8/4/2023 0 Comments Shadows of doubt youtubeLike some black market celebrity, he features on swathes of graffiti throughout the city ‘Eddie Knows’. He’s who people come to when they need to know something. Spoilers ahead: I could write a lot more about how one of your party members is an entire planet of technologically advanced aliens that shrunk itself, or how the starting area’s frequent tectonic plate movement is used as a form of public transport, but I digress.įairly early in the game, you learn of a man who deals in information– someone who digests vast quantities of personal information and divulges it for personal gain. Flawed, but bursting with character and awesome ideas, Anachronox has always been a source of inspiration for me. The solution lies in one of my all-time favourite games, an 18-year-old RPG called Anachronox. The game does an ok job of this right now- there’s plenty to research and find, but the problem is that there’s a huge amount out there that the player has no reason to explore, and it feels like a wasted opportunity. There’s also the universal appeal of knowing that your game instance is special, unique to you– and therefore your experience is unique to you. There’s a dr Frankenstein-like joy to seeing what the thing you’ve created has created. The real joy in working with procedurally generated systems, for me at least, is clicking that play button and exploring what’s been created. As a cop, it makes sense that you basically have or can get access to anywhere relatively easily. Police detectives don’t really break into people’s apartments, and even the bad-cop ones don’t really have a need to even do it that often. The problem here is giving the player enough reason to go into places they shouldn’t. ![]() Breaking into people’s apartments is fun! Who knew? They should make a game about that, maybe set in a steampunk/medieval world, and have the player be some kind of burglar or something. Stealth is something that’s been added in the last month and has instantly given the game a much-needed injection of peril. My main problem is that the most impressive and fun features aren’t a big enough focus of the gameplay: I need to remedy this before creating my planned demo/reveal video– so that’s on hold for now. I did get my checklist mostly completed before the end of the year, but sadly that work was met with some disappointment on how cohesive and fun the game is feeling. You might have read in my last post, that I was quite eager to finally get something playable working so I could focus on some of the other things that really excite me about this project. I’m going to be very cautious to make sure I don’t release something under-baked or something I wouldn’t buy myself, but I believe when done right early access is a win-win. I have some mixed feeling about early access as a gamer, but for this type of project the positives outweigh the negatives: It allows passionate fans to play the game and help shape the direction of the remainder of development, as well as providing some income security. I have decided to aim for an early access model as it seems the best fit for this ambitious style of game that could potentially take a very long time to completely finish. ![]() With that said I’ve decided on a few things for the future development of the project. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from the project is that it’s really hard to predict in terms of timeframe– a common game dev problem of course, but still a much harder thing to do for this vs Concrete Jungle. ![]() This is less of a ‘roadmap’ and more of a dirt track map by the way. It’s been a little while since the last update, and I thought I’d better do a ‘hello 2019’ style post, even if it’s just to look back on later in the project. As head of the police detective department, it’s your job to organise your sleuths and track down AI serial killers before they strike again! Read previous dev blog entries here. Shadows of Doubt is a first person detective game set in a procedurally generated and fully simulated city.
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