Shadows of Doubt
Shadows of Doubt will be playable at W.A.S.D From the 7th to the 9th of April!
We’re excited to be bringing the first publicly playable build of Shadows of Doubt to W.A.S.D - A new video game event taking place in London’s Tobacco dock from the 7th to the 9th of April!
Cole will also be attending the event to talk about Shadows of Doubt, watch some of you play and answer questions you may have. We are looking forward to hearing your thoughts on the demo as well!
The Shadows of Doubt demo offers a chance to get your hands on and try out some of Shadows of Doubts awesome features as you work your way through an opening investigation, spend your time playing the demo exploring, lock-picking, hacking, sneaking, climbing and much more!
You will find Shadows of Doubt at the Fireshine Games booth at QS5 available at all days, come join us for a chance to play, get your picture taken on a polaroid to become part of our W.A.S.D investigation, an opportunity to win an Xbox One S and more!
Shadows of Doubt Simfest Stream!
To celebrate being part of Simfest. We have worked hard to put together a new 25 minute video giving you a narrated overview of the latest Shadows of Doubt Gameplay.
Cole takes us through one of the many types of side missions you can encounter in the game. In this case he has been tasked with taking a photo of someone but all he has to go on is their place of work, their hair type and their age.
Cole gives a bit of a detective masterclass by sharing some of the various ways you can gather information and track down your target as well as an introduction to some of the mechanics in the game.
There is also a lot of new things and visuals to take in given this is the first video of its kind since 2019!
Hope you enjoy the stream!
Shadows of Doubt DevBlog #30: The Top Shadows of Doubt Development Challenges Pa
Lighting
Shadows of Doubt is a procedurally generated game. That’s great and everything, except when it comes to the technical challenge of lighting. Most non-procedurally generated games feature baked lighting (and not just lighting actually, it means you can do all sorts of yummy baking). Baking essentially means precalculating tricky things into a bunch of data the game can read when you play. Much faster than trying to figure out all those calculations in real-time.
Lighting is a big one as it means you don’t have to ask the game engine to bounce light everywhere when playing. Although it’s common for a game to feature a mixture of both baked and real-time lights anyway, the nature of the levels where nothing is predetermined means Shadows has to use 100% real-time lighting: That’s a big performance hog.
So what are the solutions?
Simply use fewer lights. If calculating all this is expensive, then use less of them right? Fortunately, having fewer lights creates some nice heavy shadows which kind of lends quite well to the noir genre. There are a few cases where this is tricky, however; mostly the street scenes. In this scenario, however, I’ve come up with a way to ‘fake’ having a bunch of ambient lighting. Over every street is a large area light, which casts a colour down on the street. This is designed to mimic a mixture of all the ambient lights in the street. Every object that spawns in the street (for example a red paper lantern) can alter the ambient colour of the overhead area light slightly. It’s not perfect, but this method helps to light up the street with additional ambient light.
Limit lighting and shadow distance. Fortunately, in Unity you are able to set distances for lights to be active. This isn’t my favourite compromise as it means the lights essentially turn off as you reach a certain distance, but it is a good ‘catch all’ method for making sure we don’t have too many lights shining at once.
Another Unity thing is light layers. This allows you to make sure lights are only cast on certain layers (any object in the world can be part of a layer). Using this, I can make individual buildings have their own light layer. Therefore ensuring that lights within an interior largely only affect things inside a building and vice versa. I’m not actually sure how much this is helping performance, but I imagine I’m at least saving the engine some amount of calculation by cutting off a chunk of active lights this way.
Object Handling/Saving/Resetting
So we have this world populated by literally 1000s of props, most of which can be moved, damaged or destroyed in some way. That’s not necessarily a problem for a modern game engine, but things get complicated when you think about how you want them to behave.
