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!

Sprint Roundup: Spring Character Cleaning!

May we welcome you to the latest OFF GRID devblog!  As always, there are continuous improvements being made, and we hope you enjoy hearing about it all. 

Improving User Experience

The last two sprints have seen improvements in the user experience for players, but even more so for modders.  That also means it helps us in making content - as we use the same tools ourselves.

Most noticeably for everyone, the look and feel of the data view has been improved.  This makes it easier for players to find and access the data they want in the levels, making the whole experience of targeting data feel better.  For anyone with access to our LevelKit and modding API, we have been rewriting lots of our API to simplify the scripts, make sure different functions use consistent syntax, and can be used everywhere.  This reduces the amount of information modders need to write, and automates more of the level setup steps on engine side to reduce the amount of things content creators need to handle.

Character Updating

Another major task has been coordinating work by a few of us on characters, their accessories, LUT colours, and how the prefabs are organised for all of this.  We finally removed the last remnants of prototype characters that have been in the game since day dot too.  It has been liberating to do some spring cleaning!  This has also meant that the full remit of characters in all colours, shapes and sizes are now implemented across the game, AND they can be tweaked and modded to your heart's content!  Next up is fleshing out the rest of their personalities and conversations!

New characters have entered the building!

Character customisation - accessories, hair, and colours can be changed.

NPC Direction

NPC direction has been improved when performing certain actions, like interacting with a device or walking through various points.  As the navigation mesh system isn't made to have an agent to face a certain orientation or to be in an exact position at the end of its path, it's needed to tweak the object direction and position with code, and at the same time control the animation manually to make everything seems as fluid as possible.    The facing orientation is really important in patrolling because it's a game design pillar for stealth games to control where the player can navigate through a level.  It's also important when the player is interacting with devices - for the animations to seem correct, the NPC needs to be in a certain position facing a specific direction.

We also added a gizmo to help us visualise in the level each direction the NPC should face at certain points such as interacting with interest points, as you can see in the screenshot below:

Arrow indicates the direction this non-playable character should face.

This helps us and modders to line up the characters correctly when setting up the patrol routes and interactions.

Improving and cleaning the NPC creation system

This is really Phase One of a bigger feature and task that we are going to talk more about in the next blog post, but for now we are going to focus on the NPC part of it.  We are developing a more flexible NPC system to have various types of NPCs with different action, behaviours, or items.  It's really important to have diverse levels, and also to give good tools for the community to create dynamic mods.  In terms of developing the game, this is also really helpful to us because it's a good opportunity to improve and clean some code.  This has already resulted in improving the AI search actions and debugging the code in a faster way.

What will you see in the next build? 

Expect a new build for all of you FIRST ACCESS folk next month - we'll give you a heads up as soon as it's done.  Here are some of the changes you can expect to see:

Characters

• All protoype characters removed and new characters implemented across the game
• Characters available in all colours, shapes and sizes now in game - ready to be tweaked and modded as you please
• Improved creation of NPCs:
• Ability to create different types of NPCs with various actions and behaviours in a flexible way
• Some components are added in runtime, using the information in Lua scripts
• Simplification, merging, and removal of some NPC scripts

Gameplay and Mechanics

• Support for scheduling things to happen based on date / time (in addition to the existing "do after X seconds" option)

Controls and UX

• Fixed issues with data view visible range and actual targeting range not matching
• Improved visibility of data & data trails
• Fixed data view range not always resetting to minimum correctly
• Fixed data view shader using negative transparency with missing/bad UV's on meshes

AI 

• New system to control the NPC direction at certain actions:
• It improves the movement before the NPC interact with a device
• Gives more control in the guard's patrol
• Gizmo added to visualise the desired direction 
• Cleaner organisation and seperation of NPC functionality, which should make debugging various parts of the codebase easier

Modding and Lua API additions 

• Lots of Lua scripting API cleanup, with more consistent and less verbose syntax for things
• Requirements for level creator / modder to set up certain things have been removed and are now handled automatically instead

Other tasks and upcoming events

• Rich did a presenation on modding and mod communities for Tentacle Zone :  
 

 
• We submitted to Steam Games Festival - fingers crossed!
• Moving and tidying of all Semaeopus and OFF GRID organizational documentation to a new system

Tonight (Wednesday the 20th), we will be demoing OFF GRID and our Milliways mod during the World Game Night:  Made in London Edition event put on by Playcrafting.  If you're free, join in - this session is all about UK games and their makers!   Check it out:  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/world-game-night-made-in-london-tickets-102541967786 

Thanks for reading!


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!  Thank you!

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...

Trick or treat! 80% FUNDED!

Happy Halloween from all of us at Semaeopus!

What a treat!

We’ve hit the 80% funded mark!  THANK YOU!

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!

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!

Sorting out motivational issues

Hello! It’s Pontus here this time.

You’ve already read about us recently making a trip to USA for GDC and PAX, and about the push for new content and polish we did before that. As things go, that kind of quick development tends to mean lots of new stuff is added at the last minute, and sometimes maybe not tested in every possible situation. Or there’s a good chance there are some odd bugs and things that only appear after a while, or in very specific conditions. Things that in the long term would get noticed, added to our bug list, and eventually fixed… but in a 4-week rush, things sometimes go less than perfectly and some features might end up being a bit buggy.

In multiple ways, sometimes.

Most of my sprint was spent on fixing biggest issues we found in our PAX build, and most of that didn’t end being much to talk about. But one of the bugs ended being a bit more interesting to figure out, and while I’d usually prefer talking about design, I though some insight on this side of game development could still have some value. So, this is going to be more or less accurate story of our guards not behaving as intended, as I saw the issue through bug reports on our Jira board, and watching people play the game & testing things myself afterwards trying to figure out what exactly was going wrong. And also a nice example of how the most obvious explanation often isn’t quite true!

The evolution of our hero

The evolution of our hero… (or one of them - hint hint)


Thanks to @Bearskopff for chivvying me along to get these to you good folks.

If you’ve got keen eyes, then in the ‘Mixamo rigging’ post we put up, you might have spotted a different character to the one in our trailer, but until now I hadn’t put anything up officially. Well, here’s where we are with it…

Silvia’s work on the characters really deserves some limelight and applause, she’s been doing a fantastic job and I cant wait to show you all more as it comes along.

For now, enjoy these and let us know what you think!

Characters motions

We’re just starting to play around with getting more variations on characters and their motions into the demo to jazz up the security guards and how they react etc.

@Mixamo have a great character prototyping pipeline available, we just used their free auto rigger and python scripts to create a maya rig for an animator who is helping us out.There’s a decent library of motions too so check ‘em out! http://www.mixamo.com