If we’re *exact* about it, we’re 81.355% funded at time of
writing - backers have funded us to the tune of £16,271! There’s just 8
days to go for us to raise the last £3,729.
A quick reminder: it’s an all-or-nothing campaign, so we absolutely must hit the £20k goal in order to receive the funding. Help us get there by continuing to share the campaign in any way that you can.
Real life trickery
We hope you enjoyed yesterday’s surprise character reveal!
Hackers and hacktivists have become iconic figures in recent
times, making a huge impact on the public dialogue around data privacy,
information security, freedom of information, whistleblowing, mass
surveillance, and digital rights.
Having real hackers in the
game is an opportunity for players to dig into the themes of the game in
a more meaningful way. After all, their stories helped inspire and
shape OFF GRID.
Our halloween themed scare is all about these scenes from the OFF GRID intro...
Each represents a real scare that happens regularly.
They
are not fiction. They happen. Governments really do smash their way
into homes (or use trickery to gain access), and bundle away teens and
other souls with little, poor, or even no substantial evidence.
The
people we are featuring in the game have been through this, and they’d
be the first to tell you that’s a trick-or-treater you don’t want
knocking on your door. So whatever you do this Hallows Eve - stay safe
on the interwebs!
Help us reach 100% funded!
If you haven’t backed OFF GRID yet, what are you waiting for?! Go ahead and treat yourself - it will help us make this game the best it can be, and shine a light on the aforementioned issues.
If you are quick about it there’s still some early bird £14 copies available as an exclusive to Kickstarter! SO BACK NOW!
Just 8 more days to go!
Happy Halloween and THANK YOU!
The Off Grid Team
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!
Did you happen to spot this image on the Kickstarter page, scratch your head, and wonder who it might be?
Drumroll please...
Former LulzSec, Anonymous, and other well-known hackers will feature as characters that players can meet in OFF GRID!
Hackers to be featured include:
Ex-LulzSec and Anonymous members and now security researchers
Mustafa Al-Bassam
Jake Davis
Darren Martyn
Alleged Anonymous hacktivist and digital rights campaigner
Lauri Love
Noteable whitehat security researcher
“March” O’Neill
. . . with more to come!
Hacker characters to feature in OFF GRID: Mustafa, Jake, Darren, March, Lauri
This will be a very cool feature of the game as it builds on the
notion of exploring hacker culture in the game world with an
authenticity that is hard to come by in mainstream media.
It will
give the hackers themselves the chance to tell some of their stories
about the future of the internet, and if this proves popular, will
provide something to really expand upon.
Some of the early concept art
We have found it hard to keep from blurting this one out, and it has been excruciating working on the art without saying anything. Turns out well known hackers know how to keep a secret too!
Hacktion figures
We have exported the models in a 3D printable .stl format so that you can print your own characters from the game.
Ever wanted your own Lauri Love action figure?
They are released under Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 so feel free to share and remix, have a play!
We've
got an update directly from Sophie, who works as an artist on OFF
GRID. She is fairly new to the team, but she's been doing a stellar
job! We hope you enjoy:
- -
Hi! Soph here!
I’m
here to keep the art side of things rolling on smoothly. Which mostly
means asset creation, like props, but also set dressing.
Modular Props
Let's
talk modular: doing things this way allows you to have just a few
meshes that you can make a lot of things out of. For the Apostle level,
I made a couple pieces of modular furniture to speed up asset creation.
Think
of it like an Ikea range where you could buy a desk, drawers,
cupboards, etc. that all fit together physically and look like part of a
family. Some of the pieces in that range will share exact parts, and
some will have unique ones. This is the basics of modular building.
Modular desk components.
With these six pieces I can make six variations of desks. Going
beyond these, you could make a broken desk with only three legs that is
being propped up with other assets, or you could scale the length of the
straight desk-top as much as fits the space you want (since the
textures are vertex-painted faces there’s no distortion).
Modular sofa components that can be put together in endless ways
Different from these desks, this four-piece sofa set is mostly
one-off models (they all share the same feet). Yet when placed in the
scene, there is no real end to the possibilities you can make with it.
Make a snaking three mile long sofa if you so wish!
The modular sofas creating a comfy space in the Apostle level
Set Dressing
Set dressing is pretty straight forward as a
concept. You’re placing things around the world to make it feel like a
more real lived-in environment. It’s a little more than just throwing
assets around the place (although that’s a lot of it), you need to think
about each environment differently.