Lots of things might get moved around by the player (say the player trashes an apartment or a bar), we don’t want those objects to stay in their trashed positions forever; as this is a simulation we would probably want the AI to put things back how they were eventually, or at least imply that and have everything be reset at some point. That’s great then; tell things out-of-place to get reset to their original positions after a certain amount of time. Well, what about litter? What about things the AI have deliberately moved for good reason? Wallets? Purses etc? We actually don’t want everything to reset. In order to solve this problem I had to come up with a ‘relocation authority’ system; or a system dictating special cases on when we want items to reset and when we don’t. Generally, we have to look at the object’s owner; they have the ‘power’ to set the spawn locations of objects, so they can move them. There are plenty of special cases, however; such as if an NPC steals an item and positions it in their home or elsewhere. In short this is a bit of a special case minefield. Yay.
Then there’s save data. Due to the nature of the game, we can’t always dictate what objects are valuable sources of information for a case. Therefore when we save a game, we have to save everything. Not just objects the player is carrying or is in the immediate vicinity of, but every item in the world! Ouch.
In the next dev blog I’ll continue ranting about stuff! Stay tuned.
Shadows of Doubt DevBlog #29: 2021 Wrap-Up
Where were we this time last year?
Looking back in my source control commits reveals that I had just finished a revamp of the way the citizens were put together. Something that we've really capitalized on (and you can read about here). The fleshing out of the citizen visuals is something I'm super pleased with, and arguably the biggest area of improvement this year; giving them a real new lease of life.
The game was, at this point last year, only really playable in terms of the more scripted story component we have; a lot of the procedural gameplay elements were still lacking refined enough systems to be properly part of the gameplay. And in fact, due to the complexity of it all having to fit together to work; something this remained so for a large portion of this year.
What notable progress happened this year?
I'm pleased to say the game has come together a lot (especially in the last half of the year).
We launched a short closed alpha in June to gather feedback, and although the game was buggier than I would have liked at this point, we did gather plenty of vital feedback which we've been busy implementing. It's always hard to semi-publicly share something you feel is still very much a work-in-progress, but in retrospect, this was a good time to do this. Most things at this point were not set in stone, so we were able to chop and change a lot, whereas if we'd waited it's possible a lot of work would have to be undone (or feedback thrown away). Thank you to everyone who participated. And to those of you who chose not to, or didn't get into the alpha, rest assured you'll be playing a better game!
Miles, our excellent pixel artist turned voxel artist has been working very hard over the course of this year. Not only had his hard work on the citizens paid dividends, but the number of props we have in the game has exploded (and we've still got plenty to add that you haven't seen yet). The new street props help differentiate city districts, making them feel much more unique.
The world has been further developed and fleshed out thanks to our star writer Stark Holborn, which you can read about here if you haven't done so. We'll also be looking to share more exciting detail about the sound design with Monomoon in the new year.
Weather effects such as rain and snow make the world feel more alive than ever.
Gameplay has seen huge shifts too: Playable side missions, AI killers, identifiable footprints, guns, hilarious passive-aggressive AI behaviour, a GUI revamp, a huge array of interactable items, status effects, weather effects, basements, purchasable upgrades and apartments... Plus I fixed that condiment bug.
Where are we now?
Obviously, global events continued to throw a spanner in the works this year. A good portion of the start year here in the UK was spent in lockdown. We're hoping 2022 will be the year we can safely think about public events again, but if 2021 has taught us anything, it's to keep plans like this on ice.
Me working on the game in the middle of a pandemic.
But game-wise I'm feeling very positive about 2022: We're going into it more or less at a phase where the core systems are all in and functioning (minus bugs and in some cases more iteration).
What's Next?
Much of 2022 will be about adding content and iterating (fun), and then bug fixing and optimizing (less fun but necessary). I'm really looking forward to sharing the progress. And to address this elephant in the room, we're not quite ready to talk about release dates, but you'll read it here first when we are!
Shadows of Doubt DevBlog #28: Building the World Through Writing
One of the best parts of working on Shadows is the world-building. Luckily, right at the start of development Cole dreamed up an amazing framework for an alt-history, neo-noir world, packed with memorable characters, shadowy alliances and corrupt power structures. It’s a rich setting and a lot of fun to write, but one of the main challenges is how to insert all that world-lore into the game in creative ways, without infodumping and still allowing for a variety of different play styles.
