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.