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[ColePowered]

Hi everyone! In this month’s dev blog I’m going to hand the reigns over to Miles, the talented pixel and voxel artist who’s now behind a lot of the new models you now see in Shadows of Doubt. This year one of the biggest challenges has been revamping the citizens: Part of the game’s appeal is the city’s generated population of individuals, each with their own personalities and looks. This blog focuses on the challenge of sculpting their faces…

Creating faces in low resolution
Recently we have been giving the citizens of Shadows of Doubt an overhaul. We have upped their resolution slightly, given them new clothes, and most importantly faces, with eyes and mouths and ears! We are also working on the citizen’s style choices: beards, hairdos, moustaches, tops, hats, dresses, etc. All of this should give a bit more life to the people walking around the streets of the city as well as a recognisable and individual identity.


One of the biggest challenges with voxel faces is adding subtle differences in order to generate diversity. It is particularly difficult to make masculine and feminine faces distinct and believable at such a low resolution. There are some key features that help communicate whether a face is masculine or feminine; primary details such as, head shape, brow line form, chin, cheek and jawline structure, hairline position, nose shape, lips. Then there are secondary details like hairstyle and facial hair which can be used for further emphasis.


Below is a comparison between the masculine and feminine heads and their different face shapes. I will explain the design choices I made, and hopefully, some of you can benefit from this analysis to help create your own voxel characters, or you might simply find it interesting.

Primary details
One of the most notable details is the overall head shape, more rounded for feminine heads and squarer for masculine heads. To portray roundness there is an extra voxel between the top of the forehead and the hairline, softening the interface between the face and the top of the head. For masculine faces the hairline tends to start higher up, therefore by having the forehead 3 voxels tall the illusion that the hairline starts higher up is created. In addition to this, male pattern baldness can be created by simply having the voxels of the corner of the forehead be skin coloured, which also makes the heads appear squarer.


A wider brow is a notable masculine trait, this is simply done by making the brow 5 voxels wide. Prominent cheekbones are a more feminine characteristic, however, on both styles, the face width is 5 voxels wide. Yet, by having the brow of feminine heads only 3 voxels, the cheekbones appear to sit further out and thus appear more prominent.


Another masculine feature is that of the nose, the bridge of the nose starts higher up, and this is simply communicated with having two voxels for the nose. Whereas, for a feminine face the nose is only one voxel. The added benefit of this is that it helps emphasise the roundedness or squareness of the head.


Masculine faces typically have stronger, wider chins when compared with feminine faces, however, this detail is difficult to communicate without trying to make feminine chins be only a single voxel wide or underdeveloped. Instead, simply a standard neutral ground for both chins was chosen.

Secondary details
Once these primary details are figured out, then hairstyles and facial hair can be added. Having a base hair area textured onto the head helps ensure the haircut models work seamlessly and look natural. Hair colour and skin colour can be randomised using the colour shaders and a whole plethora of unique looking citizens cans be created.

We’ll be continuing this dev blog miniseries next month with some further insights into our progress on the citizens, stay tuned!

[ColePowered]

Hi everybody, welcome back to our more-regular-than-ever dev blog! This time we're continuing to talk about the citizen visuals; Miles the voxel artist will take you through his workflow of creating clothing. Take it away Miles...

Intro


Last blog I talked about making voxel faces for the citizens in Shadows of Doubt and the challenges that come with that. This week, we’ll be looking at the modeling of the citizens as a whole and their outfits!

If you follow us on social media, you may have noticed that the citizens’ wardrobe selection has expanded beyond trench coats and trilbies. Don’t worry, you’ll still find this dapper detective look around the city. However, you’ll also see a range of other outfits; from casual jeans and shirts to snazzy dresses and to classy suits.

In this blog, I’ll run you through what it takes to create a new outfit for the game and the decisions I make when designing them.

Creating the Outfits


All designs start with a little bit of research. Usually, this entails googling 1920-80s clothing and finding some simple inspiration there. However, I’ll often look up outfits worn by celebrities from this time, or I’ll draw inspiration from noir films, such as ‘The Maltese Falcon'.

To model an outfit there are a few important limitations that need to be addressed to get it working in Shadows of Doubts. For the purposes of procedural generation, every outfit, ideally, can be worn by every citizen and have a random colour. Therefore, when an outfit is modelled, it is modelled six times. Three times for each body type we have, and then another three times so that there is a masculine and feminine version.

