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The Game development adventures of Cole Jefferies.

Shadows of Doubt DevBlog #31: An October Update

Shadows of Doubt DevBlog #31: An October Update

October 14, 2022 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 folks, it’s been a while so for this update I thought I’d keep it simple this time and just write a general update for how things are progressing with the game, and also use this as an opportunity to talk about random bits and bobs of the game that don’t really fit into any other themed updates.

Internally we’re transitioning from ‘adding stuff’ to ‘refining stuff’, which is a pretty big milestone. It’s no secret this game has been challenging to create, and it has no shortage of rough edges right now, so it’s feeling really good to go through and address them.

Player Progression

One such thing we’re refining is player progression. I haven’t really talked about this a lot previously.

The biggest chunk of practical player progression comes in the form of “Sync Disks”; think Bioshock-style genetic updates that give you a choice of buffs. You won’t have lightning shooting from your fingertips or anything; these upgrades are much more grounded (ha) to something resembling reality. The main idea though is for each one to have a choice of 2 or more upgrade options; making for some interesting decision-making and bringing some RPG-like elements to the game. For example, one disk will have you choosing between more health or more inventory space: That’s one of the more ‘standard’ upgrades, but I’ve really tried to think outside the box a bit for many of the others: Some of them are more akin to modifiers that subtly change how you play the game rather than straightforward benefits. I want to give examples but it’s probably better if I leave the discovery to you. The idea is you may want to play Shadows running through it with different builds in different generated cities.

I’ve recently done a ‘grime’ pass over a lot of the interiors

Audio Progress

Another area that has progressed a lot in recent weeks is audio. Nick has been busy adding and refining sounds, and it’s making a huge difference in how immersive the world is feeling.

One thing we’ve been tackling recently is diegetic music; that is music that appears within the world such as a song played on a jukebox in a bar. What’s great about this one is that I had previously set up the AI to dance to anything playing (our artist Miles has done some excellent NPC dance animations). Hilariously the AI simply does not care what it’s dancing to, resulting in citizens grooving away to slow melodic piano music… I guess they’re just that starved of entertainment in the world of Shadows.

When that absolute banger from Erik Satie comes on

WCs

One of the last things to make the latest build, bizarrely, is the public lavatory setup. Before now we had the apartment bathrooms working, but the models for public ones were not yet present in the game. This resulted in a very awkward public bathroom situation that involved a single toilet and sink in a large open room that anyone could just walk into. Not that that AI seemed to care. Now we have proper cubicles. Proper ones that give the citizens some privacy. The eagle-eyed detectives may even spot some useful graffiti scrawled on the side.

A Parting Thought…

One of the early limitations of the gameplay was the player not being able to kill anyone, or specifically, be able to shoot people. While this may not feel in keeping with the game’s noir roots, this limitation has actually become, in my opinion, a benefit to the gameplay. Much like in a horror game, not giving the player an arsenal at their disposal makes them much more vulnerable; and this works really well with the ‘creeping around places you shouldn’t’ vibe. And even when things do go wrong and you have people hunting you with guns, it’s much more satisfying to be forced to rely on your environment: Ducking into an air duct, hiding in the shadows, or if you are committed to violence, chucking a chair in their face to knock them out as you dart for the exit. It started as a practical limitation and has ended up as one of my favorite aspects of the gameplay.

Anyway, that’s it for another update. Times are very busy right now, so for the moment, the schedule of the updates is, by necessity, ‘when I can find the time’, stayed tuned and thanks for reading!

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3 thoughts on “Shadows of Doubt DevBlog #31: An October Update”

  1. Avatar Akito says:
    October 14, 2022 at 4:09 pm

    Thank you for this update. Nice to read how things are going.

    I find it especially intriguing, that you turned a practical limitation into a feature, i.e. intentional design decision.

    Looking forward to the next update.

    Keep on keeping on.

    Reply
  2. Avatar Rand0mname says:
    October 20, 2022 at 11:00 am

    Been following this game since May and I gotta say, I love practically everything I’ve seen! . With that said, I still hope we see a revolver or something similar down the line; that gun is basically a part of the uniform! Make ammunition rare or the penalties for using it stiff if you must, but don’t send us out there improperly dressed!

    Reply
  3. Avatar GreatCharade says:
    March 2, 2023 at 4:40 pm

    I missed out on the demo, but after watching the gameplay footage I’m confident that I’ll love the game. I wouldn’t have been upset to have a revolver and enough bullet scarcity or inventory scarcity to make that a challenge to use… I think the original Deus Ex allowed you to use upgrade disks to get better at aiming as well (so maybe you don’t start out with perfect accuracy). I love the idea of having unique sets of upgrades on a character by the time you’re done.

    At any rate, I’m incredibly excited for this… so much so that I sought out the dev blog and left a comment. I’m still curious about so many things:

    Is there falling damage?
    Can you break windows to escape buildings you’re in?
    Are there fire escapes to buildings for stealthier access/escape?
    Will you be able to make friends with NPCs?
    Do NPCs notice if things in their personal spaces have been moved or altered (maybe tied to conscientiousness score)?
    Does NPC behavior change if they suspect you’re on to them?
    Do NPC criminals ever return to the scene of the crime?

    The complexities here seem endless… but really it just means there is a world of possibilities!

    Reply

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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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