Cheats and Liars Update is Coming on September 25th!
Hey Detectives!
Our first major update is coming out on September 25th!
Cheats and Liars introduces a brand new case type - investigating an infidelity. As a private detective, you'll be tasked with looking into suspected sordid relations to track down everything that's been going on in an illicit affair. Investigate the couple’s movements, discover clues, seek out evidence and monitor their actions to determine whether the accused has been unfaithful.
You can check out the trailer here:
Check into a room in the brand new multi-storey hotel and make use of its facilities - as long as you can pay the bill. Relax at the rooftop bar or marvel at the antique crystal chandelier in its majestic lobby - the hotel is yours to explore. Discover brand new NPC interactions and dialogues, including the option to directly accuse your suspect and place them in handcuffs. But be warned, your suspect might not always take kindly to being accused of a crime...
Track down missing items listed on notice boards and return them to their owners for a reward. Discover an improved game experience with a range of quality of life improvements, including bug fixes, localisation improvements and support for NVIDIA DLSS.
A lot of the focus since launch has been on bug fixing and optimisation so it is nice to be able to share new content with you all as well
Please do join us on our early access journey and join our Discord to get involved in the conversation
Shadows of Doubt V 34.10 Patch Notes
We have a whole host of fixes this week that we had been testing out on experimental and thank goodness for the experimental system because we managed to catch a few issues that were caused by the changes. Now that it is live on default there should be no new issues from these updates.
Fixed: Player was unable to interact with keypads on certain doors (appeared in 34.09 on experimental)
Fixed: You can now preview square wall pictures in apartment editing mode properly
Fixed: Bug report form did not detect compressed save game format (only affected 34.08 experimental)
Fixed: Placed items disappearing from player apartments after a long period of time (could still happen in a starting apartment in sandbox mode)
Fixed: Cancelling ‘pass time’ while sitting on certain benches would cause the player to clip through the wall behind the bench
Fixed: Stopped the player from getting stuck between two back-to-back park benches
Fixed: Rare freeze error on city generation
New city data compression: City data is many times smaller and is now included in steam cloud data
New toggle options in the gameplay settings for save game and city data compression
Fixed: Problems loading air vents in ceilings (resulting in a weird hole in the ceiling)
Fixed: Framed jersey wall frame spawned too high and could block air ducts
Fixed: Placed items disappearing from player apartments after a long period of time
Fixed: Objectives could become stuck on game load, resulting in some broken side mission logic
Fixed: Faulty collision mesh for filing cabinet
Fixed: Some cases of side mission items not loading properly (may require a new side mission)
Fixed: The game’s initial loading screen had unlocked fps, causing some long loading issues on some hardware
Fixed: Error that could happen when the game tried to spawn a decal on a null object
Shadows of Doubt V 34.09 Experimental Branch Patch Notes
Hey detectives!
We have another experimental branch update for you all. We didn't push the last experimental branch to the default because of some issues with saves not being submitted with bug reports so we couldn't verify bugs etc found on the previous experimental build. Thanks again for brining these issues to our attention, hopefully this patch helps fix a lot of the issues being reported recently!
Fixed: Bug report form did not detect compressed save game format (only affected last experimental version)
Fixed: Placed items disappearing from player apartments after a long period of time (could still happen in a starting apartment in sandbox mode)
Fixed: Cancelling ‘pass time’ while sitting on certain benches would cause the player to clip through the wall behind the bench
Fixed: Stopped the player from getting stuck between two back-to-back park benches
Fixed: Rare freeze error on city generation
Join our Discord to get involved in the conversation
Shadows of Doubt is a Tiny Champion!
Hey everyone!
You will be pleased to know that the 20% discount will roll on for the duration of the Tiny Teams event on Steam! So you have until the 10th of August to get the game at 20% off!
The Tiny Teams event is a fantastic initiative that celebrates games made by small teams and we are so honoured that our tiny team behind Shadows of Doubt has been selected as a Tiny Champion!
You can find the event and a host of other fantastic indie games made by tiny teams on Steam here!
Please do join us on our early access journey and join our Discord to get involved in the conversation
Shadows of Doubt V 34.08 Experimental Branch Patch Notes
Another experimental patch going live to hopefully help with some more issues people have been facing!
New city data compression: City data is many times smaller and is now included in steam cloud data
New toggle options in the gameplay settings for save game and city data compression
Fixed: Problems loading air vents in ceilings (resulting in a weird hole in the ceiling)
Fixed: Framed jersey wall frame spawned too high and could block air ducts
Fixed: Placed items disappearing from player apartments after a long period of time
Fixed: Objectives could become stuck on game load, resulting in some broken side mission logic
Fixed: Faulty collision mesh for filing cabinet
Fixed: Some cases of side mission items not loading properly (may require a new side mission)
Fixed: The game’s initial loading screen had unlocked fps, causing some long loading issues on some hardware
Fixed: Error that could happen when the game tried to spawn a decal on a null object
Join our Discord to get involved in the conversation
Shadows of Doubt V 34.07 Hotfix Notes
A quick hotfix to sort an issue with the latest update:
Fixed: Game was getting stuck on 'Simulating Past Events' on some cities
Shadows of Doubt V 34.06 Patch Notes
Hey everyone, the most recent experimental branch has helped a lot of people with some save issues and a bunch of other things and we managed to catch an issue it created with some floating files before pushing it onto the default branch for everyone!