To get the random colours, the model is first created fully coloured so I can get a good idea of how it “should” look. It is then manually grey-scaled to allow the code to recolour it properly, and with this, I create the colour map to select each area to be recoloured differently. Generally, the outfits have 3 colours to be replaced: red, green and blue, however, I’ll also use black on the colour map to maintain certain colours from the base texture before being recoloured by the code, like a white shirt or black buttons.

Once this first version is completed each model needs to be checked to make sure it works with the animation and other outfits that it’ll randomly generate with. The outfits replace the models for the arms, legs, body, etc. so making sure that they all align properly and there are no oddities sticking out when a character is walking is important. A good amount of trial and error is needed, going back and forth between Unity and Qubicle, chopping off voxels here and there to ensure the outfit works well. Generally, the tops and the bottoms, as well as dresses, are built from a standardised base design and this helps reduce the amount of trial and error needed to rework the outfits to a good standard.

With voxel models, the texturing and the modelling is often one in the same process. Particularly for lower resolution voxel models. It’s very easy to simply retexture while working in Qubicle. Moreover, the folds of clothing and the surface texturing is baked into the base texture model, rather than using polygons. This means combining the texturing and modelling processes is important because it’ll help me make decisions as to how to get a good clothing “look”.

Unique Outfits


While it is desirable to make all tops and bottoms work together to get a huge diversity of procedurally generated outfits, there are some cases where this simply wouldn’t allow for enough shape variation. The biggest cause of this is that the tops and bottoms need to sit flush at the interface of where they meet at the waist. If this interface differs between each outfit there’s usually some weird clipping when you start to mix and match them.

To get around this there are a few “complete” outfits, these are ones that cover the full body and don’t mix and match several pieces. It’s far easier to create a unique shape if the whole outfit works as one. The gold jacket and white trousers in the screenshot above is one such example. Another example is the dresses. Which also provided another significant challenge…

There are no custom animations for the outfits, therefore for dresses, the design must allow for leg movement without the model deforming to keep the fixed voxel shape. As a result, the dresses are made as a solid objects because this means as the legs split apart for the walking animation they appear as one continuous surface. If they were hollow, you would essentially see the dress split apart too when walking.

A similar design is used for the trench coats, but, as these maintain the models for the upper legs a weird little wall of voxels is used to hide when the legs split apart when walking. However, this may need further work if it poses an issue during sitting animations where you can see the underside of the upper leg models.

 

Other notable unique outfits are those that are used for specific professions. For factory workers, I’ve created some lovely work overalls to wear instead of getting their trench coats dirty! And then for the police officers, we created a somewhat dystopian twist on the traditional British police uniform. They’ve got the vintage smart black uniform, and custodian helmet, however, we’ve attached a riot gear visor. This helps enforce the idea that they’re privatised security and gives them an impersonal feel as it obscures their identity.

Other Features


Recently we introduced glasses and hats into the character generation – I find they really help add a great amount of personality to the characters, with very little effort.

This will be a niche reference, but in continuation of our internal 'this citizen looks like x person' game: This dude really reminds me of British vocalist Richard Hawley - Cole.

We also have a huge variety of hairstyles. Conveniently the hairstyles are designed to work with any head shape as they all follow the same structure, unlike the clothing. This means any single hairstyle can be used for all 6 head types.

 

Lastly, shoes! The shoes aren’t part of the outfits as such, because they can be an important clue for your detective work. Currently, there are 3 types of shoes, your bog-standard kind, boots and heels. They have a higher resolution to the rest of the citizens’ outfits to allow you to distinguish the detail on them.

Final Thoughts


Cole has recently spoken in a blog post about generating the personalities of citizens: Colepowered.com Eventually we would like to tie this into the citizens clothing choices. Therefore, someone who is happy and outgoing are more likely to wear brighter and outlandish outfits. And we can then use this to tailor specific outfits to the personalities so that there is a broad spectrum of personalities encompassed by the clothing.

Thanks Miles! Tune in this time next month for more...

[shadowsoflight777]

Super cool! I'm always looking for examples where procedural generation could go deeper, with rules and relationships that create believable situations. I'll be trying to keep up with this one

I'm hoping that Nick will do one about the music at some point, would love to see his approach.

[ColePowered]

Super cool! I'm always looking for examples where procedural generation could go deeper, with rules and relationships that create believable situations. I'll be trying to keep up with this one

I'm hoping that Nick will do one about the music at some point, would love to see his approach.

