Shadows of Doubt
Shadows of Doubt V 36.09 Experimental Branch Patch Notes
Fixed: Vandalism side jobs could choose apartments with no or not enough windows
Fixed: The correct passwords to black market dealers were not being accepted some of the time
Fixed: On some occasions innocent citizens were admitting to murders they didn’t commit (!)
Fixed: The game could not generate a city info txt file from compressed city data
Fixed: Errors in Dead of Night when killer’s home building did not feature a telephone router
Fixed: Disabled closing case for retirement
Fixed: Small chance of a pile of clothes blocking access to a low drawer*
Fixed: Head bob was broken in Dead of Night and certain other situations
Fixed: Sentry gun turrets did not unfold properly when alarm triggered if they weren’t visibly rendered.
Fixed: Rare error when loading in certain player apartments (no door appearing, rendering errors, audio errors)
Fixed: Some issues solves when buying/placing light switches in décor edit mode
Fixed: Restrictions put on cruncher use depending on position (for when positioned in inaccessible positions via decor edit mode; could otherwise result in clipping/teleporting of the player)
Fixed: Potential fix for sniper excessive shooting scenario
Fixed: Sitting in a chair after physics were recently active caused it to glitch out as it interacted with the player collider
Fixed: You can no longer sit on a chair unless it’s upright
Fixed: Player wasn’t able to sit in a chair if they had moved it away from its starting position
Better randomization of success/fail results with dialog
* Requires a new city generation to appear/spawn/see
Investigations #9: Sharpshooter Going Awry?
It’s our last month before the Summer investigations begin. Unfortunately for the city, it's too covered in corporate smog to even enjoy. Alas, crime never ceases and we need you on the case as usual. Let’s take a look at the latest:
Reports of Sharpshooter Assassins missing their intended targets have been circulating around the city, leaving piles of shell casings everywhere. The department is currently seeking a fix for these less than accurate shooters.
On a similar note, are you having trouble tracking down your sniper? Check out this great guide over at Gamerant to give you an edge on apprehending the shooters in your city.
Looks like some of our detectives have also worked other investigative jobs in the past as well…perhaps sketch artists? Have any of you put a face to your in-game detective's name?
One of our Discord detectives, TheRealTrevanian has. Meet “Owen Durand”...
On our local community mod front, we’ve got CENTORA, a 1500 population 9x6 city. Can you imagine investigating all of that?! Remember, EVERY room in EVERY building is accessible one way or another!
That wraps up the case for now, detectives! Thanks for investigating. Stay sharp on the beat and alert on the street.
Investigations #8: Happy Birthday Shadows of Doubt!
The votes are in! We have also been doing polls during early access in our Discord to see how you all like to operate on the beat.
DID YOU KNOW:
- Detectives would kindly knock at your front door to ask questions.
- Detectives prefer to investigate in the dead of night.
- Detectives favorite beverage to have while cracking a case is coffee
- Detectives prefer homicide cases over all other types
Throughout Early Access, you have helped us shape Shadows Of Doubt into what it is now with your feedback and sharing of all your exciting and fun experiences.Last year we launched the first major free content update, Cheats & Liars. This introduced new case types like infidelity and stolen items, a new building, The Grand Hotel and new ways to interact with citizens.
What better way to celebrate our 1 year anniversary than with ANOTHER major free content update, The Sharpshooter Assassin. Released earlier this month, an all new type of killer, the sniper, has been introduced. Using bullet trajectory analysis and investigations of the Black Market dealers in the new and improved Fathoms district will prove very helpful in catching these snipers.
In addition to the sniper, you’ll now acquire social credit perks as you level that will give you an edge on your cases in a a variety of ways and even grant you access to a new location above the filth of the cities, The Echelons.
General Sam also released another fantastically themed video showcasing some of this new content along with a host of other grevious law breaking in his quest to stop crime. You can also now find some wonderful voice acting of theirs in game!
With more to come before our 1.0 launch this year along with console releases (FINALLY, we know you’ve been wanting it 🙂), we want to thank each and every detective who has been on the case throughout Early Access sharing your findings, exciting moments and giving us the feedback needed to continue to create an amazing detective sim experience for you all. Let’s all cheers up an ice cold Starch Kola or perhaps an Old Wheel Bourbon and celebrate what will be another exciting year for detectives and Shadows Of Doubt!
Shadows of Doubt V 37.08 Patch Notes
- New: TV show content!
- Sales ledgers and receipts now have a significant chance of spawning harder name tracing information (e.g. just initials, surname etc).