In the run up to the
Kickstarter, I spent a lot of time in the Apostle offices discussing
with the team what the general feel of the place is, and then looking
room to room talking about what happens in these rooms in a gameplay
sense.
The Apostle is being closed. There are boxes everywhere as
stuff is being packed away to go elsewhere. These boxes are great for
the stealth aspect of the game, but also tell the story of what is
actually going on. Most of the larger offices are quite sparse, having
already been packed up, but a few offices are still very much in use.
Set
dressing has to work alongside the game in making the environments look
more interesting but not distract from what the player needs to do.
This means I can’t place new hackable devices around the place and not
block the player’s path. But what I can do is direct the player to
places of interest.
Set dressing is cleverly used to direct attention to this office in the Apostle level.
For instance, most of the offices don’t have much in them that the
player needs to notice, these are kept very sparse and all packed up.
But there is a particular journalist's office that is a key place in the
Apostle level, and it’s one of the few offices that’s still in use.
There’s things scattered around the desk, a coat that’s been left on a
hanger, a board with all the bits of information that the journalist has
been working with.
Fun with set dressing - a DIY standing desk.
There were a few other places less important to the player that I was
able to just have fun with. Such as this office where it’s being packed
away. A friend of mine wanted a standing desk but her work wouldn’t
give her one so she stacked things up to make her own one. I made a
little desk in honour of her here. I bet it really annoys the person on
the opposite desk!
A secret corner for slacking off!
Here the occupants of this office have used the fact the office is
moving as an excuse to move furniture around and create them a secret
coffee corner for slacking off.
Hope you've enjoyed!
Help OFF GRID succeed!
We have just 10 days to go with the campaign and need to raise another £4,318 in order to meet our goal. Please help us!
Share the campaign with others: if each of you shared just once, the
campaign would be shared to thousands of others. We need this exposure!
THANK YOU!
The Off Grid Team
p.s. Did you read the last update?! BIG NEWS coming Tuesday!
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, 26 October 2018
OFF GRID is 76% funded and officially loved by Kickstarter! <3
The campaign was given a 'PROJECT WE LOVE' badge earlier in the week! We had hopes and dreams
of getting that nice little bit of extra love from Kickstarter before
we started, and now we’ve got it. It feels good. Thanks Kickstarter!
BIG NEWS IS COMING
We have some tremendously fun news coming next week! Stay tuned - the news is going to break on Tuesday, October 30th. You don’t want to miss it!
Once the news is LIVE - please do us the favor of sharing it to
the masses. Tweet, blog, write an article, do a little video, share,
retweet, or write us a poem.
Would you like a clue? OF COURSE you'd like a clue! Here you are:
To celebrate the release of the aforementioned news, Rich will be doing a dev stream on Tuesday to chat about it all with you! Tune in via twitch.tv/semaeopus at 5pm UK time.
Now,
let's get to smashing the 80% milestone as soon as possible, folks!
Share and chat about it as much as you can! Perfect conversation for
all those Halloween parties this weekend... the mass surveillance state
that surrounds us all is downright frightening, after all.
THANK YOU!
The Off Grid Team
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!
Halfway through the Kickstarter campaign and 73% funded is a great place to be - thank you!
You backers have given us a seriously wild ride: OFF GRID was 35% funded in 5 hours, 40% funded in 7 hours, AND THEN we hit the 50% mark within 21 hours!
It has been super exciting to have the support of all of you behind us. To be 50% funded within 24 hours? Astounding!
We still need £5,330 to meet our goal - and WE NEED YOUR HELP!
If you have yet to back OFF GRID
on Kickstarter - now would be the *perfect* time. Help us reach 100%
funded! Every single £, every single $, is hugely appreciated - please,
please, please share far and wide throughout your own networks.
We’d also like to hear from you: what would you like to hear
more about in these updates? Character backgrounds? More on hacking
gameplay? You tell us! Let us know in the comments below or in the
discord - join it here, if you haven't already.
There are 15 days left in the campaign, and a lot can happen in 15 days. We are excited!
If you’ve read anything about OFF GRID
or played the demo, you will have picked up that our hero, Joe, is a
technophobe dad who relies heavily on his hackivist daughter, Jen, for
everything: to get his phone to work, keep the smart fridge firmware up
to date, and make sure the IoT toaster doesn’t get any funny ideas.
Our
last update showed some of the early art tests we did, and explained
that we landed on following a low poly art style pretty quickly.
