Sprint Roundup: Meta work

Welcome friends, time for another sprint update!

 

 

In the last couple of sprints we did a fair amount of checking existing game systems, making sure everything works as intended, and adding some long-planned polish here and there to make those existing features look and feel better. Most visible changes from player's perspective would be improvements to how meaning and use of metadata is communicated to the player, with better messaging about what data has new metadata, making sure player knows when they gain new metadata, and making the effect of collecting data about someone more visible in the UI.

One of the improvements we did was the addition of the save slots, we believe that this change will make the save system cleaner and quicker to use. Each slot (the current number of available slots is 3, but that value can be increased before launch) can have one manual save and one auto save, also the difficulty option will be associated with a specific slot, to give the option to have different game states with different difficulties at the same time, every other game option will be general and not associated with a save slot.

Improving the AI system is another important feature that we worked on in recent weeks, it's still a feature in development so we will talk more in-depth in the next sprint roundup, but essentially we felt the necessity to change the NPCs behaviour in the middle of a mission in a more flexible way, using the specific agent Lua script, doing that in an easier and transparent way. This will be a powerful tool to us and modders, to change the AI in a more dynamic way, but also it will help us to debug and improve the NPC behaviours in a faster way. For example, with this we can give a NPC a taser in the middle of a mission to attack the player. We'll have a full update on this topic on the coming weeks.

On the art front we have been importing a load of art assets into the project and reorganising our source files. We've been reworking all Existing LUTs, essentially cleaning up any old redundant character textures. 

Whilst we made these changes, we updated the wiki to reflect which LUTs are working and a preview of their appearance, this should help to visualise the vast variety of LUTs we have in the game for modders to choose from.

On top of all this we've been looking forward with some funding applications for some interesting post release collaborations we have in the pipeline. We've also done a lot of back end organization work, we moved cloud provider for our documentation for the studio, and it takes a surprising amount of time to make sure everything makes it's way over to a new system properly, and when you move stuff you realise you have a bunch or organization to do at the same time!

In the latest game and Levelkit build : 

So, what can you expect to see in the next build of the game and modding tools?
 
Content (Level Design and Art) 

• Dynamic light cone mesh for flashlights (no more flashlights clipping through walls!)
• New gates, fences, light models, concrete barriers, road/sidewalk parts etc added to LevelKit 
• New character LUTs have been made based on the older designs that work with the new LUT template

Gameplay and Mechanics

• All game systems will now only display a character's name if the player has actually learned the name from metadata or not.
• Targeting system will show if a data point has new metadata the player hasn't found yet. (also cleaned up the target info window a bit)
• Data download notification shows the amount of new metadata gained from the data.

Controls and UX

• Save slots added

AI 

• Improving and fixing various issues on the AI system such as NPCs being able to move form neutral to adversarial mid mission
• Setting and changing NPCs actions and goals were improved
• Cleaner NPC animation state machine setup

 

Modding and Lua API additions 

• Changes made on agent Lua script to allow for more flexible modding of AI
• Lua track for Timelines (run any Lua command from a timeline - DANGER!!)
  

Bugs fixed 

• Character LUTs were not assigned correctly if only color or only smoothness/metallic was defined in mission Lua script.
• SocialInventory was not assigned correctly so all collected metadata was just sent to void
• Lua API was not handling null/nil values consistently, some API calls returning a nil value from Lua side as a nil, and others as null.

Other 

• Funding applications for post release DLC
  
• Cloud and documentation migration
  

That's it for this update, we'll be back again soon with more, in the mean time stay safe folks!

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!

Sprint Roundup: An iterative process

Devblog time!  From making all characters playable, API improvements, and an overhaul of our setting systems, we've packed a lot in to the most recent sprints this summer. 

New character spawn system

On the last sprint roundup, we talked about the new NPC creation system - a more flexible system to create various types of NPCs.  That was the phase one of a bigger goal:  to improve and simplify the process to spawn all characters - NPCs or playable ones.

The second (and final) phase was all about making all characters playable!  Now all character prefabs are generic, and every character can be a NPC or playable.  To change between these two states now just requires defining in a single line in the mission script, which, for examples, looks just like this: characterType = "npc". The game will automatically handle add the needed components and connections to make the character controlled by the player or the AI.

