Off Grid Dev Blog - "Still Alive and Hacking"

How long has it been since we've posted something in our dev blog? 10 months?! Sounds like it's time to remedy that and give all of you an update about what's going on in the Off Grid development!

 Shall we get the excuses out of the way? It's not you, it's us. Jokes aside, we have been juggling other projects to keep the company wheels rolling and put bread on our tables. This meant that we needed to spread Off Grid development a little thin to focus on contract work. Ultimately that would have made for some boring and heavily redacted blog posts! (Gotta respect those NDAs!)

Our bad. We never planned to be this quiet for this long, and we know radio silence is not a good look for an indie game team. So, we are sorry about that!

The Good news is that not only are we still alive but Off Grid development has been picking up pace. We even expanded our team. So let's introduce our newest member:

OFF GRID Devblog "Look who's talking!"

Welcome back to another episode of the OFF GRID DevBlog, lots of interesting interactions to tell you all about, so let's dive right in!

Sprint Round Up - 21.12.18 - The LAST Sprint of 2018

Twas the last sprint before Christmas, when all through slack
there were messages pinging, of snow in Finland
tasks have been completed on Jira with care
with hopes of increased wishlists for the new year

...we're not poets and we know it, but all in good cheer!   Pontus has decamped to his native Finland and the snow is plentiful!  There's a few us of here in merry ol England that are snow jealous.

Finland = Winter Wonderland

In this sprint, there were lots of tweaks and updates as we prepped the roll out of the FIRST ACCESS programme for our Kickstarter backers, as well as plenty of essential documentation and tasks. So without further ado, here's the last Sprint Update of 2018:

App System

•  Apps can define cost per action, and any continuously-running actions can apply cost over time.
•  Updated App scripting wiki page to match with the recent App system changes and to better explain all the features

AI

• Added generic actions to AI definitions (to perform tasks, change state, without the need of an InterestPoint)
•  Added stats to AI definitions (to track various attributes in a data driven fashion)
•  AI documentation

LevelKit

•  Built the "Semaeopus Testing Facility" level in LevelKit as an example for modders, and as easy place to test new modded content and features
•  Changed the LevelKit Tool to have a dropdown menu of different Districts for the mission so people don't need to check the options from wiki and type it in
•  Did a complete review of all the props and models in LevelKit:

•  Made sure Models are not importing new Materials
•  Gave a box collider to things big enough to need one
• Created a Prefab of everything  
• Added everything to Collections, cleaned up and re-sorted Collections

Organising materials in LevelKit

FIRST ACCESS

• Sent FIRST ACCESS keys to relevant backers
• Fresh build of OFF GRID with LevelKit tools for FIRST ACCESS users
• Created public Trello board for modders and FIRST ACCESS players to request features and report bugs

The best NDA return e-mail we received!  :D

Character Controls

• design and planning for improving character control

Bug Fixing

•  Fixed game crash in Map screen.

Other

•  Final itch.io build, and then added back all features & content that was disabled for it.
•  Explored documentation generation
• Loads of improvement and additions to the documentation on the wiki
• planning and research on offering a slacker backer option for people to be able to get into FIRST ACCESS post-Kickstarter (more news coming soon!)
•  A team holiday party at Beef & Brew that left us all bursting!  No worries, we took the leftovers home.  Waste not, want not, folks!

A note on FIRST ACCESS: 
 If  you are eligible for FIRST ACCESS, you will have
 a) backed OFF GRID at the PENTESTER level or above on Kickstarter and
 b) already received an e-mail with instructions on how to join!

If you find that e-mail and you have time to dig into things over the holiday season, please do!  Sign and return your NDA, and we'll endeavor to send over your Steam key in return as soon as we can. 

...and that's that!   We're still going through the holidays, but taking it a little easier than usual to enjoy the time with families and friends.

Thanks everyone.  We wish you all the happiest of holidays!

The OFF GRID Team 

p.s.  There's a HOLIDAY GIVEAWAY planned!  We've chatted about it in our discord - and it's soon to be announced.  Sign up to the newsletter to get the details first!



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 Update 19.11.18: The Longest Sprint

Hello!  This Sprint Update is a long time coming - there's been a lot going on, including a successful Kickstarter!   Successful Kickstarter has a nice ring to it, eh!?

