Shadows of Doubt News

Hello detectives! This is a follow-up blog from the last one where I discussed new content for Shadows in 2025. We have fleshed out some plans now and I wanted to share a little on what we're working on for the game this year. If you haven't already, I recommend reading the last blog post for some content: Mainly that we have decided to not add anything massive as to do so would likely cause issues with the game systems we've already spent a lot of time working on over early access & beyond.

With that in mind, let us jump in! What I do want to focus on this year in addition to more bug fixes is giving the game a new coat of polish. These content-focused updates will arrive in 3 instalments, roughly spaced out over the year with exact timings still to be decided at this point.

For the first update, we're going to be adding a couple of things that we ran out of time to include in the initial release; some new items, an easter egg side hustle, as well as a couple of quality-of-life gameplay enhancements to give the player more of a presence in the world. Also, expect to see a fun little cruncher addition one of our programmers has been working on.



The second content update is the one I'm most excited about I think; this one will focus on gameplay modifiers. We're going to be adding several different 'modes' that modify the game in some way that will change how you play it. These will range from some fairly standard to completely unexpected ideas. I'm looking forward to sharing those with you closer to the time.

Towards the end of the year, we'll refocus our efforts on game modding. As we've mentioned previously we're keen on enabling Steam workshop support. We're also looking to expand the ways in which the game can be modded. A lot of specifics here are still wrapped up in some technical questions so apologies I can't be more specific but this is the general theme of the third content update.

Along with these updates you can still expect our regular patches which will focus on fixes; we're going to be aiming for a patch roughly every 2 months throughout the year including the above content updates.
Hopefully that's a little something to look forward to in 2025!

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Hey detectives, time to investigate a fresh patch for you all after checking it out on the experimental branch. More news to come on the plans for the year soon as well!

• Much improved mini-map rendering speed
  
• Fixed: Citizens could become stuck in a loop cleaning up receipts from the floor in their home if certain conditions were met.
  
• Fixed: In certain circumstances the player could give items to dead citizens.
  
• Fixed: Taking a bullet casing from an apartment-stored inventory could result in a non-droppable item that the player could repeatedly take.
  
• Fixed: An inaccessible light switch could spawn behind a water cooler.*
  
• Fixed: Game forgot player’s own discovered password on save/load.
  
• Fixed: Attempted fix for certain achievements not completing until the player ate/drank.
  
• Fixed: Attempted fix for certain achievements not unlocking at the correct time (sometimes only once the game was over).
  
• Fixed: KO’ing a citizen by door barging did not count towards the ‘Spare No-one’ achievement.
  
• Fixed: Décor mode UI spawned partially off-screen on Steam Deck (1280x800).
  
• Fixed: News Stands always sold the ‘Cartographer’ sync disk for their daily deal.
  

* Requires a new city generation to appear/spawn/see


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Hey folks, we have another new experimental patch for you all.

[h3]Experimental Branch:[/h3]
These builds are only found on our ‘experimental’ steam branch. You can access this by right clicking the game in your steam library, choosing ‘properties’, then the ‘betas’ tab. The experimental build should be in the dropdown list. Experimental builds may be less tested than the default branch builds. Most experimental branch patches will make their way to the default branch after a week or two (barring any issues discovered).

Please do see the public bug list with comments from Cole about what is being worked on at the moment here: https://shadowsofdoubt.notion.site/0053dddf306643eea972c6595ac897d2?v=25d97977c0ad43b5811787d11ee27987

• Much improved mini-map rendering speed
  
• Fixed: Citizens could become stuck in a loop cleaning up receipts from the floor in their home if certain conditions were met.
  
• Fixed: In certain circumstances the player could give items to dead citizens.
  
• Fixed: Taking a bullet casing from an apartment-stored inventory could result in a non-droppable item that the player could repeatedly take.
  
• Fixed: An inaccessible light switch could spawn behind a water cooler.*
  
• Fixed: Game forgot player’s own discovered password on save/load.
  
• Fixed: Attempted fix for certain achievements not completing until the player ate/drank.
  
• Fixed: Attempted fix for certain achievements not unlocking at the correct time (sometimes only once the game was over).
  
• Fixed: KO’ing a citizen by door barging did not count towards the ‘Spare No-one’ achievement.
  
