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

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...

Off Grid Sprint Update 05.07.2017 - Modder-dod-a-ding-dong

We have spent the month hard at working putting together new changes to the game’s interface and the modding tools. We have also brought our wiki documentation forward so that it is usable because we have had our first modder working with us this month!

Our First Modder

We were lucky enough to be contacted out of the blue by Dominic who goes to college not far away from the studio and was looking for a place he could do work experience at a games studio. We jumped at the chance as many of us got our first breaks in life through being bold and asking
for work on a whim and we were glad to be able to offer the opportunity.

Dominic has been testing our modding tools and helping write up documentation on our wiki on how to use them this last week, but we’ll let him tell you what he has been up to…

Off Grid Sprint Update 06.06.2017 - Radial Velocity

The month of May is done and dusted - and Off Grid is all the better for it! We’ve overhauled the app system, reorganised our LevelKit, and continued adding all the right save features. If you’re a wannabe Off Grid player and modder, the time to start getting familiar with the tools at hand is right here, right now!

New ways of using your apps

In this sprint we ended with fairly big difference in how apps, and selecting targets for interactions are handled. While the old AppWheel is convenient for certain types of interactions, like grabbing all the data around you as you run through the level, it’s less ideal when you want to do more planned and complicated interactions with various devices, without having to switch different apps on & off and sometimes opening your pause menu and inventory to select files and send them.

So we decided adding a radial menu you can use to select the apps to use, files to send etc while you are currently looking at a target device would be a nice option.


Simple enough as a concept, but as things go, actually building this ended up requiring quite a lot of other things to change as well…

Sprint Update - 27.01.17 - Voron-Oi-Oi-Oi

Hello folks!  We hope you have had a good start to 2017 and are fully recovered from the post holiday slump! It has been a pretty busy start to the year for us. We have built a whole new system for mission selection, added new characters and missions, and all the while been busing doing release planning and following up on biz dev.

Rigi.py

We rigged up a new character and have been working up some new content.
There is a fantastic python script available to take the standard Rigify add-on in blender. It gives you the ability to to switch between the tools needed for animating in Blender and alternatively stripping the export down to just what is needed for importing into Mecanim for setting up with Unity’s humanoid system. We won’t say any more but if you use Rigify and Unity this will make your life sooo much easier!

You can grab the script from here:
https://github.com/trynyty/Rigify_DeformBones/blob/master/Rigify4Mecanim.py

Sprint Update - 24.12.16 - Ubuntu Xmas

Our gift to you this year is stable builds across all platforms! The big news is we have been making sure our Linux builds are up to scratch as Rich is off to 33C3 and some of the hardware he might be borrowing to demo on will undoubtedly be running various flavours of Linux for us to put the build through its paces on.

Linuxmas is here

Last Saturday we tweeted out a few screens from the latest Linux build running and we were lucky enough to get this write-up from Gaming On Linux.
 

We’ll be putting the build through testing on as many distros as we can ahead of release, for a game with the sorts of themes encountered in ‘Off Grid’, and as all three devs are Linux users, making sure we cater to those of you who like to play on Linux is extremely important to us.