ColePowered Games Ltd.

Shadows of Doubt is a first person detective 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.

This week has been hugely productive– following on from last week, I’ve implemented basic interiors so you can now go inside every building (complete with stairwells). That’s not to say interiors are anything like complete- there’s no furnishings, doors, or really anything of note, just rooms decorated in a sickly green striped wallpaper. However, the rooms even existing in 3D space is a nice milestone.

I’ve had to start thinking about the culling techniques for the game, as the game can’t possibly render every single room in every single building across the entire city at once. I’ve been able to appropriate my pathfinding/grid system to help me here, as interior space configurations are massively simplified by being on an internal 5×5 grid system, it’s able to help the engine know what to render and what to skip. The streets are rendered from inside a building, so you can see out the windows, but not vice versa. The only exception to this rule is the ground floor, which is rendered at street level, so it’s possible to have things like shop storefront windows which you can see into and out of. I’m happy with this compromise as it’s generally pretty tough to see into a window above the ground floor if you’re in the street.

After my graphical production spree, I’ve now settled back into coding the gameplay. The main reason for this is to get something at least semi-playable I can demo pretty soon. I’m finding the pieces are finally fitting together a little more. The complete simulation of detective cases gels well with the player being an active character in the world. For example; don’t want to spend several in-game hours dusting the crime scene for prints? No problem- just leave it to your other detectives while you track down a lead.

You might, want to question the prime suspect, but also canvass all of the neighbours to leave no stone unturned- again, not a problem, just leave the boring stuff to your minions! If there’s nothing for your other detectives to do, that’s not a problem either- they’ll sit back at the office and generate ‘paperwork’, which is a resource you need to unlock various orders (for example obtaining a search warrant).

Essentially it’s going to be a first-person detective game which allows the player to focus on the more interesting side of detective work. It’s also going to be possible to do the opposite and be the one sitting back at the office, passively generating the paperwork resource, while you simply order your detective teams to do everything.

I’m going to draw a line at combat though. Stealth, sneaking about and tailing suspects are definitely on the cards, but combat not so much. If I do ever decide to explore it, it would be a minor part of the game, so just to reiterate- this isn’t a shooter.

One decision I’m stuck on is what to do with the old default view; the isometric camera. As you can see below, the game looks great from this view, but sadly I cannot find much of a practical use for it. Currently, it’s been taken out- the first person camera being essential for exploring, while the top-down camera is better for navigation and a general overview of the city. You can switch between them seamlessly with the F key. What the top-down camera can’t do, however, is differentiate between different floors in a building. This could be where the isometric camera is useful.

Lastly, with the focus now back on gameplay, I’ve been working on a first-person object interaction system. I’ve taken some inspiration from the original Deus Ex and System Shock here, as I’m sure anyone familiar with them will no doubt recognize. Maybe it’s my own nostalgia, but in my opinion, it remains the clearest graphical way to interact with the game world. Not having a first-person weapon to design around frees up both mouse buttons to become available for world interaction- I’ve not quite figured out the rules for this yet, but it gives me some freedom in that respect.

In the week ahead I’ll be continuing to evolve the gameplay. My first gameplay milestone involves having the AI killer murder someone, have the crime be reported, and then for the player to be able to visit the crime scene and find various bits of evidence.

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!