New button in Settings > Gameplay menu to revert all settings to their defaults
Minor performance improvements
New save game compression: Save game files are many times smaller
New graphics options to adjust light fade distance
Skulls will now spawn less often in apartments (requires new city generation)
Fixed: Selling an item using the room décor edit menu would not always delete that item
Fixed: Devices with an APU (like Steam Deck) would dedicate resources to maintain a high frame rate while first loading the game, resulting in the initial loading process taking a much longer time than was necessary
Fixed: The game could give the player an apartment on loading a save game (even if they didn’t have one)
Fixed: Rainy windows no longer appear indoors
Fixed: Rainy windows now turn on/off with rain detail graphics setting
Fixed: Some issues with flickering area lights
Fixed: Footprints weren’t spawning in as often as they should
Fixed: The sky could be set to the wrong colour in certain cases
Fixed: Using the same city seed to generate other cities of different sizes could cause loading game errors
Shadows of Doubt V 34.06 Experimental Branch Patch Notes
Another new patch live on the experimental branch for you to check out:
New button in Settings > Gameplay menu to revert all settings to their defaults
Minor performance improvements
New save game compression: Save game files are many times smaller
New graphics options to adjust light fade distance
Skulls will now spawn less often in apartments (requires new city generation)
Fixed: Selling an item using the room décor edit menu would not always delete that item
Fixed: Devices with an APU (like Steam Deck) would dedicate resources to maintain a high frame rate while first loading the game, resulting in the initial loading process taking a much longer time than was necessary
Fixed: The game could give the player an apartment on loading a save game (even if they didn’t have one)
Fixed: Rainy windows no longer appear indoors
Fixed: Rainy windows now turn on/off with rain detail graphics setting
Fixed: Some issues with flickering area lights
Fixed: Footprints weren’t spawning in as often as they should
Fixed: The sky could be set to the wrong colour in certain cases
Fixed: Using the same city seed to generate other cities of different sizes could cause loading game errors
Shadows of Doubt is part of Steam's Stealth Fest!
Hey everyone,
Shadows of Doubt is taking part in Steam's Stealth Fest! The event is a celebration of all games where you can sneak about and quietly achieve your objective!
Shadows of Doubt is a great fit for the event and will be available alongside a host of a bunch of other fantastic stealth themed games on Discount and with free demos available!
Join our Discord to get involved in the conversation
Devblog: The Road to New Content
Hey Detectives!
I’ve got some exciting news to share in this one, it’s probably about time we talked about the changes to our roadmap. Due to a couple of factors (including the success of the game) we’ve decided to extend and revise our initial Early Access plan: The timeline will now be roughly a year, but we’ve also added some stuff to it based on the feedback from the community. This is what our new roadmap looks like:
Out of the gate it became apparent that our main focus should be on sorting out bugs; this is a complex game with so many moving parts and as a small team it does take time to tackle everything. This pushed back the initial content update a little. We’re getting through them though and fixing bugs will remain a high priority: You’ll continue to see frequent patches every couple of weeks interspersed with less frequent content updates.
Secondly there has been quite a high demand for modding. We’re eager to respond that, so we’ve added a focus to it in our roadmap as a second content update due towards the end of the year. More on that in future blogs.
With that said, we can start to look forward to our first content update ‘Cheats & Liars’, which will arrive in September!
Another thing I’m working on is compressed save games and city data files. At the moment they tend to be quite large; sometimes well over 100mb (especially in the case of larger cities). Because of this, currently only the save games are stored in the steam cloud and not the city data files.
This can potentially cause problems because if you were to try and load a save game on another machine without also having the generated city file, the game will try and recreate the required city from the city seed. This is fine if the game is on the same or similar version, but if the city was created on an older version of the game there can be differences in what cities feature: Which can of course mean issues when you load in the game.
The good news is that compression reduces the file sizes quite a lot, in some cases around 10x. This means the file sizes become more manageable and we can open up steam cloud to include city data as well as save games. This will go some distance towards mitigating the problem as Steam will be syncing both city and save data across devices.
In an ideal world we’d have it so new versions of the game are capable of recreating identical cities to what an older version of the game would generate if needed. This isn’t an impossible thing to implement but it is quite tricky as it would involve storing multiple past versions of the game’s configuration files for things like furniture and items (as the city generation process relies on this). We may revisit this idea in future if needed, but for now data compression will start to roll out over the next few experimental branch patches.
That’s it for this update, hopefully you are looking forward to what’s to come!