I’m a novelist as well as a games writer, and part of my aim when writing a book is to sneak worldbuilding into a text without a reader even noticing; we’re trying to do the same thing with Shadows. Look closely, and you’ll find lore woven through many items in-game, especially everyday objects. Like the books on the shelves: many have readable blurbs that reflect the world in which they were written.
And it’s not just books. Off the top of my head I can also say that Yellow Beaks cigarettes are named after the events of the Mustard War, while a “Krueger Sandwich” (slices of synthetic beef, pork and chicken smothered with ketchup) was invented by Starch tycoon Eden Krueger to prove the safety of their new synthetic meat products after the Eastern Food Crisis.
At the time the game is set, Starch Kola is the president of the United Atlantic States, meaning the corporation’s presence is everywhere. I’ve made it a sort of running joke that in this super dystopian world, Starch will try and jam advertising into literally anything, from press releases to Enforcer and medical reports.
The advertisements you come across or hear on the TV (and maybe, at some point, in the streets…) also provide tons of opportunity to reflect the dystopian themes of the game and the hyper-industrialized, capitalist society of Shadows.
To get the right tone, I usually scout around for vintage advertisements and infographics, before turning things up to eleven.
[previewyoutube="S4hlH-lX5r4;full"]
Here’s an example of one of our adverts:
City-living getting you down? Need a bit of fizz to take you higher?
Grab a Starch!
Our new improved recipe is great for home, work and play, giving you the sparkle you need to succeed.
Starch Kola: Put Some Life Into It
Just to dive into the wording of this one: the reference to city living implies that everyone who hears this is living in a metropolis and that there are no alternatives. The juxtaposition of down (bad, in the gutter) and up (higher floors, achievement) reflects the preoccupations of the wider society, the reference to “home, work and play” implies that citizens must be conscious of their behaviour and energy at all times, and the ad ends on the obvious tying together of drinking Starch and achieving success…
There are shades of Philip K Dick’s Ubik in here – the power of advertising to dictate and re-frame reality – as well as Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and even Time Bandits.
Of course, a lot of this is background colour and setting. A huge part of Shadows will be the ability for players to create their own narratives and stories by how they choose to interact with this procedurally-generated world.
Procedural storytelling is inherently challenging, but it’s something that Cole and I have been working on. We’ve developed certain systems, and Cole has created a custom-made dialogue editor with access to a wide number of procedural fields and variables, which also allows us to insert written content directly into the game for testing. We’ll be using it to further explore the procedural storytelling during the next stage of the game’s development. But that’s probably one for a future post…
Stay tuned for more dev updates coming soon!
Bio: Stark Holborn is a novelist, games writer and film reviewer, and is the author of Ten Low, the British Fantasy Award-nominated Triggernometry series, and Nunslinger. Stark lives in Bristol, UK.
Social Links:
Twitter: @starkholborn
Instagram: @starkholborn
You can receive a FREE short story here: Starkholborn.com
Shadows of Doubt DevBlog #27: Populating the Population: Outfits
Intro
Last blog I talked about making voxel faces for the citizens in Shadows of Doubt and the challenges that come with that. This week, we’ll be looking at the modeling of the citizens as a whole and their outfits!
If you follow us on social media, you may have noticed that the citizens’ wardrobe selection has expanded beyond trench coats and trilbies. Don’t worry, you’ll still find this dapper detective look around the city. However, you’ll also see a range of other outfits; from casual jeans and shirts to snazzy dresses and to classy suits.
In this blog, I’ll run you through what it takes to create a new outfit for the game and the decisions I make when designing them.
Creating the Outfits
All designs start with a little bit of research. Usually, this entails googling 1920-80s clothing and finding some simple inspiration there. However, I’ll often look up outfits worn by celebrities from this time, or I’ll draw inspiration from noir films, such as ‘The Maltese Falcon’.
To model an outfit there are a few important limitations that need to be addressed to get it working in Shadows of Doubts. For the purposes of procedural generation, every outfit, ideally, can be worn by every citizen and have a random colour. Therefore, when an outfit is modelled, it is modelled six times. Three times for each body type we have, and then another three times so that there is a masculine and feminine version.
