OFF GRID: 2019

Friday, 27 December 2019

Sprint Roundup - "This week I have been mostly eating bugs"

Welcome folks, to the last devblog of the year! We hope you have had happy holidays wherever you are in the world. Festive cheer, lots of food, and if you don't celebrate a holiday this time of year then we hope you have had some time off to play some games at the very least.

Eating bugs

We have had some fun stuff, and some not so fun stuff, this last couple of sprints. But in all fairness the not so fun stuff has been satisfying... We decided to spend some extra time on lengthening the test sprint and working through bugs to tidy up the backlog ahead of the end of the year. Oh boy does it feel good reducing tech debt!

Eating ALL the bugs.

The last month or so has included:

bugs
more bugs
some non-bug fixes

As Pontus put it "this week we have mainly been eating bugs :D"

Coworking and Cracking On - Sprint Roundup 30.09.19

Hello faithful OFF GRID fans!

We had a fairly unique sprint this time around, with loads of doing stuff IRL! And with that we have got plenty to update you on with this sprint:

Facetime

This sprint we had a great co-working session with the team in Essex. It was the first face-to-face gathering with all of the current team in one place, and so we made sure to start it off well! Sarah welcomed the team with fresh, homemade doughnuts and Rich had several racks of ribs ready for the smoker.

It was an extremely useful co-working session with lots of planning and organisation - with discussion carefully curated by Filipe. The team also got together with other Essex devs for a bowling session one evening... and we've learned there are no standout bowlers on the team!

Essex Dev Bowling

OFF GRID Release Update

Since our incredible Kickstarter backers helped us successfully smash our Kickstarter goal late last year, we’ve had a big year of development. We also opened our FIRST ACCESS programme, started doing dev streams every two weeks, and have been enjoying some great banter with our Discord community.

Now we’re nearing the end of 2019, and you might be wondering if there is a release announcement coming soon…

During the Kickstarter campaign, we promised delivery of the game by December 2019. This is possible, but we believe OFF GRID would be better served by delaying its release into 2020.

Sprint Roundup - 28.08.19 - I AM Controlio

Welcome OFF GRID fans, we are back with your regular dev update. Lots to tell this time around. Plenty of nice new features in both the game and the modding tools, new content, and some pretty crucial fixes, as well as a special edition modding stream we collaborated on with our First Access modding community in the Discord!

Want to hear more? Read on...

Giving you "the feels"

Character controls, and what some people like to term "the toy", are incredibly important, especially in a third person game where you see the character all the time and the camera revolves around that entity.

Walking in a Unity wonderland

Sprint Roundup - 20.06.19 - Information Underload

We are back with another Sprint roundup! Loads of progress to tell you about and a lot of great stuff to poke and test out in the newest build if you are a First Access backer, so let's get to it!

Working on Information Underload

Now, bearing in mind the game is still pre-alpha - one of the most frequent pieces of feedback we get from first time players is a sense of information overload, and that it takes about 20 minutes of play time to really break though and "get" the game, but once there they love the depth.

Information overload

This is unsurprising seeing as the demo level that we show people drops you in the mid-game in order to give enough of a tech demo and playground, and has very little tutorialisation in it, other that some dense walls of text to set the scene for those interested.

Many people who bear with it really get a kick out of the moment when the game "clicks" for them, it can be quite rewarding to feel the pieces slot into place as you work out how Off Grid mechanics can be used and combined to your advantage, but it's not optimal that it takes so much perseverance to get there, and this is something we have always hoped a good opening to the game would help solve.

In steps our first pass at tutorialisation!

Sprint Roundup - 30.05.19 - 'Fluttery' will get you everywhere

It's that time again: here is your regular sprint round up of development! Read on to find out what we have been up to...

"UI the long face?"

As promised as one of the stretch goals in our Kickstarter campaign, we've now added our in-game short message social media app, which we've decided to call "Flutter."

Some 'fleeting' in action

Similar to our existing SMS system, it sends procedurally-generated messages using the profiles of non-player characters in the levels. In addition, it sends messages from the rest of the people in the the game world. PLUS we've made it Lua-scriptable (even more so than the SMS system is), and added support for sending custom messages, both from our own game systems and from Lua scripts. So, the messages the player sees can actually provide some useful feedback about something you've just done in the mission, or reflect on some previous choice you've done during the game. They may also help explain what may be going on in some NPC's AI mind at the moment...

Sprint Roundup - 14.03.19 - Doors of Perception

It's that time again! Here is your regular sprint round up of development! Read on to find out what we have been up to in the last few weeks and if you are one of our backers on the FIRST ACCESS level, what you can expect to see in the latest build update!

Content (Level Design and Art)

Created new Character LUTs amd some character variations (as seen above!).
Cleaned up on the geometry of the IRL hacker and activist characters.
Setup new system for door prefabs

Wow this was a big one, but one we have had our sights on a while - the doors and door frames all now conform to sane dimensions and make use of the new nested prefab system in Unity meaning doors and their variations are infinitely easier to create.

Lots of work on an early level and tutorialisation of rooting your phone and glasses, and the hacking tools you have to install and learn at the beginning of the game.
Some more scripting of interactions with a more neutral NPC than the fairly intolerant guards you meet in other levels.

Gameplay and Mechanics

New mechanics for data view trace time & app use and costs. Hopefully this will sort out some of the pitfalls of the old trace time system and instead turns that into a proper game mechanic. Plus the changes give us a way to upgrade player abilities throughout the game while keeping things balanced. We'll test this a bit in action and will then tell you more details.

This also came with some visual prototyping with Josh Ge's ASCII art and animation editor REXpaint (as you may recognise from his game Cogmind) to try and get an ASCII art / homebrew software feel, we are still playing with this, but it's a nice start:

Prototyping visuals with Josh Ge's REXpaint

Added support for using physical inventory items (and the Lua API for scripting what the items do).

This helps evolve the game's "adventure game" like elements
This allows for finding and using items which can be scripted now to do pretty much anything. We have yet to add a "combine items" button, but watch this space. Mini crafting system here we come! :0

Speaking of 'adventure game like elements' - Rich talked a little bit about this on the retro gaming podcast last year. One of the host's, Ben, described the game like this:

"Its kind of like an adventure game that is then set within this 3d stealth game - which gives you more fail states than 'well I'm too stupid to figure out this puzzle'.

You can listen here around the 1hour 30min mark.

Modding and Lua API additions

The above point to do with physical item inventory comes under Lua API too of course.

Not much on it on the wiki yet here but this shows some of the basic usage.

New scene hierarchy in the Template scene in generated when you create a new mod LevelKit to give a guide to help keep your mod scenes tidy and

Other

Fixed NPC prefabs to have the correct navmesh area tags so that NPCs would use stairs again!
Lots and lots of small stuff about doors. How their logic is set up, how the player and NPC's unlock them, and making sure they open away from the character instead of hitting you in face etc...


Testing doors!

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!

Thursday, 31 January 2019

Sprint Round Up - 30.01.19 - The FIRST Sprint of 2019

Hello hello, here is your regular sprint round up of development through January! Read on to find out what we have been up to, and if you are one of our backers on the FIRST ACCESS level, what you can expect to see in the latest build update!