Hi Detectives, it’s time for a new Dev update from me!
To start off we’re working on a patch at the moment for Shadows of Doubt that should be out before the end of August that is going to feature a couple of quality of life improvements and updates.
The first change that we’ve implemented is the ability to turn off certain killer types that you may or may not like. I know a lot of people weren’t keen on the kidnapping cases or didn’t want to deal with the sniper cases so you can now turn them off. Or alternatively, only play them if that’s what you want to do. This is an update that will be available on all platforms.
The second big change we’ve been working on is some changes to the way objectives work that have previously caused a lot of confusion.The way objectives work at the moment, and have always worked in the game, is that when you get a case the case questions will appear as objectives on the right. However, in some cases some of the questions are things like ‘Arrest the kidnapper’, and, because the objectives on the right are just a carbon copy of that question, they’re not particularly interactive and there can be some confusion around ticking them off.
There are other similar scenarios that just don’t feel as intuitive as we would like them to or that don’t seem to acknowledge the players actions as much as we’d like, so we’re working to improve these. This should become a lot clearer once the update is released this month, however this is a change that we’ve had in the works for a while with the goal of improving players’ gameplay experience and making things feel a little bit more refined and responsive.
The next part of this update I wanted to touch on, which I mentioned all the way back in Dev Blog 12, is a bit more technical so bear with me, but surrounds our decision to make Shadows of Doubt in Unity’s High Definition Render Pipeline. At the time this was brand new and felt really fancy with lots of visual effects and lighting which just looked really good. Using HDRP is the main reason that Shadows of Doubt can look as good as it does, especially in regards to volume metrics ,fog and stuff like that.
So, that was a decision that we made a long time ago with the thought that the package would be continuously improved and added to, which it has but just not as much as the Universal Render Pipeline which about 90% of games use because of how performant it is.
As the name suggests, the Universal Render Pipeline is way more universal and therefore a lot better supported due to it being in a much higher demand from developers.
Now, I don’t know what Unity’s plans are, however, it kind of feels that they’re aiming to have URP as the only pipeline or at the very least, the main one. Just due to how supported it is currently and the frequency in which it is being added to in comparison to HDRP. So, with that in mind, we are in the process of converting the whole of Shadows of Doubt onto this Universal Render Pipeline. This, hopefully, would allow us to achieve some big boosts in performance, which is a large reason why we’ve decided to attempt it. However, that being said, we don’t want to sacrifice any visual quality so we are working with that in mind but, for now, we’re just giving it all a go to see how it can work. Ideally, we’d like to replicate the original game as closely as possible. Then, what I think is most likely going to happen is, this version will sit on its own steam branch that you’ll be able to access, allowing players who want to prioritize performance over visuals to do so.
As it stands, the disparity in visuals is yet to be seen and we currently don’t know what it’s going to look like. Though, in an ideal world, we’d have the new version look every bit as good as the old HDRP version and, if that’s achievable in any way, then we’d just have this new version as the default steam version and even the default version on other storefronts as well.
So to summarise, we’re looking at quite a radical revamp in terms of the rendering code on Shadows of Doubt, converting it URP and making it more performant. This is an update that won’t touch any gameplay code by the way, just the graphics.
With this change we’ll see how good we can make it look and hopefully achieve some hefty performance benefits. If for whatever reason this doesn’t boost performance then we’ll put a stop to this because there’s just no reason to do it- but that’s the goal.
So yeah, that’s what we’ve been up to for most of 2026 so far. We’ll make sure to keep you updated along the way but we look forward to hopefully bringing about some really good performance boosts which could help a lot of people out, especially those on lower performance systems.
And then aside from that, the new projects that I mentioned last time, they’re shaping up really well, but we’re not ready to announce them yet, so not this time unfortunately.
That’s all for now but I hope everyone is having a great summer.