Shadows of Doubt DevBlog 36: A Roadmap Update

Originally Written by Cole Jefferies
Jun 30, 2023

Hello detectives! Welcome to the latest instalment of the dev blog.

I’m writing an update today to talk about progress and what you can expect from the project in the near future. It’s continued to be really busy; I’m really pleased with the number of bugs we’ve been able to fix since the initial launch but am also aware that there’s still a bunch more to go. We’ve decided to prioritise the bug fixing over new content, at least during this initial phase. It feels like we should aim for a solid foundation for new content as possible, and while we’re super excited about all the ideas we (and you) have about expanding the game, it’s sensible to not try and rush too many things into it right away.

We’re settling into a rhythm of releasing experimental patches, then pushing them to the default branch a week or two after. Josh has been working at increasing performance and reducing the obstacles to a smoother gameplay experience; this is a work in progress and you’ll likely see small gains as we continue to roll out the patches. Meanwhile, I’ve mostly been focused on fixing gameplay bugs: The reports you’ve been submitting are super useful and contain most of the info we need to track things down.

A quick note on new builds; occasionally changes we make can affect how the game generates a city using a seed. For example, if we added a piece of furniture, the game will generate a city featuring it whereas previous versions wouldn’t; this can have a knock-on effect that changes other things in the city if you compare it to one that was generated with a previous build with the same seed. Therefore it’s worth stating that city seeds themselves often won’t be fully forwards or backwards compatible with previous versions. What does this mean? Not much in effect; if you have your previously generated city file any save games that use that city will continue to work with it (unless we state otherwise in an update- but we’ll try and keep this to an absolute minimum).

It only really matters if you were to delete the city file a save game uses, and then try to load that save game with a newer version: It will attempt to recreate the city using the seed saved in the save game file, but the city generated could be slightly different, therefore causing inconsistencies. I don’t foresee this as being a big problem, but I’ll be looking at ways to mitigate this in the future or at least communicate it in-game.

TLDR: Don’t delete your city files for save games you still want to play on.