Posted June 25, 2021 by ColePowered
#Development Blog
Shadows of Doubt is a detective stealth game set in a fully-simulated sci-fi metropolis! There's been a murder and it's up to you to solve it by any means necessary, with the condition that you keep a low profile. A unique mix of procedural generation and hand-crafted design enables every room of every building to be explored. Be sure to wishlist on Steam, join our Discord or read previous dev blog entries here!
Hello everybody! I hope everybody is enjoying their summer; we here on the Shadows team have almost finished collecting all the feedback and data gathered from our limited closed alpha at the time of writing. We've learned a lot and there's so much to talk about that I thought it was probably time for another dev blog update.
Me booting up the cruncher to write another dev blog entry.
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.
We're really pleased with the rain in the game, and you liked it too!
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.