• Fixed: Décor mode UI spawned partially off-screen on Steam Deck (1280x800).
  
• Fixed: News Stands always sold the ‘Cartographer’ sync disk for their daily deal.
  

* Requires a new city generation to appear/spawn/see


If you want to sign up to the Fireshine Games newsletter for more information on our upcoming games please do so here

Hey Detectives, another patch incoming now with some more fixes ahead of the holiday season.

• Fixed: Some number pad selection issues while using a controller (using D-Pad selection moves the virtual cursor)
  
• Fixed: Missing Work ID and Wallet in Tutorial
  
• Fixed: Incorrect citizen age calculation
  
• Fixed: Number keys pull up inventory items during cruncher passcode entry (as they are also hotkeys)
  
• Fixed: Apartment keys could be stolen legally while the player obtained a guest pass
  
• Fixed: Player gained the ‘wet’ status effect while in an exterior air duct if it was raining
  
• Fixed: Removed inspect action for bleach bottle as it was missing a summary
  
• Fixed: Candles played a switch on/off sound when interacted with
  
• Fixed: It was possible in rare cases for a killer to not pick a murder weapon, leading to problems with them executing murders
  
• Fixed: The black market sync doctor would not go to work
  
• Fixed: Long delays in citizens going to work (resulting in them often being late; they still can be but it should happen less often)
  
• Fixed: The black market trader only had 2 staff; meaning it could only stay open for half of the week*
  
• Fixed: The player could quickly select an alternate user on the login screen on a cruncher after a successful passcode input, and the cruncher would log them into that account.
  
• Fixed: Failed inputs after case board closing
  
• Fixed: Failed inputs after text input
  
• Fixed: Small changes to ensure we're updating our last active controllers.
  
• Fixed: An issue with the control state flags
  
• Fixed: An unlisted bug where you could get stuck without control access in the main menu
  

* Requires a new city generation to appear/spawn/see

Hello detectives! It’s been a couple of months since the launch of 1.0 and I wanted to share a general update to talk about what you can expect next year.

First off, I’m extremely pleased to announce that Shadows of Doubt is part of this year’s Jingle Jam games bundle; a fundraising initiative with a collection of games available for donations over £35. All money goes to some excellent causes. This ends on December 14th, so be quick about it!

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On the dev team side, we’ve been mostly keeping our head down and working on resolving bugs. We’re finding we’re currently solving around ~15 issues per patch, with patches coming about every 3 or 4 weeks. As we’ve been prioritising more serious bugs, the number of those is coming down. Our main priority will be to continue with these next year and give the game the polish it deserves.

We found throughout early access that adding something ‘big’ to the game (and when I say ‘big’ I mean something that fundamentally interacted with the game’s core systems), would often break something we had either previously implemented or fixed. So doing this while trying to polish the game often resulted in a ‘two steps forward, one step back’ experience where we would add something cool, only to break something else.

Shadows of Doubt is a game with a large scope, having been constructed over 8 years, and 7 of those by a rather scatter-minded individual (myself). It would be fair to say that the codebase rather reflects this: An interconnected beast to say the least! Modifications to it on a fundamental level can often result in a bunch of things somewhere along the line going wrong, and the scope of the game means this isn’t often obvious.



So what’s next? Well as previously stated we do want to get the game in a better place polish-wise as a priority. Then we’ll likely start adding a couple of things that were nearly done but for whatever reason didn’t make the final release; these are some pretty small but interesting additions. Then we’ll look at adding some more significant things as the year goes on.

It will likely take the form of more of what’s there already (buildings, objects etc), or more modular self-contained systems that don’t weave in with everything else quite so tightly. The key here will be to avoid adding things that mess up the original ecosystem of the game to prevent the game from going backwards and polish getting wiped out.

We realise there’s scope to take the game several steps in so many directions, and people are really excited to see and explore those possibilities. We certainly are too, but the reality of game dev means we’d prefer to keep a lot of those grander schemes to a future sequel project where we can properly build around them rather than attempt to tack them on. That said, I’ve no doubt that we can add some really cool things to the game in 2025.

It’s all on the vaguer side right now as we have yet to finalize what we’re going to do exactly. Plus the dev team need a break! But you’ll hear us pipe up when the cogs are turning again, that’s for sure!

Thanks for your continued support for Shadows of Doubt.