If you followed along with the Kickstarter (and hopefully you did!) you will have had a lot of updates to read in the meantime.  Nevertheless, here is the detail of what we have been busy with throughout this epic sprint as we prepared for and ran our first ever crowdfunding campaign:

AI

- Pooled dictionaries in AI state
- Immutable AI state
- Inevitable fixes for above
- Extra cost for guards using stairs
- Fixes to AI planning
- Fixes for OffMeshLinks / AI using doors
- Tracked down a bug relating to door GUIDs / saving and loading
- Noise documentation
- Updated AI used in the Harbour scene
- Fixed a drone navigation crash
- Added mechanisms for AI to prefer particular devices based on their personality
- Added mechanisms to allow AI Actions based on their personality + Documentation for this

Controls

- Added UI to remap controls in main menu
- Checked/updated all control settings & defaults
- Limited repeat rate on analog gamepad sticks when moving around UI
- Added dataview range control on mouse & keyboard

Apps being configured: choose if you want them available in the app wheel or radial menu.

App system

- Completed new app system
    - added App system Lua API
    - unavailable apps are now hidden from Apps menu
    - If app can't be added to either appwheel or radial, it's now hidden in the App Menu (for exaple the password cracking is currently an app, but shouldn't be controlled by the player directly)
    - Apps are added to AppMenu, AppWheel and Radial menus when the app becomes available
    - Only execute currently selected app (instead of all active ones) when selecting a target+app in radial menu
    - Update loop for apps (so apps can run in background and do things continuously/over longer time)
    - Apply app action cost (both per-action, and for app cost over time for a continuously running app)
- Status windows for apps
    - Support for displaying an icon and/or a piece of text
    - Support for changing icon & color
- Rewrote Light Monitor app using new API
- Created "Send Data" app (lets you send a file to currenlty targeted chaarcter or device)

Lua API additions

- Lua API for audio RTPC
- Added normal (scaled) time support for scheduler API
- Added notification messages to UI Lua API
- Player API additions to get social profile data for currently targeted character

Bugs fixed

- Player character walking/crawling sounds get swapped after crawling first time
- Removed hack that re-assigns all materials in scenes (original Unity issue that required this has been fixed so the hack isn't needed any more)
- 1st person targeting should maintain the direction player is currently looking at
- Character profile data displays color codes in UI rather than colored rich text
- Fixed notification message UI animation setup
- Fixed file viewer not displaying images
- Fixed card scanners missing UI markers whe usign the Help app

Apostle level

- Checked all atmos colliders, added new ones where needed
- Blocked staircase from lobby to 1st floor
- Blocked door in 1st floor that would otherwise allow player to skip half of the floor
- Checked navigation layers
- Checked colliders, changed some to simpler ones, added some that were missing
- Fixed colliders with negative sizes
- Fixed typos in some device scripts
- Checked all doors and assigned correct door groups and access levels
- Removed drone from rooftop
- Replaced a few hunded cardboard box models in level with prefab versions
- Fixed missing/wrong static tags around the level
- Removed some leftover invisible collliders blocking player and the AI movement
- Fixed props not correctly aligned to walls/floor
- Redesigned first floor of Apostle HQ
- Implementated new hackable device

Art

- Creation of activist and hacker characters
- Prop and asset creation for new levels
- Set dressing and environment art for the Apostle level

Models of the real life hackers featuring in OFF GRID.

Other

- Enabled ultrawide display reoslutions
- Added headers support in popup menus (menu item with no function becomes a header automatically)
- Added splash screens when starting the game
- Data colors now ignore alpha value set in scripts and instead use pre-defined opacity to make sure things look correct in data view and in UI
- Opened studio Discord!
- Built a new website for the game
- Quick update of studio website with new Semaeopus logo

Kickstarter

Updated build for Itch.io demo

- Removed options menu from build
- Removed other levels from the build
- Forced loading straight to Apostle level in demo build
- Added Kickstarter campaign ad in main menu
- Disabled save game loading (makes no sense for a single-level demo and would cause issues when loading a save where the demo level is already completed)

Campaign Prep

- Campaign page drafting, review, and finalising
- Reward drafting, review, and finalising
- Contact push
- Press push
- Newsletters
- Update planning: every 3-4 days to all channels
- News release drafting
- Daily social media scheduling
- Streaming planning

Events and promotion

- Game Dev Camp, Lisbon - Rich and Steve spoke
- IndieCade, LA - Rich spoke
- Sweden Games Conference - Rich spoke, Off Grid demoed within Indicator and Off Grid won the Indicator award!
- Inside Intel, London - an art exhibition on privacy & surveillance
- PlayUK, a videogame curation put on by the British Council in Macedonia
- Dev Space Winter Mixer, London
- Closing party and livestream to countdown to the Kickstarter campaign's end!