Thanks

Nick seems up for doing one about the music, it's just a question of when he gets enough time!

[ColePowered]

Hi everybody, time for another dev update from us! Continuing the theme of hearing from the rest of the team, we're learning about the process behind some of the writing in the game from our talented writer Stark Holborn. Without further ado...

One of the best parts of working on Shadows is the world-building. Luckily, right at the start of development Cole dreamed up an amazing framework for an alt-history, neo-noir world, packed with memorable characters, shadowy alliances and corrupt power structures. It’s a rich setting and a lot of fun to write, but one of the main challenges is how to insert all that world-lore into the game in creative ways, without infodumping and still allowing for a variety of different play styles.

I’m a novelist as well as a games writer, and part of my aim when writing a book is to sneak worldbuilding into a text without a reader even noticing; we’re trying to do the same thing with Shadows. Look closely, and you’ll find lore woven through many items in-game, especially everyday objects. Like the books on the shelves: many have readable blurbs that reflect the world in which they were written.



And it’s not just books. Off the top of my head I can also say that Yellow Beaks cigarettes are named after the events of the Mustard War, while a “Krueger Sandwich” (slices of synthetic beef, pork and chicken smothered with ketchup) was invented by Starch tycoon Eden Krueger to prove the safety of their new synthetic meat products after the Eastern Food Crisis.

At the time the game is set, Starch Kola is the president of the United Atlantic States, meaning the corporation’s presence is everywhere. I’ve made it a sort of running joke that in this super dystopian world, Starch will try and jam advertising into literally anything, from press releases to Enforcer and medical reports.

The advertisements you come across or hear on the TV (and maybe, at some point, in the streets…) also provide tons of opportunity to reflect the dystopian themes of the game and the hyper-industrialized, capitalist society of Shadows.

To get the right tone, I usually scout around for vintage advertisements and infographics, before turning things up to eleven.





Here’s an example of one of our adverts:

City-living getting you down? Need a bit of fizz to take you higher?

Grab a Starch!

Our new improved recipe is great for home, work and play, giving you the sparkle you need to succeed.

Starch Kola: Put Some Life Into It

Just to dive into the wording of this one: the reference to city living implies that everyone who hears this is living in a metropolis and that there are no alternatives. The juxtaposition of down (bad, in the gutter) and up (higher floors, achievement) reflects the preoccupations of the wider society, the reference to “home, work and play” implies that citizens must be conscious of their behaviour and energy at all times, and the ad ends on the obvious tying together of drinking Starch and achieving success…

There are shades of Philip K Dick’s Ubik in here – the power of advertising to dictate and re-frame reality – as well as Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and even Time Bandits.



Of course, a lot of this is background colour and setting. A huge part of Shadows will be the ability for players to create their own narratives and stories by how they choose to interact with this procedurally-generated world.

Procedural storytelling is inherently challenging, but it’s something that Cole and I have been working on. We’ve developed certain systems, and Cole has created a custom-made dialogue editor with access to a wide number of procedural fields and variables, which also allows us to insert written content directly into the game for testing. We’ll be using it to further explore the procedural storytelling during the next stage of the game’s development. But that’s probably one for a future post…

Stay tuned for more dev updates coming soon!

Bio: Stark Holborn is a novelist, games writer and film reviewer, and is the author of Ten Low, the British Fantasy Award-nominated Triggernometry series, and Nunslinger. Stark lives in Bristol, UK.

Social Links:

Twitter: @starkholborn

Instagram: @starkholborn

You can receive a FREE short story here: Starkholborn.com

[JobLeonard]

Amazing update, and having coherent little details like the examples you have will do so much to breathe (dystopian) life into the game world!

To get the right tone, I usually scout around for vintage advertisements and infographics, before turning things up to eleven.

This reminds me of the vintage advertisement bits of Tim Hunkin's "The Secret Life Of Machines". Which, by the way, he recently re-uploaded with added commentary by himself at the end.

[nathy after dark]

Oof! Seeing a "Beauty Bible" published by a Genetics Company is such a great chilling detail! Even without the specific parts after the title, that lore hits hard.

[ColePowered]

Hi everybody! It's time for a 2021 retrospective, where I'm going to wrap up all the fantastic progress we've made on the game in 2021...

Where were we this time last year?
Looking back in my source control commits reveals that I had just finished a revamp of the way the citizens were put together. Something that we've really capitalized on (and you can read about here). The fleshing out of the citizen visuals is something I'm super pleased with, and arguably the biggest area of improvement this year; giving them a real new lease of life.

