Shadows of Doubt DevBlog #37: The Road to New Content
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!
11 thoughts on “Shadows of Doubt DevBlog #37: The Road to New Content”
Fantastic news for the modding support.
The game has so many incredible things going on for it, but a way to create and share scenarios will absolutely makes it a fantastic story factory
Keep up the great work!
Thank you for advancing the genre
Thanks for your work! Hope this game becomes even more popular cause it and you deserve it!!! Love
Mate, just here to say that this is one of the most amazing game idea and concept around. Keep going, becasue the potential here is infinite.
Lovley. i hope to see a co-op change where you can get together with 4 friends and solve the crime together that would be awesome and it is my biggest wish right know.
The other thing i would like to tell yall is fixing the conversation issues for example: you call a person and the only thing you can do is ask for their name.. you cant or i cant really ask anything else because it keeps glitching back.
That kinda takes up all the feature of calling someone
Lovley. i hope to see a co-op change where you can get together with 4 friends and solve the crime together that would be awesome and it is my biggest wish right know.
The other thing i would like to tell yall is fixing the conversation issues for example: you call a person and the only thing you can do is ask for their name.. you cant or i cant really ask anything else because it keeps glitching back.
That kinda takes up all the feature of calling someone
In my opinion, this is a true next generation game with enormous complexity running in the background. Im really looking forward for (shootable) guns. Not only for self defense but also shooting windows and demolish interieur, or of course, going from a failed investigator to a ruthless Assassin 🙂
What kind of compression did you end up implementing, I would like a way to easily reverse it for a city I have already made to change names and then recompressed for the game.
Just picked the game up a few days ago, and it’s amazing.
I’ll probably buy a few more copies to send as gifts.
Thanks, and keep up the amazing work!
Hey ColePowered Games,
I love Shadows of Doubt, but I have one doubt: when will you add Italian to the game?
I’m Italian and I want to enjoy the game in my language. You have French, German, Spanish, and even Japanese. But no Italian. Why? Do you have something against pizza and pasta?
Please, don’t make me beg. Just add Italian to the game. It will make me and many other fans happy. And it will also boost your sales in Italy, where we have a lot of gamers who love detective stories.
Grazie mille,
A loyal fan
Hi, I’m a huge fan of shadows of doubt and I wanted to thank you for creating a game that reignited my joy for detective stories on a cool noir vibe with a distinctive art style. I’m a 3D voxel artist and if you ever require my services please don’t hesitate to contact me, it would mean a lot to me if I could join your team. Ill leave a link to my portfolio here. Thank you again and hope to see more from this gaming studio.
https://youtu.be/mh7Y_emkXvk?si=mRTdU6v7GabM5cV_
I have always waited for a game like this, thanks to you, I can say that I have achieved my dream.
There are many enthusiasts of such games in Turkey.I hope you will bring Turkish language support to the game.
Thanks for everything