- Fixed: Photographic evidence is now accepted as proof of killer at a crime scene
- Fixed: Purchased safes should not longer display the incorrect popup window
- Fixed: Some issues with snipers trying to achieve impossible shots and waiting forever
- Fixed: Evidence printing issues
- Fixed: Taking a photo with the flashlight on is now working properly with save games
- Fixed: Lots of sounds were not pausing when the game was in a pause state
- Fixed: Pool ball shooting was broken
- Fixed: Shotgun sound was triggering once per pellet instead of per fire
- Fixed: AI could investigate your position while inside a ground level air duct, causing them to push the player out of it.
- Fixed: Crash when loading a game with the maximum number of open cases, and maxing out your social credit to initiate a retirement.
- Fixed: Player would fall through floor if they went underneath the very bottom of a stairwell
- Fixed: Missing building names for new buildings
- Fixed: The game could not generate a city info txt file from compressed city data
- Audio: Pursued notification replaced/updated
- Audio: Fixed hand-dryer roll-off behaviour
- Audio: New gramophone and jukebox music
- Audio: Slight reverb added to light and TV switches
- Audio: Replaced electronics room ambience
- Audio: Added live mixing of SFX tracks when music playing
- Audio: UI sounds mastered
- Audio: Numerous mix improvements
- Audio: Sentry gun rotation hydraulic added
- Audio: More item and weapon impact sounds
- Audio: New ‘new apartment’ notification sound
- Audio: Added a rummaging through bin sound (juicy!)
- Audio: Metal footsteps fixed
- Audio: Air ducts now mask exterior sound
- Audio: Air duct grills (in/out) now leak sound into ducts
- Audio: Air duct climb in/out foley
- Audio: Player crouching dampens their footsteps
- Audio: Coin impacts for different surfaces added
* Requires a new city generation to appear/spawn/see
Devlog 36: Sharpshooter Update Out Now! Coming to Consoles in 2024!
Not only that though, I’m excited to announce our first major content update of the year titled ‘Sharpshooter Assassin’ which launched today also. You can read the full list of changes here. This is the largest content update yet; the main focus of it is two new killer variants, both based on a killer that will kill from range. Prepare to study bullet trajectories to hunt down vantage points across the city! The goal behind this is to inject the main serial killer cases with more variety, and you’ll have to alter your detective approach a bit to accommodate these killer types.
Alongside that, there are two new building types; a mixed-use industrial building and the often-referenced-to-in-lore ‘Fathoms’ which is a kind of slum/shanty town. At the opposite end of the social class spectrum, we also have new gated communities found at the tops of skyscrapers, where land values are at their highest. You’ll need special access to visit here (well legally anyway). I hope you have fun exploring the new city geography!
In addition to this we have the introduction of social credit level perks. These have been on the cards for a while (previously the social levels were not used for anything apart from ending the game through retirement). Now each level has a small perk attached. I don’t want to spoil them all because I think they’re going to be fun to discover but I hope it gives new gameplay incentive and meaning towards gaining that precious social credit score.
There’s a bunch of other stuff in this update too, including reduced city generation time, steam cards and more but the last thing I’ll talk about here is the addition of an ‘auto travel’ feature. This is something I’ve wanted to put into the game for ages, but only now have found the time. The auto travel feature is a little like fast travel, but instead of teleporting to your destination, your character will automatically find their way to wherever you want to go.
Crucially, while auto travelling you can interact with your caseboard without pausing the game. Ever had it where you’re walking someplace and going over something in your head and not really putting much effort into the act of moving around as you know the route so well? This is trying to emulate that, kind of like a detective autopilot. It’s entirely optional of course, I expect some people to use it frequently and others to not, but it’s a feature I’m pretty pleased with. I also expect it could really help to make the game more approachable from an accessibility standpoint, or if you’re a player who is more interested in piecing together the case than physically moving throughout the world. There is a little bit of work left to do here as due to the variety of physical places the player can find themselves in, you can on occasion need to exit auto travel to guide the player yourself. Basic travel works pretty well though.
Auto travel options can be found in the location evidence window, with an additional toggle button found in the map interface.
As frequent players may have noticed, we’ve transitioned from pushing more frequent smaller patches to less frequent but larger patches. Expect this to continue going forward. Over the summer we’re going to have an increased focus on bug fixing, as well as improving controller support to get it up to a better standard. Until next time detectives!
Shadows of Doubt V 37.07 Sharpshooter Assassin Patch Notes
- New: 2 new sniper killer types; these killers will shoot victims from windows or rooftop vantage points around the city.