The game was, at this point last year, only really playable in terms of the more scripted story component we have; a lot of the procedural gameplay elements were still lacking refined enough systems to be properly part of the gameplay. And in fact, due to the complexity of it all having to fit together to work; something this remained so for a large portion of this year.

What notable progress happened this year?
I'm pleased to say the game has come together a lot (especially in the last half of the year).

We launched a short closed alpha in June to gather feedback, and although the game was buggier than I would have liked at this point, we did gather plenty of vital feedback which we've been busy implementing. It's always hard to semi-publicly share something you feel is still very much a work-in-progress, but in retrospect, this was a good time to do this. Most things at this point were not set in stone, so we were able to chop and change a lot, whereas if we'd waited it's possible a lot of work would have to be undone (or feedback thrown away). Thank you to everyone who participated. And to those of you who chose not to, or didn't get into the alpha, rest assured you'll be playing a better game!

Miles, our excellent pixel artist turned voxel artist has been working very hard over the course of this year. Not only had his hard work on the citizens paid dividends, but the number of props we have in the game has exploded (and we've still got plenty to add that you haven't seen yet). The new street props help differentiate city districts, making them feel much more unique.

The world has been further developed and fleshed out thanks to our star writer Stark Holborn, which you can read about here if you haven't done so. We'll also be looking to share more exciting detail about the sound design with Monomoon in the new year.

Weather effects such as rain and snow make the world feel more alive than ever.

Gameplay has seen huge shifts too: Playable side missions, AI killers, identifiable footprints, guns, hilarious passive-aggressive AI behaviour, a GUI revamp, a huge array of interactable items, status effects, weather effects, basements, purchasable upgrades and apartments... Plus I fixed that condiment bug.

Where are we now?
Obviously, global events continued to throw a spanner in the works this year. A good portion of the start year here in the UK was spent in lockdown. We're hoping 2022 will be the year we can safely think about public events again, but if 2021 has taught us anything, it's to keep plans like this on ice.

Me working on the game in the middle of a pandemic.

But game-wise I'm feeling very positive about 2022: We're going into it more or less at a phase where the core systems are all in and functioning (minus bugs and in some cases more iteration).

What's next?
Much of 2022 will be about adding content and iterating (fun), and then bug fixing and optimizing (less fun but necessary). I'm really looking forward to sharing the progress. And to address this elephant in the room, we're not quite ready to talk about release dates, but you'll read it here first when we are!

[JobLeonard]

Always happy to see an update here

Looks like you made good progress despite the outside world going crazy (or maybe "persisting in being crazy" is more appropriate at this point). Hope you'll keep it together in 2022 as well!

[Schrompf]

Don't mention a date, it's all good. That last picture speaks to me.

[oahda]

Just wow. Congratulations on all this amazing progress and good luck going into next year!

[ColePowered]

Thanks all, sorry I'm bad at replying here. I do eventually read the responses and your words mean a lot 

Anyway here's the latest update...

Hello everyone! Welcome to a fresh new edition of the Shadows of Doubt dev blog. This month I've put together a list of some of the most challenging aspects of creating the project so far. I should probably note this doesn't include challenges for writing, voxel modelling or audio work, ie the stuff I largely don't do. Perhaps we'll visit some of those in future blogs with the relevant team members. This one is more about my role, which is mostly design, coding and project management. I'll also say that just because these bits have been difficult, it doesn't mean they haven't been fun to work on; in fact, they've provided some of the best learning experiences of the project so far.

Lighting
Shadows of Doubt is a procedurally generated game. That's great and everything, except when it comes to the technical challenge of lighting. Most non-procedurally generated games feature baked lighting (and not just lighting actually, it means you can do all sorts of yummy baking). Baking essentially means precalculating tricky things into a bunch of data the game can read when you play. Much faster than trying to figure out all those calculations in real-time.

Lighting is a big one as it means you don't have to ask the game engine to bounce light everywhere when playing. Although it's common for a game to feature a mixture of both baked and real-time lights anyway, the nature of the levels where nothing is predetermined means Shadows has to use 100% real-time lighting: That's a big performance hog.

So what are the solutions?

