Shadows of Doubt Dev blog 45

Greetings Detectives 🕵️‍♂️!

In his first Dev blog of 2026, Cole discusses his plans for the year ahead.

From what to expect for the coming year, to some hints of hopes for the future. Watch the full, brand new video dev blog below.

https://youtu.be/B9mEgTNn-ig

Transcript

Welcome to a new video Dev blog. So I haven’t really been doing many developer updates, not in this format, for a while now, since Shadows was kind of still in the design phase, really. Mostly because there’s not really a lot to talk about when you’re just kind of fixing things like it’s not... It’s not really a topic of conversation. It’s not really very interesting. It’s just like, oh, yeah, we just need to get this done. So apologies for the lack of interesting updates. But I’m hoping that will change this year a little bit. We’ll see. We’ll see.

There’s nothing to announce in this blog, unfortunately, but we are certainly moving in that direction. But yeah, 2026, obviously we’ve had a couple of updates to Shadows last year. We’re more interested in upgrading the game this year, so we’re going to be focusing a lot on kind of long-standing issues which we haven’t managed to fix and quality of life improvements to the game rather than new content.

New content’s great, but it’s becoming really tricky to make because everything we add has to be compatible with everything that’s come before it. There’s so many interconnected systems in Shadows that it’s really hard to test all the scenarios. And we’re still struggling with it even a couple of years on. So it’s not to say the new content is a complete halt. Like, we’ll definitely consider things. We’ll definitely put small things in. And yeah, as I said, we’ll focus on quality of life improvements. But... It’s been really tricky to get to the heart of some of these problems, but we’re going to really give it a good go this year and try and just bring shadows up to a really good standard. That’s our number one mission for shadows.

We’re also going to be putting out the patches more frequently on the experimental Steam branch this year. It’s just really useful for us. It’s kind of a win-win situation because you folks get the patches a bit early. If there’s a specific fix you’re really keen on that you want access to, you can do that. And as far as we’re concerned, we get good data from you as well. So we can see if we’ve actually solved a problem or if it’s still persisting and we need to go back to the drawing board. So yeah, that’s what to expect. So fewer patches, but more frequent releases on the Experimental Branch on Steam. So yeah, hopefully that goes well.

We are working on new things as well, which is really really exciting, but I can’t talk about them yet I need to figure out when I’m gonna be able to talk about them to be honest because yeah, there’s kind of advice that says you shouldn’t really talk about something too early like you don’t want to kind of burn out your hype too early and you know but you know I’ve always enjoyed talking about things from pretty early so I don’t know we’ll just see what happens. But we’re working on a couple of things right now: one big project, one small project and they’re both in the really really early stages, and there is a third thing as well, but I don’t even know if it’s feasible, but that’s also very cool.

So don’t take any of what I’m saying as gospel, like things are subject to change. So yeah, we’ll see where we end up in a few months maybe because I really miss sharing the dev process publicly. It was really fun to do that in the initial stages of Shadows. Hopefully I’ll get to do that again.