Environments in this style are somewhat straightforward - you can make
some really interesting scenes quite quickly. Even ‘programmer art’
doesn't look bad in a low poly environment, which is one of the reasons
we went for it! But when it comes to characters, it takes something a
bit more special.
We started by mocking up a very basic low poly
character so that we could get straight into prototyping movement and
mechanics. We didn't really have a story or background for him at that
point, we just knew that we wanted the character to be a bit of a
luddite and incredibly dull - the very opposite of the superhuman, infallible secret agents of most games.
Our initial model was made as a placeholder and he was seriously vanilla:
The very first Joe - a placeholder!
We quickly pushed it on by defining the ‘shapes’ of character that
could be used to portray different attitudes. As you can see in the
bottom half of the sketch below, we felt that rectangular characters,
and especially ones with a lean to them, a bit like a parallelogram,
provided a nice dynamic. Over time, this lean also seem to fit the
notion that our lead character is ‘forced into situations’ unwillingly.
Shape studies during Off Grid character development.
There is some interesting theory around shapes and personality
floating about on the internet, but essentially, the shape of a
character will often convey their attitude.
Pixar are a great exponent of this, and a good example is Carl from UP.
He’s a grounded and steadfast character who is immovable and difficult
- until he is changed by another character with the ability to always
bounce back and right themselves, even if a little naive:
Character shapes from Pixar's UP.
...and so we starting experimenting along these lines. Sazacat,
our character artist, started speed painting some thoughts on how we
might make some extremely normal-looking folks in game.
Early OFF GRID character concepts.
Reaching the concept below really defined how we wanted the characters faces to convey emotion in OFF GRID.
A defining concept for OFF GRID hero character, Joe.
We then progressed to the more twisted / awkward style that all OFF GRID character bodies (especially the knees and hands) carry:
The Joe concept art that truly began to define OFF GRID's character style.
That style was largely brought about with the drawing above, which
very quickly translated into a model for our player character, Joe:
The 3D model for Joe that brought together all the early concepting work.
You can see the kink in the knees, and the slightly crooked fingers, as well as the uncomfortable stance (even in A-pose!).
We
also defined our style with the use of specific hard and soft edges all
over the character, but most prominently around the jaw and forehead.
The final iteration of the OFF GRID hero, Joe!
These couple of major points have set the style for the rest of the characters in the game.
We hope this provides a little insight into the process. Don't forget, if you like this sort of thing, you can get your very own copy of the 'Making Of Off Grid' book by backing at the NAMESPACE level or above!
We look forward to showing you more soon!
THANK YOU!
The Off Grid Team
P.S. Please continue to share the campaign as far and wide as you can. Every single $ or £ backing is so important to us!
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!
In case you didn’t see us shouting about it all over social media: Off Grid won the Indiecator Award at Sweden Game Conference!
It
came with the giant cheque of our dreams (literally - a HUGE check!)
and a very pretty bouquet of flowers! Rich was in Sweden speaking and
demoing the game, and was the lucky one to receive the award on behalf
of the team. We might have to stage reinactments next week so that all
of us can feel the glory of being handed a giant cheque!
All of us still have huge grins on our faces today. Thanks Sweden Game Conference - you've totally made our week!
Concept art, anyone?
We want to give you a little look at the beginning of Off Grid's visual style and whet your appetite for the 'Making Of' book!
Off Grid was destined to be low poly from the start. It’s an aesthetic style that we like and that is achievable for an indie team.
Here’s one of our first low poly environment tests:
An early low poly environment test for Off Grid
Another view of the early low poly environment test.
We also knew from the get-go that we wanted to create a world where
data was visualised and tangible. Not immediately visible with the
naked eye, but with the help of augmented-reality glasses.
This is was our first pass at what a 'data view' layer might look like:
An early concept of how 'data view' might appear.
We knew we were getting somewhere when we hit on this idea of using stealth mechanics to 'hide' your data.
Next
up was working out what the overarching objectives were for the meta
game. We wanted to create a dark, dull, dystopian near future, that
could be liberated with a new free internet (free as in open, not as in
cost). This led to thinking through what the liberating of zones or
areas of the world with 'mesh network nodes’ might look like.
Here's one of our first imaginings of what completing a level by installing a mesh network node might look like.
It's fun to look back and see how far the game has come, what has carried on, continued through, or has been left behind.
If
you like this sort of thing, there will be copious amounts of concept
art, sketches, notes, photos, and loads of other behind-the-scenes
exclusive content in the official 'The Making Of Off Grid' book!
