Shadows of Doubt - detective stealth game set in "fully simulated" sci-fi city

[Zombra]

 

[kangaxx]

Nice atrium...

 

[HoboForEternity]

this has potential

 

[Zombra]

Not a lot of news lately but I am still extraordinarily excited about this project

 

[kangaxx]

Not a lot of news lately but I am still extraordinarily excited about this project

No pronouns in Miles' bio... Day 1 purchase for me.

 

[Zombra]

The names of coffee shops will be procedurally generated, like the names of inns in fucking Telengard (1985). This is so fucking prestigious I can't handle it.

 

[Zombra]

First look at the new combat system.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/561165020709519371/803320278360916058/CrazyRagdolls-small.mp4

 

[kangaxx]

I'm surprised it has combat to be honest. I had it in my head that it would be pure stealth.

 

[Zombra]

I'm surprised it has combat to be honest. I had it in my head that it would be pure stealth.

Yeah, there are a lot of weird directions it's drifting in, but the dev periodically says something that makes me believe the overall package will have its heart in the right place. He talked himself out of having the player carry a gun in the game for example. But there will be fistfighting and violent use of physics objects at least. There will be security turrets in the game which I'm not real excited about. Note there are no game over states though, they are taser turrets or something, you get hospitalized? and 'wake up' back at your apartment and charged a trespassing fine.

In other news, there are currently planned some kind of hunger/sleep mechanics, you don't starve to death but the game bugs you to go to the coffee shop sometimes for some downtime. Also the dev said today that there are no "minigames" planned as he is focusing on getting all the investigation gameplay working and excellent, so that's good.

 

[Zombra]

The Case of the Abundant Condiments

 

[kangaxx]

Looks nice. Combat will make or break it though... it needs to be an absolute "last resort" when you fuck up IMO.

 

[Zombra]

I just did some testing in the first closed alpha. I can't talk about it at all due to the NDA, but if I were to press a Codex button to react to what I saw it would be

HYPETRAIN x 1

 

[HoboForEternity]

Nice

 

[Maximilian]

The Case of the Abundant Condiments

It's supposed to be a fully simulated city, but developers bother with bottles of condiments spawning haphazardly. The end result will never be released, or end up a subpar gimmick product.

 

[Zombra]

You're not Black.

 

[Parsimonious cook]

This looks great! I hope it actually gets released at some point.

 

[Zombra]

I guess Steam is starting something called "Simfest" in a few minutes. Shadows has a new long gameplay stream on the Steam page:
EDIT: now that Simfest is over, they have put the new gameplay up on Youtube here. Thanks LESS T_T.

 

[HoboForEternity]

Nice

 

[Parsimonious cook]

Vending machines that dispense detective equipment placed inside normal office buildings (dev mentioned this in the stream) are rather cheap and I hope this will get tweaked a bit for the release, other than that the game looks almost too good to be true. If it ends up working as intended though... massive incline.

The other big question is when is it even going to come out though, since its apparently a one man project that has been worked on for years at this point.

 

[kangaxx]

Looks interesting enough, would play.

 

[LESS T_T]

 

[Pound Meat]

I'm surprised it has combat to be honest. I had it in my head that it would be pure stealth.

Yeah, there are a lot of weird directions it's drifting in, but the dev periodically says something that makes me believe the overall package will have its heart in the right place. He talked himself out of having the player carry a gun in the game for example. But there will be fistfighting and violent use of physics objects at least. There will be security turrets in the game which I'm not real excited about. Note there are no game over states though, they are taser turrets or something, you get hospitalized? and 'wake up' back at your apartment and charged a trespassing fine.

In other news, there are currently planned some kind of hunger/sleep mechanics, you don't starve to death but the game bugs you to go to the coffee shop sometimes for some downtime. Also the dev said today that there are no "minigames" planned as he is focusing on getting all the investigation gameplay working and excellent, so that's good.

What kind of lame-ass detective doesn't carry a gun?

 

[ghostdog]

this looks like a game with deep systems, but I hope he manages to remove such mundane procedurally generated side-quests from the final game.

I mean the job is "Go get me a photo of this person, who has short brown hair, is 58y old, likes plants, works in that company.... but I don't know his sex, or his name..." it seems completely random and doesn't make any sense.

 

[Zombra]

Closed beta today! I like everything I'm seeing in terms of content and mechanics - sadly I must report that the game is still in a very rough state. Procedural floor plans are still weird - as one example, my protagonist's apartment had two doors, right next to each other, both leading into the kitchen. Much more critically, clue placement still seems to have errors - in the tutorial mission, objective markers appeared inside solid objects, implying that critical information is completely inaccessible. Imagine a normal case, where necessary evidence simply cannot be found, and you don't even know because there are no objective markers. Release is supposed to be in 2023 sometime but I'm starting to think this may be wishful thinking.

 

[kangaxx]

I saw a working version of this at EGX Ldn in September (which was absolutely terrible as a convention btw). Honestly if they can iron out the kinks it looks promising.