-a-movie feel to them. Which meant that each scene had to be a discrete chunk that would make sense in almost any order, while simultaneously establishing the tone and characters. I ended up with seven scenes, ranging from the interior of a police station to a bar, an antique shop, an interview room and a docks warehouse.

I’m a fan of film noir in any case (some of my favourites being Night and the City by Jules Dassin, High and Low by Kurosawa and The Hitchhiker by Ida Lupino), but to get the right vibe I watched a whole load of examples, aiming for a classic back-and-forth patter typical to 1940s/1950s crime noir films. Then I threw a noir slang glossary at the writing. Case in point:

DECKA GILL

Lieutenant.

LIEUTENANT BLAISE

What you doing here, Gill?

GILL

Same thing as you.

LIEUTENANT BLAISE

Now look here–

GILL

Look where? Down at that Alderman you’re carrying these days?

LIEUTENANT BLAISE

I should send you to booking.

GILL

Oh, on what charge?

LIEUTENANT BLAISE

On whatever the hell charge I please.

Part of the joy of this whole task was the license to go hog-wild and be as noir-ish as I wanted. There’s a commissioner, bullets, rye and bodies piling up. But at the same time, this couldn’t be a noir written in our world, it had to be one written in the Shadows world. And that meant weaving as much lore into the script as possible.

In Decka Gill’s city, people light up Holy Smokes and are paid in Crows and suffer from Mustard Sickness. John Does are Jacques Does – thanks to the enduring influence of the Bourbon Empire. The scene with the most Shadows detail is probably the interrogation between Gill and Franklin, where she reels off all the things he stands to lose if he doesn’t talk:

GILL

Oh, I know all about you, Mr Franklin. I know you’ve made a deposit on a plot out in The Fields; just two payments left and it’s yours. Far away from here, a patch of grass, four wall to call your own…

FRANKLIN

I said shut up!

GILL

I’m afraid you have to kiss it goodbye, Mr Franklin. ‘Cos you know what happens to that nice

family of yours if you go down? They starve. They wind up in the Fathoms, living on trash and bleeding-heart funds, and all because you wanted to protect a rat like Angel Harris…

The character of Angel Harris – incidentally – is based on some of Richard Widmark’s classic villains. His monologue to Gill about Rossini is one of my favourite bits of the whole script. (Second only to the immortal: BON VOYAGEEEEEEE HOOOHOOO HAA HA HA HA, which Allen Enlow, the actor who plays Angel, ad-libbed on the day, so I can take no credit for).

Which brings us to voice casting. This all happened during one of the Covid-19 lockdowns, so there was no way we could record in-person. Luckily, there are many, many talented voice artists with home studios out there. We put out a call for the roles and found our dream cast: Sheree Wichard as Decka Gill, Allen Enlow as Angel Harris, Amir Yussof as Gruff Man/Franklin and Ben Britton as Lennie.

We were almost there. We had our script, our voice-acted scenes, but we still had to make them sound like a noir film. Step in Nick Dymond (aka monomoon), Shadows’ resident composer, sound and game designer and audio wizard. Using an extensive sound library, home-recorded foley, processing and mixing, he transformed the raw VO files into something that not only sounded, but felt like a movie.

I still get a kick out of hearing the scenes from Claw of the Fathoms in the game. The city’s citizens never seem to get tired of it, either, which is good as it’s the only film available for them to watch. (They do have sports games to break things up now too – but that’s a subject for another post…).

Even after hearing it hundreds of times, I’ll still pause to listen to Angel Harris’s insane cackle before the screen fades to static. Hopefully it’s a sign that – by going the extra mile – we created something truly unique and worthwhile.

Shadows of Doubt DevBlog #39: Content & Consoles

April 10, 2024 colej Comments 12 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! It’s time for a new dev blog as it’s an exciting point in the year. As you may have seen from the Triple-i Initiative showcase; Shadow of Doubt will be coming to both PS5 and Xbox series S and X when we leave early access. Stay tuned for more info on that as the year progresses.

Not only that though, I’m excited to announce our first major content update of the year titled ‘Sharpshooter Assassin’ which launched today also. You can read the full list of changes here. This is the largest content update yet; the main focus of it is two new killer variants, both based on a killer that will kill from range. Prepare to study bullet trajectories to hunt down vantage points across the city! The goal behind this is to inject the main serial killer cases with more variety, and you’ll have to alter your detective approach a bit to accommodate these killer types.

Alongside that, there are two new building types; a mixed-use industrial building and the often-referenced-to-in-lore ‘Fathoms’ which is a kind of slum/shanty town. At the opposite end of the social class spectrum, we also have new gated communities found at the tops of skyscrapers, where land values are at their highest. You’ll need special access to visit here (well legally anyway). I hope you have fun exploring the new city geography!

In addition to this, we have the introduction of social credit level perks. These have been on the cards for a while (previously the social levels were not used for anything apart from ending the game through retirement). Now each level has a small perk attached. I don’t want to spoil them all because I think they’re going to be fun to discover but I hope it gives new gameplay incentive and meaning towards gaining that precious social credit score.

There’s a bunch of other stuff in this update too, including reduced city generation time, steam cards and more but the last thing I’ll talk about here is the addition of an ‘auto travel’ feature. This is something I’ve wanted to put into the game for ages, but only now have found the time. The auto travel feature is a little like fast travel, but instead of teleporting to your destination, your character will automatically find their way to wherever you want to go.

Crucially, while auto travelling you can interact with your caseboard without pausing the game. Ever had it where you’re walking someplace and going over something in your head and not really putting much effort into the act of moving around as you know the route so well? This is trying to emulate that, kind of like a detective autopilot. It’s entirely optional of course, I expect some people to use it frequently and others to not, but it’s a feature I’m pretty pleased with. I also expect it could really help to make the game more approachable from an accessibility standpoint, or if you’re a player who is more interested in piecing together the case than physically moving throughout the world. There is a little bit of work left to do here as due to the variety of physical places the player can find themselves in, you can on occasion need to exit auto travel to guide the player yourself. Basic travel works pretty well though.

Auto travel options can be found in the location evidence window, with an additional toggle button found in the map interface.

As frequent players may have noticed, we’ve transitioned from pushing more frequent smaller patches to less frequent but larger patches. Expect this to continue going forward. Over the summer we’re going to have an increased focus on bug fixing, as well as improving controller support to get it up to a better standard. Until next time detectives!