Secure your own copy by backing at the NAMESPACE reward level or above! If you've already backed, remember you can easily up your pledge, too!
Funding update:
WE ARE 70% FUNDED!
Yesss! What a relief it is to say
that! We've been steadily climbing the £14k mountain this week, and
it's possible we have hit refresh more times than we care to admit over
the past few days.
We have had the best time sharing Off Grid with the world through this campaign so far. Nineteen days remain! A LOT can happen in 19 days.
If you have yet to back, please do! If you’re thinking about backing, please do! If you keep meaning to tell your friends to back, please do!
THANK YOU, BACKERS!
The Off Grid Team
p.s. If you're near London on today, go check out Inside Intel!
It's a very cool contemporary art exhibition with the theme of
surveillance running through it, put on by the Centre for Investigative
Journalism. It's FREE, and open all of Saturday.
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!
We’ve been Kickstarting for a week and we’re ALMOST 70% funded!
Nearly 70% in seven days is absolutely astounding. Thank you all SO
much!
It’s been excellent to hear from backers and hugely
exciting to get feedback from those of you that have played the demo.
We’ve gotten our first Let’s Plays, and overall, we are feeling pretty
good about week one!
Now for week two!
There’s a few fun things going on this week - Rich is Sweden for the Sweden Games Conference. The conference theme is ‘Games and Politics: Reflections on power, play & changing perspectives'... and we fit the bill! Rich was invited to speak AND Off Grid was selected to be on the show floor as part of Indiecator - a showcase dedicated to indie games!
If you’re in London - Off Grid is also on show as part of Inside Intel
- an exhibition of contemporary artworks, design objects and digital
assets brought together to investigate the confusion sewn by an
increasingly partisan media, sinister new technologies and the culture
of official secrecy and widespread surveillance. The exhibition forms
part of the 2018 Centre for Investigative Journalism’s Logan Symposium: Conspiracy. If the theme of our game is what’s piqued your interest - go check it out as it looks seriously cool! Plus it’s free!
We want to keep momentum for the campaign going - and we need you to
help. Please continue to share, share, share. Remember, it’s an
all-or-nothing campaign, so we must hit our target in order to recieve
the funding and fulfil the rewards. Keep on sharing, shouting, and
spreading the word for us!
Thanks again for an incredible first week, backers!
He’s out there as he’s a speaker at IndieCade today!
He’s talking about modding, digital activism, and why as a game
developer, you probably have less to say about a subject than your
audience does.
So without further ado: let’s talk about what makes Off Grid so unique!
Off Grid is first and foremost a fun yet challenging hacking game that opens a dialogue about the real world issues of data privacy, information security, and the mass surveillance state that surrounds us all. It has a compelling narrative and a sweet father-daughter relationship at its core.
It’s played with a controller, and we promise, no previous hacking knowledge is required. ;)
But if you wish to take it further, there’s so much more to it!
Replay & Community Input
We want Off Grid to continue on as a piece of
work that the community can shape along with us in order to make it
everything it can be.
It is an open stealth game with multiple solutions to levels and a
complex AI, creating missions that are fun to play through many times
over.
PLUS, the game is extensively moddable and the speed and ease
with which players and modders can turn around a level means that
interesting content and stories should be produced at a speed and scale
that will outstrip anything we could dream of as an indie development
team!
This is something we want to expand on here...
The 'South Park' of Hacking Games
Off Grid has dark humour at its centre, and the
state of this crazy googling, Orwellian hot mess of a world we live in
is ripe for modders to exploit humorous interpretations.
Off Grid is much like South Park in that important themes are wrapped up in tongue-in-cheek humour. Like South Park’s speedy turnaround of episodes to approach topical issues, Off Grid’s modding tools make it possible to produce a new level in a matter of days in order to ape news and current events.
The incredible importance and relevance of the issues around
hacking and data privacy in everyday life mean that there is a mine of
inspiration available for topical mods to be created and for streamers
to play and comment on.
In the video above, we took a real life
vulnerability and made it as a mod in the game to prove the tools could
used to tell stories of real life hacks. In this instance, we took Scott Helme's talk from Steelcon16 about the vulnerabilities of the Nissan Leaf,
and made a hackable car that carried the same weakness: a publicly
displayed VIN was used to access the app that controls the car's aircon,
battery, locks, and could get the car's location data.
The possibilities are endless! We look forward to the game being released and seeing the first official mods come back.