To get the random colours, the model is first created fully coloured so I can get a good idea of how it “should” look. It is then manually grey-scaled to allow the code to recolour it properly, and with this, I create the colour map to select each area to be recoloured differently. Generally, the outfits have 3 colours to be replaced: red, green and blue, however, I’ll also use black on the colour map to maintain certain colours from the base texture before being recoloured by the code, like a white shirt or black buttons.
Once this first version is completed each model needs to be checked to make sure it works with the animation and other outfits that it’ll randomly generate with. The outfits replace the models for the arms, legs, body, etc. so making sure that they all align properly and there are no oddities sticking out when a character is walking is important. A good amount of trial and error is needed, going back and forth between Unity and Qubicle, chopping off voxels here and there to ensure the outfit works well. Generally, the tops and the bottoms, as well as dresses, are built from a standardised base design and this helps reduce the amount of trial and error needed to rework the outfits to a good standard.
With voxel models, the texturing and the modelling is often one in the same process. Particularly for lower resolution voxel models. It’s very easy to simply retexture while working in Qubicle. Moreover, the folds of clothing and the surface texturing is baked into the base texture model, rather than using polygons. This means combining the texturing and modelling processes is important because it’ll help me make decisions as to how to get a good clothing “look”.
Unique Outfits
While it is desirable to make all tops and bottoms work together to get a huge diversity of procedurally generated outfits, there are some cases where this simply wouldn’t allow for enough shape variation. The biggest cause of this is that the tops and bottoms need to sit flush at the interface of where they meet at the waist. If this interface differs between each outfit there’s usually some weird clipping when you start to mix and match them.
To get around this there are a few “complete” outfits, these are ones that cover the full body and don’t mix and match several pieces. It’s far easier to create a unique shape if the whole outfit works as one. The gold jacket and white trousers in the screenshot above is one such example. Another example is the dresses. Which also provided another significant challenge…
There are no custom animations for the outfits, therefore for dresses, the design must allow for leg movement without the model deforming to keep the fixed voxel shape. As a result, the dresses are made as a solid objects because this means as the legs split apart for the walking animation they appear as one continuous surface. If they were hollow, you would essentially see the dress split apart too when walking.
A similar design is used for the trench coats, but, as these maintain the models for the upper legs a weird little wall of voxels is used to hide when the legs split apart when walking. However, this may need further work if it poses an issue during sitting animations where you can see the underside of the upper leg models.
Other notable unique outfits are those that are used for specific professions. For factory workers, I’ve created some lovely work overalls to wear instead of getting their trench coats dirty! And then for the police officers, we created a somewhat dystopian twist on the traditional British police uniform. They’ve got the vintage smart black uniform, and custodian helmet, however, we’ve attached a riot gear visor. This helps enforce the idea that they’re privatised security and gives them an impersonal feel as it obscures their identity.
Other Features
Recently we introduced glasses and hats into the character generation – I find they really help add a great amount of personality to the characters, with very little effort.
This will be a niche reference, but in continuation of our internal ‘this citizen looks like x person’ game: This dude really reminds me of British vocalist Richard Hawley – Cole.
We also have a huge variety of hairstyles. Conveniently the hairstyles are designed to work with any head shape as they all follow the same structure, unlike the clothing. This means any single hairstyle can be used for all 6 head types.
Lastly, shoes! The shoes aren’t part of the outfits as such, because they can be an important clue for your detective work. Currently, there are 3 types of shoes, your bog-standard kind, boots and heels. They have a higher resolution to the rest of the citizens’ outfits to allow you to distinguish the detail on them.
Final Thoughts
Cole has recently spoken in a blog post about generating the personalities of citizens: https://colepowered.com/2020/10/ Eventually we would like to tie this into the citizens clothing choices. Therefore, someone who is happy and outgoing are more likely to wear brighter and outlandish outfits. And we can then use this to tailor specific outfits to the personalities so that there is a broad spectrum of personalities encompassed by the clothing.
