Friday 15 December 2023

OFF GRID Dev Blog - "Happy Trails"

Howdy y’all, we are probably (definitely) well overdue a new devblog update! It’s been a busy time in the Semaeopus offices (I mean when is it not!? We are making a big video game after all...and funding it by making other people's videogames in parallel) but these last few months have been especially packed on the OFF GRID front. We’ve built new mechanics, polished art, been on international adventures and welcomed a host of new talent onto the team. Here’s some highlights:

Time For a Quick Vent

While we've always talked about trying to focus on realism, and are perfectly aware that air vents rarely are large enough for a person to fit in, what would a stealth game be without being able to crawl through some air vents?

Scene from Die Hard of John Mcclain crawling through a vent.

We've had this feature planned almost from the first versions of the game, but now that we are trying to get more of the game levels completed it was the time to make sure it all actually works, and that our designs for air vent dimensions etc are usable.

This has meant a fair bit of adjusting things as far as our character controller and camera behaviour goes while crawling. The movement was fine for hiding behind some cover in more open spaces, but the tight spaces and corners inside air vents are a whole different issue so a lot needed to change to make it easier to navigate your way through the vents. We've adjusted both the movement code (and controls), tweaked our animation setup, and locked the camera more tightly close to the player to avoid clipping through the air vent walls and to make sure the player has good visibility in front of the character while moving.

Work In Progress shot of Vents being placed in level.

...and talking about good visibility, it turns out air vents are really, really dark. And keeping things feeling suitably dark for hiding, while at the same time having enough light for the player to see what's going on, can be a bit of a challenge to balance. So we've set the camera to adjust more to different lighting conditions, just like your eyes would adapt in real life, and also cheated a tiny bit by adding some light around the player. This works reasonably well, and we'll certainly get things to look and feel even better in the long run. Same goes for the movement and control.

The main thing is that from now on you can finally do what every action film hero and stealth game main character has been doing for ages, crawl your way through the air vent networks in buildings to reach different areas conveniently out of the sight of the guards.

CCCamp 2023 and Modding in Off Grid

Stef headed over to Germany this year to get stuck in at The Chaos Communication Camp, which describes itself as ‘a five-day open-air event for hackers and associated life-forms’.


CCCamp in Unity - in side the Off Grid Mod

While there she did a talk about Off Grid’s development history and the modding options we have available in game. You can watch the talk here.


Stef waves to camera at her talk
 

Following the talk Stef held two workshops where she walked people through the modding and setup process of Off Grid, the Level Kit tools and how to get involved with a CCCamp specific mod built by Mcfly of the Milliways Village. 

 
The mod in action, with modder McFly's character wandering CCCamp
 

We are very excited to see this mod coming to life as people populate it with all the things they love about CCCamp. We can’t wait to see it grow as more CCCampers get involved and add themselves to the project. Details on the Mod and how you can get involved, are on our wiki.

Modding with unity…on the Steam Deck!

A highlight of the CCCamp was when two campers, who wanted to take part in the workshops but didn’t have their laptops with them, managed to get everything up and running on their Steam Decks instead. Yeah, including a full download of Unity! That’s dedication to modding.

 
A Steam Deck running Unity, Off Grid and the Off Grid Level Kit
 

Once again thanks for your continued support friends! Lots of things are speeding up now in OFF GRID development, and with Semaeopus as a whole, so be sure to keep your eyes peeled for new and more regular announcements.

 

If you haven’t already - be sure to wishlist Off Grid on Steam - each wishlist makes a big difference to us, and we really appreciate your support!

Friday 14 April 2023

Off Grid Dev Blog - "Still Alive and Hacking"

How long has it been since we've posted something in our dev blog? 10 months?! Sounds like it's time to remedy that and give all of you an update about what's going on in the Off Grid development!


 Shall we get the excuses out of the way? It's not you, it's us. Jokes aside, we have been juggling other projects to keep the company wheels rolling and put bread on our tables. This meant that we needed to spread Off Grid development a little thin to focus on contract work. Ultimately that would have made for some boring and heavily redacted blog posts! (Gotta respect those NDAs!)

Our bad. We never planned to be this quiet for this long, and we know radio silence is not a good look for an indie game team. So, we are sorry about that!

The Good news is that not only are we still alive but Off Grid development has been picking up pace. We even expanded our team. So let's introduce our newest member:

Wednesday 1 June 2022

OFF GRID devblog "Keep it Clean"!

Hello and welcome to the latest devblog.

As we are now firmly into tech and feature lock and finalising all systems to help speed up developing content, this last couple of sprints we decided to get to grips with the AI and get it cleaner and easier to write and use for gameplay. It made sense to do a pass to tie up loose ends and close the door on some of the AI designs or features that had been left open ended (thanks to the modular system they can always be further added to later!). But in digging around and doing code review, we came across a few other things that deserved some attention too...

Thursday 3 March 2022

OFF GRID Devblog "Look who's talking!"

Welcome back to another episode of the OFF GRID DevBlog, lots of interesting interactions to tell you all about, so let's dive right in!


Wednesday 8 December 2021

Off Grid Development Update - November 2021

 Once again it's time for a new Off Grid development update, and we certainly have a bunch of interesting changes to the game to talk about this time!