#Heavy shadows of doubt update#
#Heavy shadows of doubt upgrade#

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. One of the early limitations of the gameplay was the player not being able to kill anyone, or specifically, be able to shoot people. The eagle-eyed detectives may even spot some useful graffiti scrawled on the side. Proper ones that give the citizens some privacy. 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. Before now we had the apartment bathrooms working, but the models for public ones were not yet present in the game. One of the last things to make the latest build, bizarrely, is the public lavatory setup. When that absolute banger from Erik Satie comes on WCs 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. 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). 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. Nick has been busy adding and refining sounds, and it’s making a huge difference in how immersive the world is feeling. I’ve recently done a ‘grime’ pass over a lot of the interiors Audio ProgressĪnother area that has progressed a lot in recent weeks is audio. The idea is you may want to play Shadows running through it with different builds in different generated cities. I want to give examples but it’s probably better if I leave the discovery to you.

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.

#Heavy shadows of doubt upgrade#

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. You won’t have lightning shooting from your fingertips or anything these upgrades are much more grounded (ha) to something resembling reality. 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. I haven’t really talked about this a lot previously. One such thing we’re refining is player progression. 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. Internally we’re transitioning from ‘adding stuff’ to ‘refining stuff’, which is a pretty big milestone.

#Heavy shadows of doubt update#

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. Be sure to wishlist on Steam, join our Discord or read previous dev blog entries here!

A unique mix of procedural generation and hand-crafted design enables every room of every building to be explored. 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.