Thanks Miles! Tune in this time next month for more…
Shadows of Doubt DevBlog #26: Populating the Population: Sculpting Faces
Creating faces in low resolution
Recently we have been giving the citizens of Shadows of Doubt an overhaul. We have upped their resolution slightly, given them new clothes, and most importantly faces, with eyes and mouths and ears! We are also working on the citizen’s style choices: beards, hairdos, moustaches, tops, hats, dresses, etc. All of this should give a bit more life to the people walking around the streets of the city as well as a recognisable and individual identity.
One of the biggest challenges with voxel faces is adding subtle differences in order to generate diversity. It is particularly difficult to make masculine and feminine faces distinct and believable at such a low resolution. There are some key features that help communicate whether a face is masculine or feminine; primary details such as, head shape, brow line form, chin, cheek and jawline structure, hairline position, nose shape, lips. Then there are secondary details like hairstyle and facial hair which can be used for further emphasis.
Below is a comparison between the masculine and feminine heads and their different face shapes. I will explain the design choices I made, and hopefully, some of you can benefit from this analysis to help create your own voxel characters, or you might simply find it interesting.
Primary details
One of the most notable details is the overall head shape, more rounded for feminine heads and squarer for masculine heads. To portray roundness there is an extra voxel between the top of the forehead and the hairline, softening the interface between the face and the top of the head. For masculine faces the hairline tends to start higher up, therefore by having the forehead 3 voxels tall the illusion that the hairline starts higher up is created. In addition to this, male pattern baldness can be created by simply having the voxels of the corner of the forehead be skin coloured, which also makes the heads appear squarer.
A wider brow is a notable masculine trait, this is simply done by making the brow 5 voxels wide. Prominent cheekbones are a more feminine characteristic, however, on both styles, the face width is 5 voxels wide. Yet, by having the brow of feminine heads only 3 voxels, the cheekbones appear to sit further out and thus appear more prominent.
Another masculine feature is that of the nose, the bridge of the nose starts higher up, and this is simply communicated with having two voxels for the nose. Whereas, for a feminine face the nose is only one voxel. The added benefit of this is that it helps emphasise the roundedness or squareness of the head.
Masculine faces typically have stronger, wider chins when compared with feminine faces, however, this detail is difficult to communicate without trying to make feminine chins be only a single voxel wide or underdeveloped. Instead, simply a standard neutral ground for both chins was chosen.
Secondary details
Once these primary details are figured out, then hairstyles and facial hair can be added. Having a base hair area textured onto the head helps ensure the haircut models work seamlessly and look natural. Hair colour and skin colour can be randomised using the colour shaders and a whole plethora of unique looking citizens cans be created.
We’ll be continuing this dev blog miniseries next month with some further insights into our progress on the citizens, stay tuned!
Shadows of Doubt DevBlog #25: Closed Alpha Conclusions
Me booting up the cruncher to write another dev blog entry.
Why a limited closed alpha?
Initially, we wanted to have a slightly more open alpha, but given the stage of development the game is at right now we didn't want to be overwhelmed with feedback. We thought a smaller amount of more in-depth feedback and a close look at how players were interacting with the game would be the most beneficial. We chose the relatively low number of 250 participants and the Go Testify service we worked with to get as much info as possible. For obvious reasons we haven't been able to demo the game at any game shows as of late, and I personally find them really helpful to look at how folks are interacting with the game: So I'm really happy that our closed alpha mimicked this type of feedback pretty closely.
The street scenes are good right now, but they will get even better with more props, bigger cities, and more unique locations.
So what did we learn? Some of you reading this may have played the alpha, but many may not have, so I'll give as much context as possible so this makes sense. I'll probably spend more text talking about what needs work rather than what we're getting right, so it might seem a little imbalanced but rest assured this alpha has really bolstered my confidence in where we're at and where to go (so it was easily worth it for that alone).
I'll start by addressing the most obvious thing and give it it's own paragraph; the game was very buggy. Ideally, I would have liked to get it into a better shape before pushing the big red button, but I fell into the classic game dev time management trap of thinking some things would take a shorter amount of time than they ultimately did. So thanks to everyone who played and put up with the bugs. We think we're aware of just about all of them now, so it will be a case of working through them during the rest of development.
More bugs than we'd like.