This means you can now easily make a mission in which you can play as a guard and Joe can be an NPC!  It's a big change that gives so much more flexibility when creating new missions.

Look Up Tables

We also reviewed how the characters are currently implemented, and decided how we want them to work with regards to the character look up tables. Following this, we decided to create a new LUT template that would work for all characters whilst still enabling a variety of characters to be created from a single mesh, which will also take into account the new head prop system. For this system to work, a new UV layout has been created, which has been a great opportunity to review all existing characters and tidy up any issues with these characters too. 

Timeline

There's been a lot of work getting Timeline to play nicely with spawned characters and our Lua API - so recent work has centered around implementing the playable sections of the intro to the game making use of this. It's been an interesting process with lots of back and forth as Timeline really does seem like a tool made for making animated movies in Unity rather than controlling entities in a game engine between playable sequences. Writing "playables", the Unity components needed for scripting different functionality into sequences, is a little arcane too!  None the less, we now have something that is looking pretty good and sets the whole game up nicely.  We think you are going to enjoy this!

Settings

We improved the settings system, and added new settings to give players more options and to add other important small quality of life features.

The new and updated settings are:

Gameplay

• Vibration: enable or disabled the controller vibration
• Auto hide mouse:  the game have full control if the mouse cursor is shown or not, dependent if the player is playing with a keyboard and mouse or a controller
• Mouse locked [only available if the "auto hide mouse" option is disabled]: Always show or hide the mouse cursor
• Follow camera: if enabled, the game camera will always follow the player character

Graphics

• Brightness: increase or decrease the screen brightness
• Resolution: select the resolution in a list of available ones, the user screen native resolution is set as default
• Fullscreen: selected between fullscreen or window mode
• Locked framerate: it is possible to play the game on a unlocked or a locked framerate
• Vsync: the options here are off, on, or half
• Anti aliasing: the available options on this field are FXAA (FastApproximateAntialiasing), SMAA (SubpixelMorphologicalAntialiasing), TAA (TemporalAntialiasing) or none
• Anti aliasing quality: the player will also be able to choose the AA quality level if it's selected FXAA or SMA on the option above
• Shadows Quality: it's also possible to select the shadows quality (high, medium, and low) or disable it completely

Quite a list that is!  All together, they will certainly improve user experience. 

API Improvements

Making games is very much an iterative process, often requiring going back a few steps and re-doing what you have but in a slightly better ways. Over the development, we've grown our Lua API a fair bit, and sometimes things haven't ended in the most logical place, or with the most descriptive name. And in quite a few places we've eventually come up with a more convenient, or more flexible, way something could be done instead. So, while we still have a chance to make massive, breaking changes to our Lua API without annoying all the modders by breaking their mods, we've done a bit of an overhaul of our Lua API in general.

In short, the API is now less verbose, more consistent in its syntax and its use in various Lua scripts in the game, automates certain setup tasks better, removes some easy chances of making mistakes in your scripts, and after all the changes, our mission scripts shrunk in size by about 25%, so you'll probably end having to write less code to make your mods as well!

In summary

As always, a quick list-based summary of the progress:

Characters

• Finished the new spawn character system
• Bugs fixed and polish on characters and save systems
• Character LUTs

Content (Level Design and Art) 

• Intro cutscene playable and tutorialised
• Testing the Unity Timeline integration with our Lua API and extending it to fit the implementations we need it for
• Work with virtual cameras and targeting in Intro to make them behave nicely now they are following dynamic spawned targets
• Continued work on the harbour level
• Harbour props - creating fences, gates and cranes to help make the harbour feel more authentic
• Adding head props to the unity project

Controls and UX

• New and updated settings
  

AI 

• Writing custom AI Agents for intro level interactions

Modding and Lua API additions 

• Updated some existing levels to new Lua API
• Added in-game debug UI with support for executing Lua commands while testing the game/mods

Bugs fixed 

• Lots of generic clean-up and fixing various small bugs

As always, thank you for reading and following along on this development journey!

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!