- New: New mixed-use industrial building*
- New: Shanty town building (’the Fathoms’)*
- New: Gated communities (’the Echelons’) are now located at the top of certain buildings. You’ll need to obtain a high social status to access these legally*
- New: 2 new murder weapons (Bat, Katana)*
- New: 11 new player perks unlocked by climbing social credit levels! Including:
- Enforcers will allow you at crime scenes
- Immediate status cure on visiting player apartment
- Enforcers will allow you at crime scenes
- New: Auto travel feature; turn this on to allow your player to automatically follow a plotted route. While auto travelling opening the case board does not pause the game, allowing you to interact with your case board enroute to your destination.
- New: Added button on the map display to cancel the current route, along with a toggle for auto travel.
- New: Loitering around shops/bars/restaurants without buying anything is now a thing; you will be asked to buy something or move along.
- New: New conversations, documents and v-mails
- New: Steam trading cards, badges and community assets
- City generation times reduced by about 15%
- Improved weather effects
- Some changed/new interface iconography
- Improved ragdoll physics
- Fixed: Improvements to player route calculation
- Fixed: Some errors with AI not prioritising important actions (discovering body etc)
- Fixed: Player-plotted routes will no longer get cancelled if the player is in mid-air
- Fixed: Bug when waking up in hospital while playing on a pre-release city
- Fixed: Ragdolls were in wrong positions upon load of a save game
- Fixed: In rare cases an NPC could end a citizen’s telephone call by speaking to them
- Fixed: Stealing money or some certain objects was resulting in cr0 fines instead of their worth
- Fixed: Player could get stuck upon loading in a game that was saved inside a Sync Chamber
- Fixed: On games started before 36.07, buying a new apartment before the story mode ended would cause furniture and items to not be saved properly
- Fixed: City Hall 4th floor would appear incorrectly filled-in on the map*
- Fixed: No override fog settings when inside some buildings (indoor environment could appear overly foggy)
- Fixed: Wall decals were not presented properly in camera pictures
- Fixed: Increased size of briefcase hitbox to avoid intersecting geometry issues when picking it up.
- Audio: metal impact improvements
- Audio: water cooler audio fix for cancelling drinking
- Audio: new décor rotation and placement sounds
- Audio: bone break sound added
- Audio: minor tweak to body collapse sound
- Audio: passing time now has its own soundscape
- Audio: player punch variance when player punches a wall
- Audio: minor improvements to heavy door knocking on wood
- Audio: smoothed Edge Distance parameter for better blending of city ambiences
- Audio: new gain social credit sound
- Audio: new social level up sound
- Audio: new case solved sound
- Audio: new case unsolved sound
- Audio: improved wooden and metal glass door locked attempt sounds
- Audio: minor improvements to sync disk machine sounds
- Audio: sounds added for the various door types
- Audio: steaming manhole improved roll off and behaviour
- Audio: locker lock/unlock improved timings
- Audio: computer HDD loading sound improved roll off
- Audio: fire barrels less crackly/harsh
- Audio: wooden door close creak now probability based
- Audio: fixed English Starch Kola TV ad cutting off too soon
- Audio: added new TV and PA advert (Old Bourbon)
* Requires a new city generation to appear/spawn/see
Investigations #7: BIG NEWS Coming April 10th!!
We are part of the triple-i initiative
We have some massive news coming on April 10th at 10am PDT / 1pm EDT / 7pm CEST as part of the triple-i initiative. Please do tune in for over 30 announcements from the best in the indie space with no ads, extra fluff or any nonsense like that. You can check out their Twitter here to stay up to date
Art Competition Winners
We can also announce the winners of our art contest in our Discord:
- @sue2u2 with the autographed picture
- @meysmerized with the diamond detective
- @kommandantrook with the sunset city
Writing Competition
After the success of our previous art contest, we’ve decided to do more to celebrate another group of our Discord detectives…WRITERS. Plans are in the works to get another contest going in the near future involving our noir story-telling folks so keep your private eyes peeled in our Discord for that!
We hope you’ve been enjoying all of our teases for the next big Shadows update that have been shown on TikTok and on Twitter this past month. Some of them have been pretty straight forward teases…others have been a bit more subtle. Have you been able to figure them all out?
Some More Fun
If there ever was a wrong time to be investigating, we think Debwake has found it. Not as romantic as the music would convince you of though! Check out the YT Short here
That's it for this week detectives. April is about to be BIG for Shadows Of Doubt, so we’ve gotta get right back to our own investigations on the company crunchers behind the scenes. We will see you on the case!
Shadows of Doubt V 36.07 Patch Notes
- New: Blood pools will appear under victims and grow over time.
- Improved bullet impact VFX
- Altered behaviour of bullets when they come in contact with a window: The first will leave behind a bullet hole in the glass, a second will shatter it.
- Cigarette ends are now left behind by smokers
- Tweaked killer chances and evidence spawning probabilities (you should see more supporting evidence).