What did people like?
-It was very rewarding to see people spend time in and generally enjoy the world we've created. Each of us, perhaps above all, wanted to create somewhere that felt really atmospheric, and I think in that respect we're 100% on the right track, and we'll continue to create this weird dystopic world of Shadows.
-Minus some obvious bugs, the proc gen was working to create some interesting scenarios, and broadly speaking a world that players wanted to explore.
-The game often kept people playing past (sometimes way past) our planned 1-hour target.
-We're really pleased with some of the 'oh wow' moments players occasionally get, but I actually don't want to spoil any in the blog.
We're really pleased with the rain in the game, and you liked it too!
What do we need to work on?
-The user interface caused some problems: Some things just weren't quite intuitive or obvious enough and we'd really like to improve this so players can interact with the game properly. It's a super important thing to get right. The community has already provided some fantastic ideas, and we're now able to learn a lot by looking at the closed alpha screen recordings.
-The tutorial level still needs improvement and iteration: Too much information is being presented to the player at once, silly oversights on my part are causing confusion, and there aren't enough safe opportunities for players to experience stealth, sneaking or breaking and entering mechanics.
-The tutorial also lacks prompts towards the end, and there is definitely not enough end-of-case feedback. We want to revise the way cases are concluded including giving the players some clear objectives from the start about what they are aiming to achieve in the case. Note: This is different from 'hand-holding', which we don't really want to do more of.
-Features that are planned but just weren't ready in time for the alpha were causing some frustrations, especially key mapping along with some other control options.
What would be good to build upon or pivot more towards?
-It was wonderful to see how a lot of players liked to live and roleplay within the world. We're pretty keen to enable this, so we'd really like to give the everyday items in the game more meaning through carefully handled status effects (these will often be buffs or minor debuffs so as not to interfere too much with the investigative element of the investigative element the gameplay). We like the idea of something like grabbing a coffee if you're tired; it gives meaning to some of the world elements we've worked hard to bring to life. There are certain other gameplay aspects largely not talked about yet that I hope will also lend well to this. I'm actually super excited about this side of things because it lets me play around with the kind of smaller-scale detail that I get a kick out of.
-The city needs to be bigger and features more variations. In the alpha the city was small, largely due to the game being unoptimized. We're really keen to open up the world some more and give you more to explore; it's one of the first things on our list. A bigger city also naturally opens up the gameplay, so I'm super keen to get this rolling.
-People enjoyed the systemic gameplay, but in many places, the AI wasn't up to the task; it needs more iteration and a variety of reactions to create interesting scenarios. One example that came up quite a lot was their reaction to dead bodies- they kind of don't so much right now. We're keen to remedy that along with more varied reactions to violence and catching the player.
The locations are very limited in the alpha version, but we hope to expand these very soon.
So there we have it. Is something you fed back not on the above list? We're likely aware: I have plotted just about everything mentioned in a feedback tracker and the above are just the broad strokes. There are dozens of nuances and smaller things that I'm confident will get done or addressed in some way.
Lastly, I'd like to thank everyone who participated; your feedback is valuable and your ideas are appreciated. It's sometimes not so easy to dive into feedback on something you've been working on closely for years, but just about everything said was constructive and there was a hell of a lot of great and realistic ideas for improvement, so I've been really chuffed with that. I'd also like to thank those that didn't get a chance to play- we chose a random selection as we thought that would be fairest. Rest assured that when you play the game will be in a far superior state. Ears will be open throughout the rest of the development process.
Closed Alpha Sign-up!
The time has finally come for you to get your feet wet and investigate some sci-fi noir detective goodness yourselves. The Shadows of Doubt Closed Alpha has been announced and recruitment is happening RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW:
Closed Alpha Sign-Up - Discord
The test will run through the second half of May and we will be looking for your general feedback on the experience and how you are getting along. Suggestions, likes, dislikes and all the in between are welcome! Testers will have access to a special Discord channel to discuss their investigative findings and thoughts.
Here's a little taste of things to expect within your Alpha experience if chosen:
<*> Nearly an hour of Sci-Fi Noir, mystery filled story gameplay.
