Shadows of Doubt News

Shadows of Doubt is the voxel-based 1980s detective sim in which the glass is always rain-slicked, the coffee as bitter as the human soul, and the whodunnits, procedurally generated. Hard-nosed private eye Rachel (RPS in peace) pronounced herself fascinated but a little stumped by it, back in April, while Graham described it as his "ideal game" in a post about the recent addition of infidelity cases and lost-and-found jobs, adding to my suspicions that Graham is some kind of jigsaw killer and that his news posts are actually ciphered confessions of his terrible crimes.

Well, these already viscous plots are about to thicken into a borderline-immobile soup of intrigue, for ColePowered Games are adding modding tools to the game. These will allow you to pen your own detective mysteries, and even alter the surrounding city to fit.

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Good day, detectives and welcome back to another Shadows of Doubt round-up! This week we wanted to give you a little update on the modding update and touch on more of your personal stories and experiences you’ve had in the procedural cities solving your cases.

[h3]An Update on the Modding Update![/h3]

We are currently aiming to have the update ready for early December. Before then we may look to share the modding tools with some of the dedicated Shadows of Doubt modding community to make sure it all works and to check if there is anything else we should implement. If you would be interested in this please do join our Discord and take on the "Crunchers" role.

Now for a bit more detail on what is coming with the update. The update consists of 3 main elements:

• A text editor tool - which you can use to add new text to the game for new citizen chatter, conversations, v-mails and more. Different dialog can be triggered based on citizen traits and situation. This is actually what we use to get text in the game.
  
• An in-game city editor - for now this will only give you the ability to rename buildings and streets and decide where you want to place the buildings but we hope to expand it in the future
  
• A mono build - we are going to make a mono version of the game available on a separate open Steam branch so that players can mod the game to their heart's desire. The mono version willl have slightly lower performance so we didn't want to put it on the default branch but hopefully you will be able to have some fun with it.
  
• There will also be a few other things coming unrelated to mods that we have been working on that we will keep secret for now
  
• Finally - we will also be implementing Steam achievements as well! We can't wait for you to have fun with these.
  

[h3]Now onto your stories![/h3]

Being that Shadows of Doubt tends to be very unique (and sometimes absolutely wild) with every new playthrough and new city, you’d be surprised at the things we’ve seen and probably the things you’ve seen yourselves…

So let’s sit around the diner booth, have a Starch Kola and reminisce on some notable moments shared by you!



Have you ever been so hot on the case that you witnessed an attempted murder?

Twitter user @n0valith has. And on top of that, was able to apprehend the killer before they had a chance to claim their next victim. Well done! See the full video here: Catching them in the act.



How about THINKING you’re hot on the case until you realize you’ve broken into the wrong facility after hours to investigate a potential murderer. @pixlBandits has some first hand experience to share with you: Oops wrong place.



We suppose you could ignore all of these kind of situations if you just go ahead and take EVERYBODY out of the City Hall database. Reddit user u/Kijora_The_Duck did just that when they said “Government Who?”



That’s it for this week, detectives! Keep on the case, and keep sharing your sleuth experiences with us…we might investigate YOU next!

Hey detectives, thanks to the people who have been testing the experimental branch we have a bunch of fixes now available on the default branch!

• New: New DLSS configuration settings
  
• Fixed: Camera sometimes didn’t capture citizens properly (either excluding them when they should be in frame or including them when they should be out of frame)
  
• Fixed: City Hall receptionists would not turn up to work correctly (requires new city generation)
  
• Fixed: City Hall reception/foyer was incorrectly named
  
• Fixed: Game could sometimes display blank text when set to non-English
  
• Fixed: Potential fix for rare case of game not loading after ‘press any key’ screen
  
• Fixed: Some typos in sync disk descriptions
  
• Fixed: Removed an instance of street rubble blocking access to a spawned briefcase
  
• Fixed: Issues with sync disks not displaying their 3rd upgrade option stats properly
  
• Fixed: When sync disk was installed with option 3, the tooltip text on the upgrade buttons would only display the effect of the first upgrade
  
• Fixed: Sync Disk chamber in Sync Clinics could appear invisible in some cases
  
• Fixed: Trespasser Sync Disk option 'invisible' was not functioning correctly
  
• Fixed: Beauty Sync Disk option 'allure' increased prices instead of decreasing them
  
• Fixed: Status effects could still trigger even if they were turned off/disabled through an upgrade
  

Hey detectives! We've got a new update out on the experimental branch now! You can find details on how to access it here if you haven't used the experimental branch before!

• New: New DLSS configuration settings
  
• Fixed: Camera sometimes didn’t capture citizens properly (either excluding them when they should be in frame or including them when they should be out of frame)
  
• Fixed: City Hall receptionists would not turn up to work correctly (requires new city generation)
  
• Fixed: City Hall reception/foyer was incorrectly named
  
• Fixed: Game could sometimes display blank text when set to non-English
  
• Fixed: Potential fix for rare case of game not loading after ‘press any key’ screen
  
• Fixed: Some typos in sync disk descriptions
  
• Fixed: Removed an instance of street rubble blocking access to a spawned briefcase
  
• Fixed: Issues with sync disks not displaying their 3rd upgrade option stats properly
  
• Fixed: When sync disk was installed with option 3, the tooltip text on the upgrade buttons would only display the effect of the first upgrade
  
• Fixed: Sync Disk chamber in Sync Clinics could appear invisible in some cases
  
• Fixed: Trespasser Sync Disk option 'invisible' was not functioning correctly
  
• Fixed: Beauty Sync Disk option 'allure' increased prices instead of decreasing them
  
• Fixed: Status effects could still trigger even if they were turned off/disabled through an upgrade
  

Good day detectives!

We wanted to start doing a semi regular community update sharing fun little things behind the scenes, community content, potentially news about competitions and other bits and pieces with you all. Welcome to the 1st of our investigations.

[h2]Freecam mode and more![/h2]
Cole wanted to share something that might be fun for those of you who want to mess around with the game a bit: You can enable the developer cheats mode in Shadows by launching the game with the -uncleeden parameter! You can do this in steam as shown below.



If done correctly it should enable a 'developer' section in the settings menu where you'll have access to a bunch of developer cheats we often use. It's especially noteworthy as it features a free cam mode, which I know a lot of video makers especially have wondered about. Disclaimer: As these are intended as a dev tool you can break the game this way, (you may not see fixes for anything broken in them, and especially not anything in-game that was broken by using them). Have fun!

[h2]Community Case Boards[/h2]
Since the Cheats and Liars content update, the cases have been rolling in and City Hall can barely keep up. You’d be surprised how many cheats and liars there are out there in the city. The Dove app. Must be raking it in.

While on the subject of case files, over time, we’ve seen some of the most elaborate, wild case boards and some of the most organized. Investigate a few of these and see if you follow:

Discord user "Shy_Monke" has quite the tangled web of connections here.



Discord user "Neonrose" has a very organized style



If you have a case board you are particularly proud of please do share it so we can see the madness!



[h2]Gamescom[/h2]
We’ve also been on the case IRL recently at Gamescom and gave out some goodies to some sharp detectives on the scene. We may have some more goodies for our fans in the Discord in the near future along with competitions! If you haven’t joined yet, come investigate!

Some of you may recognise the case we had people try and solve below:


That's all for this one - let us know if there is anything else you would like to see included in this kind of Steam post as well!