Simply use fewer lights. If calculating all this is expensive, then use less of them right? Fortunately, having fewer lights creates some nice heavy shadows which kind of lends quite well to the noir genre. There are a few cases where this is tricky, however; mostly the street scenes. In this scenario, however, I've come up with a way to 'fake' having a bunch of ambient lighting. Over every street is a large area light, which casts a colour down on the street. This is designed to mimic a mixture of all the ambient lights in the street. Every object that spawns in the street (for example a red paper lantern) can alter the ambient colour of the overhead area light slightly. It's not perfect, but this method helps to light up the street with additional ambient light.

Limit lighting and shadow distance. Fortunately, in Unity you are able to set distances for lights to be active. This isn't my favourite compromise as it means the lights essentially turn off as you reach a certain distance, but it is a good 'catch all' method for making sure we don't have too many lights shining at once.

Another Unity thing is light layers. This allows you to make sure lights are only cast on certain layers (any object in the world can be part of a layer). Using this, I can make individual buildings have their own light layer. Therefore ensuring that lights within an interior largely only affect things inside a building and vice versa. I'm not actually sure how much this is helping performance, but I imagine I'm at least saving the engine some amount of calculation by cutting off a chunk of active lights this way.

Object Handling/Saving/Resetting


So we have this world populated by literally 1000s of props, most of which can be moved, damaged or destroyed in some way. That's not necessarily a problem for a modern game engine, but things get complicated when you think about how you want them to behave.

Lots of things might get moved around by the player (say the player trashes an apartment or a bar), we don't want those objects to stay in their trashed positions forever; as this is a simulation we would probably want the AI to put things back how they were eventually, or at least imply that and have everything be reset at some point. That's great then; tell things out-of-place to get reset to their original positions after a certain amount of time. Well, what about litter? What about things the AI have deliberately moved for good reason? Wallets? Purses etc? We actually don't want everything to reset. In order to solve this problem I had to come up with a 'relocation authority' system; or a system dictating special cases on when we want items to reset and when we don't. Generally, we have to look at the object's owner; they have the 'power' to set the spawn locations of objects, so they can move them. There are plenty of special cases, however; such as if an NPC steals an item and positions it in their home or elsewhere. In short this is a bit of a special case minefield. Yay.

Then there's save data. Due to the nature of the game, we can't always dictate what objects are valuable sources of information for a case. Therefore when we save a game, we have to save everything. Not just objects the player is carrying or is in the immediate vicinity of, but every item in the world! Ouch.

In the next dev blog I'll continue ranting about stuff! Stay tuned.

[oahda]

You may not update often, but when you do it's quite something. Love reading these. Even knowing how some of it works from doing so I think I'm going to really feel immersed when I end up walking around this world—you're doing a great job on those lifelike details of the sim! And the light still seems to look great

[ColePowered]

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.



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!

[oahda]

Another good update! I'm not sure I knew before now that the game has a health system for the player. How does that work in this sort of game? And yeah, weapons are not at all what I would expect from a game like this—I'm even surprised to hear about being chased and knocking people out as I was always under the impression that this was a slow-paced game but that does sound like an exciting change of pace on occasion The dancing is fun too; will it be updated to fit the music?

[ColePowered]

Thanks Prinsessa! It is quite a slow-paced game, but not without bursts of action due to getting discovered in places you shouldn't. Haha, I've updated the diegetic music tracks since the last blog too so the dancing doesn't look quite so... Weird.

[ColePowered]

Hello, another update here. As you might gather I post updates around on a couple of different sites but as this one is a bit special (announcing early access release) I just wanted to say a big thank you to everyone here at TigSource who followed the development of this. Without further ado, here's the rest of the update...

Thank you to all of you who played the demo over the course of Steam NextFest. It was a massive success, with more people playing, wishlisting, and joining the community than we could have ever hoped for. As you may have expected we received a tonne of feedback, and we’ve been processing it all over the last few weeks to help us finalize the game’s launch plans - and beyond!

Yes, as some of you have suspected by now (pun intended), we’re going to be releasing the game via Steam Early Access on… April 24th! I can’t believe I finally get to say it! Shadows of Doubt will be in your hands in just a few short weeks, and I couldn’t be more excited for everyone to step into the role of detective and explore the city streets very soon.



But of course, elephant in the room, why Early Access? As many of you know, Shadows of Doubt has been in development for many years, and so we didn’t take the decision to launch into Early Access lightly. Being open and transparent, we’ve had a lot of serious discussions about how and when to launch the game. The game is in a very advanced state of development - while there are plans for new content and further optimizations, the game is functionally complete with a full suite of features, cases, content, and a complete Sandbox Mode, beyond what you may usually expect from an Early Access title. Both I and the publisher are confident in the overall quality, breadth of content, and playability of Shadows of Doubt’s Early Access release.