If
this sounds up your street and you have yet you back Off Grid, please
consider doing so now! We’d love to have you as a backer.
To all
of you that have backed and/or shared this campaign so far: we can’t
say thank you enough - it’s been an absolutely incredible few days!
THANK YOU!
The Off Grid Team
P.S. Don’t forget: please share this, retweet us, post the
link wherever you hang out online, and tell your friends! THANK YOU! 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!
WOW. You backers gave us a seriously wild ride yesterday: 35% funded in 5 hours, 40% funded in 7 hours, AND THEN we hit the 50% mark within 21 hours!
It feels seriously good to be 50% funded within the first 24 hours of the campaign! Your enthusiasm and support has blown us away. THANK YOU!
For this first update, we wanted to give you a little background on the inspiration for Off Grid. As you might be aware, it’s been in the works for quite some time!
The game was initially inspired when Rich heard Eben Moglen speak about net neutrality and data privacy at the INET conference in 2011. It struck a cord, and the seed for Off Grid was planted.
Soon after, Rich teamed up with Pontus, and together they built the first prototype of Off Grid. The goal was to get people thinking about data. The root notion was to try and physicalize it - to make data into something manipulable, something that people would be able to go and play with and see as a thing you can walk around.
But the concept was still a little out there: this was early 2013, before Snowden and NSA revelations.
Fast forward to June 2013, and the first ever public unveiling of Off Grid (in a livestreamed interview at Etoo London) just happened to fall nearly 64 years to the day after the publishing of George Orwell's book, 1984, and the same week that Edward Snowden made his first leak.
And all of a sudden, it clicked.
Prior to the first revelations, it was a struggle to explain to anyone why what we were doing with Off Grid was important or would be interesting. Then, almost overnight, Snowden gave everyone the vocabulary to talk about it. People understood.
Now, years on, the revelations have just kept rolling, and everyone is much more aware of the issues surrounding data privacy and mass surveillance.
It is the perfect time for a game like Off Grid: people are tuned into the effects of data mining and the impact that bad laws around digital rights have on real life. Help us get Off Grid funded, and THEN help us shape the game so we can all try to picture a less dystopian digital tomorrow.
Let’s keep the momentum going - tell your friends!!
THANK YOU!
The Off Grid Team
P.S. If you want to chat to us a bit more informally, we regularly hang out in our studio discord - we’d love to see you in there! Join us: https://discordapp.com/invite/NDEVwBJ
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!
The moment we've all been waiting for: Off Grid is now LIVE ON KICKSTARTER!
That means you now have the opportunity to:
-PLAY A FREE DEMO OF OFF GRID
-Secure your copy from as little as £8 (the SUPER EARLY BIRD deal is a steal!)
-Get your name or handle in the game
-Help shape the game via our FIRST ACCESS program (back at the PENTESTER level)
-Snag some official OFF GRID merch!
Support OFF GRID: A game about data privacy and mass surveillance. Launching on #kickstarter today with playable demo! http://offgridthegame.com/kickstarter #offgridthegame OFF GRID: A stealth hacking adventure where data is your most powerful weapon. LIVE ON KICKSTARTER TODAY! http://offgridthegame.com/kickstarter #offgridthegame Hack like you have to. Game the system. Don't get caught - your daughter needs you. Support @OffGridTheGame on Kickstarter TODAY! LIVE AT 4PM BST! http://offgridthegame.com/kickstarter #offgridthegame
Thank you!
The Off Grid Team 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!
From 4pm BST onwards TODAY, you will have the opportunity to:
-PLAY A FREE DEMO of Off Grid
-Secure your copy from as little as £8 (SUPER EARLY BIRD - it's a steal!)
-Get your name or handle in the game
-Help shape the game via our FIRST ACCESS program!
-Snag some official OFF GRID merch
Launching on Tuesday, October 9th, you will have the opportunity to:
-PLAY A FREE DEMO of Off Grid
-Secure your copy from as little as £8 (SUPER EARLY BIRD!)
-Get your name or handle in the game
-Help shape the game via our FIRST ACCESS program!
...and much more!
The campaign goes live at 4pm BST. That's:
4pm London / 5pm Berlin / 11am New York / 8am LA
Get in there quick to get the best deal on the game! Some reward tiers are limited... you don't want to miss out!
Help
us spread the word! Share our posts, tell friends when you've backed,
and let us know that you have by using #offgridthegame on social media!
THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT!
The Off Grid Team
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!