<*> A hand-crafted, robust neon city full of living, breathing citizens.
<*> Two polished and complete side missions to show the procedural aspect of the gameplay.
<*> Use your sleuthing skills as a detective by: monitoring security systems, hacking computers, lock-picking doors and much, much more.
<*> Utilise an arsenal of investigative technology and equipment will be at your disposal including codebreakers, fingerprint scanners and more.
As this alpha is purely for gathering feedback, we’ll ask you not to share it online at this point. We’ll get to that point in the future, but for now, we’re just looking to shape the game into being the best it can be!
This is a very exciting and important step for Shadows of Doubt and we are really looking forward to hearing from you. Make sure to not miss this opportunity and get involved over at the Discord now:
Closed Alpha Sign-Up - Discord
This is one case you don’t want to let go cold! 🔎
Shadows of Doubt DevBlog #24: Roadmap 2021
Year In Review
Polish up the game with the goal of presenting it at Rezzed in London at the end of March. This means fixing bugs, adding a couple of smaller features and brining stuff that’s ‘half-way done’ up to ‘pretty much done’. Get some more content in there, hopefully, some new characters models and animations along with more environmental items and at least 1 new building to make the city more varied.
Well… EGX Rezzed didn’t happen, so there’s that. I did get a playable version ready for this, and RPS kindly made a nice video about it. In retrospect though, the game was still too early to show at this point. Sans COVID I would have taken it to Rezzed and probably would have been a little stressed by the number of technical issues. B+.
Hack computers to access CCTV records.
Flesh out the gameplay features. CCTV, hacking, tracing phone calls. Foundations of the skill systems and progression. Cool detective stuff that opens up the gameplay.
I did a good chunk of this, and I’m really pleased with the way the CCTV system is going. Nothing is ‘complete’ standard yet, and won’t for a while, but we’re getting there. The skill system is something new I’ve been working on since Xmas so I missed the target date here. B.
The fingerprint system and fingerprint reader is one of the most significant gameplay additions.
Quarter 3 2020
By this point, I should know if early access by the end of the year is feasible. If it is then it will be a case of adding content throughout this quarter until I feel we have something that’s worth your time and money.
If we are able to hit early access this year, the first build will likely feature the first story mission (already done but not polished), or 2 plus a nearly-complete sandbox experience. By that, I mean enough varied side missions and incentives to progress skills/items. There’s a couple of cool ideas that I’ve kept under wraps in terms of what the player can progress towards, but I’ll write about that another time instead of spoiling it here.
Quarter 4 2020
Gearing up for EA. Polishing, fixing bugs and adding minor content. Playtesting. IF we don’t hit EA this year, we should by this point at least have a pretty solid date in mind for when that’s achievable.
At Q3 and 4 we still weren’t ready for any kind of public playtest. I’m not quite as free as I once was to talk about this kind of thing due to now working with a publisher (I now have to coordinate with professionals!) All I’m going to say is: Stay tuned in 2021, I will be sharing news when things are ready. C+.
The diner is one of many new locations added this year.
What about the stuff we did get done though? There’s been a decent amount! The game is starting to look more and more together. We’ve added the first story chapter, weather system with rain, fingerprints, much improved AI, alarm systems and security turrets, in-game computer systems, big improvements in the simulation, first-person objects and huge numbers of props.
There is still significant ground to cover though. This is a big, ambitious game and although it feels great to now be fully confident in its scope and the boundaries of that, it’s a rough, complex beast that will take time to hone and perfect. So what do we want to get done this year?
2021 Goals
- Citizen visual improvements with various builds, clothes, better detail and faces.
- A range of to-be-revealed first-person gadgets to aid you in stealth and investigation.
- Functioning skill system.
- Revised side missions with more twists and turns.
- All story chapters fully implemented.
- Side missions fully implemented.
- Continue with AI improvements.
- Expanded world: More things to discover, explore and find.
We’re going all out on awesome-looking rain!
There’s actually a fair chunk more that I could add to this but I’m going to reveal that when the time comes. I’ve hope you’ve enjoyed following along this year, here’s to another great year of progress!