However, there are some key things that launching in Early Access allows for, not least of which is more content. It was always a goal of mine to develop post-release content for the game, but launching into Early Access means I can bring that new content directly into the pre-1.0 roadmap, meaning there’ll now be even more for players to discover in the initial base game when the full version launches (and Early Access players will, of course, get this content for free as it’s added to the game). As a bonus, it also means that we get more critical and constructive feedback from players who are passionate about the game during active development, which is really useful for further improving the overall experience.



Secondly, it helps me respond to bugs and unusual edge case issues that, given the massive scope of the game and the nature of its systems, I fully expect to be unearthed for the first time at launch. Speak to any developer and they will always tell you that a game is never finished, but with the breadth and (often unpredictable!) nature of Shadows of Doubt’s layers of AI, it’s particularly true. To speak openly and honestly with you, it makes me so much more comfortable knowing that I’ll be able to identify any of these unusual issues and react to them during Early Access, rather than have players discover them in what is considered to be a ‘final’ release. I hope that makes sense.



Also for the purpose of expectations, I wanted to let you know that the game doesn’t currently feature a story thread of missions beyond those featured in the demo. The purpose of ‘The Dead of Night’ case you may have played in the demo is to teach the player the mechanics within a scripted mission, before letting them off the leash for the game’s core immersive, non-scripted, sandbox experience. Early on into development, we found that asking AI citizens to behave nicely with heavily-scripted sequences did not benefit the overall game, especially when all they really want to do is live out their lives dynamically (no matter how long they ultimately lived for), and leaning more heavily into a sandbox experience driven by the AI itself is where the game shines. That said, there may be an opportunity to expand on more bespoke narrative-based missions during the course of the Early Access roadmap, depending on your feedback. There is still progression, of course - over the course of the game you’ll take on new cases to earn cash, find new gadgets and equipment, customize your apartment, and unlock new upgrades for your character to become a better detective. And I’d definitely encourage you to experiment with different cities - the Early Access release lets you generate bigger cities than the demo allowed, and they really can make a difference to how you approach situations, depending on what you get!



Shadows of Doubt really has been a dream project of mine to make, and it’s my goal to make it the best possible game it can be for everyone who plays it. Stay tuned for more info about our Early Access updates that we’re currently working towards and, when the game launches next month, we’d love to invite you to share ideas of what you’d like to see too.

So, April 24th! I can’t wait, and if you haven’t already, please do consider wishlisting the game to be notified the moment it’s available! It really does help small developers like us. I’ve also set up a poll to find out the kind of things folks are most excited about during Early Access (see below). You can select up to 3 answers, and your choices could help us prioritize if there’s something that particularly resonates: https://strawpoll.com/polls/ajnEOO96NZW

Thank you again, detectives! See you again soon.

[JobLeonard]

Aaaah, if only my Steam Deck wasn't broken! And if I didn't have a three month old to give my undivided attention to (I guess that one should weigh heavier, hmmm)

But congrats!

Sounds like a very reasonable early access approach - the game definitely looks a lot more "almost done" than most Steam EA titles

[mobilelast]

What a great style and mood!

When that absolute banger from Erik Satie comes on

With a bucketload of absinthe, I presume. A true Montmartrian way.

[ColePowered]

Happy launch day detectives!! It’s really fantastic to see all the enthusiasm around the project (and it’s been there since I’ve started sharing stuff about it) so I really can’t thank everyone enough for the support. Without it, I don’t think this project would have been possible. It’s difficult to really know what to say other than I hope you enjoy all the hard work we’ve put into the game!

This is an early access release so I won’t speak as if this is the end of the journey. We’re expecting bugs but I’ve managed to cover a decent amount of ground this last week in regard to more fixes; you can see an updated changelog here if you want to see specifics: https://shadowsofdoubt.notion.site/Version-Change-Logs-Released-1e5d5987a562401584d4790c2a9d2225

We’re also really keen on listening to your feedback and improving the game over the course of early access. In the spirit of that, I’m pleased to share with you our planned roadmap!



We’re excited to be adding new content and improvements to the game, and the current plan is a six-month early access period consisting of three major content updates spread out at roughly one every two months. The first will be themed ‘Cheats & Liars’ and be with you over the summer. I’ll share more news about that closer to the time, but for now, the priority is the launch. Have fun!