- You will now only get mugged in the street when above social credit level 1.
- Tweaked social credit level curve
- Staff will now clean up trash left on the floor of a restaurant or bar
- Greatly increased social credit given for successful completion of jobs, murder cases and lost & found.
- Improved culling, especially outdoors*
- Various street furniture now spawns on rooftops*
- Minor visual adjustments to rain VFX
- Toned down the fog at the start of the story mode
- Fixed: Weather shaders now working properly
- Fixed: Bug where killer would not kill if there was no place to purchase their weapon of choice.
- Fixed: Disallowed apartment purchasing before the campaign is complete (when on story mode), as this caused errors in the campaign.
- Fixed: Switching items didn’t trigger if the item was the same type as item already held.
- Fixed: Rare internal error when picking citizen to be a murderer
- Fixed: Wrong post processing environment volume references in some locations
- Fixed: A geometry issue in the diner’s back yard*
- Fixed: Muggings rarely worked unless stood still for a while (be more careful on the quiet streets!)
- Fixed: Missing item descriptions added.
- Fixed: Internal error when plotted player route was cancelled
- Fixed: Murder victims changing outfits upon their death
- Fixed: Visual glitch with enforcer helmet visors
- Fixed: Nosy Parker achievement was triggering erroneously
- Fixed: A rare error causing the game to hang on the loading screen when loading a game
- Fixed: Configuration fix for mod.io
- Fixed: Provisions made to stop the game trying to regenerate a city data from a city that was made with the city editor
- Introduced another failsafe and potential fix for the falling through floor glitch (we’re continuing diagnostic work with this one as it’s unreplicable on a consistent basis)
- Introduced a system to stop the player getting stuck in tight spaces
- Audio: New intro sequence music
- Audio: New player spawn sound
- Audio: Curtain open/close sounds added
- Audio: Throwing object sounds added
- Audio: Desk fan impact sounds added
- Audio: New door barge and break sounds
- Audio: Water cooler sounds added
- Audio: Tutorial mystery caller audio replaced
- Audio: Lockpicking sound ceases if lockpicking player looks away
- Audio: Cushion impacts added
- Audio: Padlock sounds added
- Audio: NPC gun sounds replaced and properly set-up
- Audio: Punch wall sound replaced
- Audio: Tweaks to melee sounds
- Audio: minor improvements to grenade spatialisation
- Audio: minor improvements to phoneline sounds
- Audio: quieter ambiences at city edge
- Audio: basement ambience quieter
- Audio: footsteps slightly quieter (mostly player on carpet)
- Audio: chem stack burn-off sound improved in many tiny ways
* Requires a new city generation to appear/spawn/see
Investigations #6 Discord Updates and News on the Horizon
Our first art contest over in the discord is well underway and there have been some amazing submissions from many detectives hoping to get their artwork placed in the game as a decorative object.
Speaking of our Discord, We’ve recently made some QOL changes to the structure and added some fun new bits like custom animated stickers and emojis that you can use wherever! Our new UGC section makes sharing your favorite moments in Shadows of Doubt and fanart super easy and allows us to curate and share your content more widely with everyone. If you’re not a member yet, it’s time to get investigating!
Finally, while Shadows Of Doubt is chock full of lore if you listen and look around hard enough, but we are LOVING how deep some of you have gone digging and creating your own theories based on our neo-noir world. Check this world map out based on the events leading up to when Shadows Of Doubt takes place. Brought to you by u/Leldy22. Click the link for more lore discussion over on Reddit.
That's it for this investigation, detectives. Stay tuned for the next one where we may very well be announcing some more NEW things to get you ready for another big case!
Investigations #4 Back in full motion and working on the next update!
We’ve kicked off the new year continuing work on the next major content update for Shadows Of Doubt amongst many other things that will continue fleshing out the best sci-fi noir detective world we can give you! In the meantime, we hope you’ve been working hard on the case to obtain all of our new achievements.
We’ve also been investigating what you have all been getting into within your cities:
@DCeleria has been using our city editing feature to create what we like to call “Hotelopolis”. You wont need to worry about vacancy in that city!
Discord User Boome_2 is working a new murder case. Though it would appear the murder scene has had quite a bit of visitors based on the door fingerprints…Good luck with that one!
What detective agency is complete without a resident sketch artist? Discord user Treealone may be onto something with this Kola Monster sketch…are the myths true?!
That’s it for this investigation. Keep on the beat and stay tuned for our next blog here where we crack the case on more of your awesome content and talk a bit more about upcoming content from our end! Thank you for your continued support and as always…
Do join the Discord to get involved in the discussion and if you want to hear more about Fireshine Games please do sign up to our Newsletter