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!

SURPRISE Character Reveal

Remember us harping on about some big news?

Well... today is the day!

"Surprise characters to be unveiled"

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!

Get the files from here!

They will all be up on our Github page shortly too.

Mustafa in progress

If you do do some printing, be sure to take a picture and post it at us on:

• Twitter
• Discord
• Instagram
  
• Facebook
• Reddit

HACK THE PLANET!

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!

Hero character concept art: The evolution of Joe

OFF GRID is 73% funded!  THANK YOU!

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!