Happy new year from all of us at Salty Studios, hope you had a great holiday season! So here we are getting ready to jump straight back in to development and thought we would share a little bit about the transition from what was Project Light/Source to the now named Lawson’s Shadow.
From there it began, we started formulating a plan of action and the team we needed to get it done. Over time the team changed as people came and went but the core of us stuck together to move forward with this idea of a stealth game that plays with the idea of light.
It went through numerous incarnations but one thing we knew we wanted was top down; that bird's eye, Hotline Miami-esque design. We experimented with numerous themes for the game - at one point it was a wasteland style survival game, at another point it was a neo-metropolis game about corporate espionage.
Whatever the changes, we all knew what we wanted from this game and put our hearts in to crafting it into what we needed it to be. But with change comes setbacks and numerous roadblocks in our first year of development. From missed deadlines to family commitments, for a while it felt like maybe we have bitten off more than we could chew.
This very much came to a head with our first year of showing the game at conventions. It began with MAIcon in Launceston, a smaller convention but one run by a group of super dedicated people. It was a solid showing and people were getting the core concept and the feedback was huge but from some reactions we knew we had to go even bigger for PAX and that was only 1 month away at the time.
Soon it was go time, the team implemented as many changes as they could to get the game up and running and the next thing you know, we were off to Melbourne to showcase Light/Source, the first big game from Salty Studios. It was a whirlwind trip filled with good memories, great company and even better food but it came at a cost; on day one of our trip we lost one of display monitors and computers.
On it was our build and everything that we had been working on to get it up and running - now this is where the age old saying of save your work would come in handy but unfortunately, we had been working on it the night before with no internet so what we had was simply what we had. We did what we could to repair and even had our modeller working on things on a donated laptop to show off our progress.
We salvaged what we could, took in the numerous amounts of criticism and revelled in the compliments given to us by other developers and built friendships with some incredible people but most of all we were driven to come back bigger and better. The final stop was AICon 2018, where we showed exactly what we had planned for PAX, had a super great weekend and enjoyed the time as a team but one thing happened when we got home that changed everything.
People really wanted this game in first person.
For so long the game had been in our minds as this unique twist on stealth and the top down genre but maybe we were wrong. We always had this mantra “we make games that fans want to play” and we used this a lot for our design and direction. At every major turn we had players input about what they would want to see in the game and we saw the occasional note and had the occasional comment.
But from everything we read, it was crazy how often this suggestion for first person popped up, and as a team we took it on board and went to work. We ended up coming out with the idea for Lawson’s Shadow, a 90’s noir comic inspired stealth game that puts you in the role of a fixer, a criminal for hire in Chicago criminal underworld.
But this change came with some setbacks; we lost more team members to other commitments. As for most of us this was our side project from our day to day lives. We lost people due to various reasons and in the end, it went back to the core group.
We eventually met some other people who shared our vision and together built something we were really proud of. We scrapped nearly everything from almost all the code to 90% of the assets and we went back to basics. We used tools that we had never thought once about using and began creating characters and assets beyond what was in the original concept.
From there we announced Lawson’s Shadow and began moving out of planning into solid development, we finally felt like we had the right people, the story was coming together, and the game had this knock effect in which we started going to places and meeting new people and even though we have never met they knew of Lawson’s Shadow and Salty Studios.
We finally felt as if we were ready for PAX AUS 2018 and ready to show off Lawson’s Shadow.
Next time I’ll discuss and break down our trip to PAX AUS 2018 and how from there we have begun to build the game we think will be something special to us and those who play it.
Hi everyone and thank you for taking time out of your busy holiday lives to have a read of what’s going on in the development of Lawson’s Shadow. Starting today, we will endevour to update the dev blog with weekly posts and updates about what is happening here at the studio. Expect to read interviews with the team, see photos of the development and sneak previews of what we have in the works.
A common complaint was the lack of clear defined lighting in the game. Ben and the team have gone all in creating some absolutely amazing fixes to the game’s current lighting.
So with character movement the biggest thing really was that there was no model at the time of the demo. Brett has been working really hard to get the models to the standard he wants them to be to make movement smoother and more responsive.
Probably the biggest issue to come out of PAX was feedback of what the player was doing. From audio to onscreen, there just wasn’t enough information being relayed back to the player. We have addressed this by firstly increasing the audio in the game and secondly by building in more descriptive UI elements.
In the demo, the game required you to be very precise in what you do and how you interact with things. We have made changes to the game to make it so that when you want to interact with an item, the distance makes sense.
Another common complaint was the bland colour palette which made the game hard to navigate. As you will be able to see below we have made changes to how colours appear in the game world.
Overall it’s been a very productive couple of months since PAX, right now myself and Grady are finalising the story to begin the script and bring in the characters we have made for this world, whilst the rest of the team are working on various assets and in-game items.
Thank you for taking the time to read our first dev blog and we will check in next week with some new information.
Lawson’s Shadow is a first person 90’s noir comic book inspired stealth game that puts players in the role of Lawson, a fixer for hire who operates in the shadows taking on jobs from Chicago’s biggest criminals.
It’s been a long time coming but we are finally ready to show it off and where better to begin but at none other than PAX Aus 2018. Players will have the chance to come mess around within the tutorial level of the game and give us feedback to continue development for hopeful release some time in the near future.
The biggest change as you would have probably noticed is the swap from top down to first person; this is the biggest change as it really transforms how the game plays (obviously). The main reason for this change was player feedback from the surveys that we had at conventions.
When it came to the question “What feature you would like to see the most?” the top 2 responses were “a first-person mode” or “multiplayer”. Whilst the second option is on the cards as a possibility, the team sat down to have a hard think and decide what do in regard to the player perspective.
Now, we have always said the reason Light/Source was in so many people’s hands early was so that our fans and other players could help craft the world we had in our minds. So, with that, the decision was made, and we turned the game first person and began building the world from there.
Can you get in and out?
Thanks to the hard work of the team we are now ready to get Lawson’s Shadow in to the hands of fans and players to help us finish crafting the game WE wanted to make, and YOU want to play.
So, from the bottom of our hearts, we thank you for all the support and for coming along this journey with us.