The final moments of the Kickstarter campaign!

Whew!  A long list to match a long, bountiful Sprint! 

To top all of this off, the team travelled to Dundee, Scotland last week to attend the UK Games Fund Awards.  Semaeopus was nominated for the 'Smart Studio' Award, and we were looking forward to a fun celebration together after the month of hard graft.  When the category for 'Smart Studio' was up, we were absolutely stunned to hear 'Semaeopus' announced as the winners!

Award winners!  Sarah, Steve & Pontus pictured with the award presenter.

A successful Kickstarter, two new awards, and loooooads of new supporters - we are so grateful to each and every one of you that has helped make the last couple of months so successful!  

There's been SO much going on - expect to hear more from individual members of the team as we each wrap up from the last couple of months. 

What's next?

It's onwards and upwards now.  We're working on getting our FIRST ACCESS programme off the ground.  Anyone that backed at the PENTESTER level or above can expect to hear from us soon about what is to come. 

One of the two main goals of the crowdfunding campaign was to provide a bit of additional resource to support more open production of Off Grid.  We're busy getting our ducks back in a row after the Kickstarter, and can't wait to move forward with you all behind us.

THANKS EVERYONE!

The Off Grid Team


If you haven’t already - be sure to wishlist Off Grid on Steam - *EVEN IF YOU ALREADY BACKED THE KCKSTARTER! Each wishlist makes a big difference to us, and we really appreciate your support!

OFF GRID IS OVER 50% FUNDED IN 24 HOURS!

WOW.  You backers gave us a seriously wild ride yesterday:  35% funded in 5 hours, 40% funded in 7 hours, AND THEN we hit the 50% mark within 21 hours!   

It feels seriously good to be 50% funded within the first 24 hours of the campaign!  Your enthusiasm and support has blown us away.  THANK YOU!

For this first update, we wanted to give you a little background on the inspiration for Off Grid.  As you might be aware, it’s been in the works for quite some time! 

The game was initially inspired when Rich heard Eben Moglen speak about net neutrality and data privacy at the INET conference in 2011.  It struck a cord, and the seed for Off Grid was planted. 

Soon after, Rich teamed up with Pontus, and together they built the first prototype of Off Grid.  The goal was to get people thinking about data.  The root notion was to try and physicalize it -  to make data into something manipulable, something that people would be able to go and play with and see as a thing you can walk around.

But the concept was still a little out there:  this was early 2013, before Snowden and NSA revelations.  

Fast forward to June 2013, and the first ever public unveiling of Off Grid (in a livestreamed interview at Etoo London) just happened to fall nearly 64 years to the day after the publishing of George Orwell's book, 1984, and the same week that Edward Snowden made his first leak.

And all of a sudden, it clicked.

Prior to the first revelations, it was a struggle to explain to anyone why what we were doing with Off Grid was important or would be interesting.  Then, almost overnight, Snowden gave everyone the vocabulary to talk about it.  People understood.

Now, years on, the revelations have just kept rolling, and everyone is much more aware of the issues surrounding data privacy and mass surveillance.    

It is the perfect time for a game like Off Grid:  people are tuned into the effects of data mining and the impact that bad laws around digital rights have on real life. Help us get Off Grid funded, and THEN help us shape the game so we can all try to picture a less dystopian digital tomorrow.

Let’s keep the momentum going - tell your friends!!

THANK YOU! 

The Off Grid Team 

P.S. If you want to chat to us a bit more informally, we regularly hang out in our studio discord - we’d love to see you in there!  Join us:  https://discordapp.com/invite/NDEVwBJ

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!

OFF GRID IS LIVE ON KICKSTARTER!

The moment we've all been waiting for:  Off Grid is now LIVE ON KICKSTARTER!

That means you now have the opportunity to:

-PLAY A FREE DEMO OF OFF GRID
-Secure your copy from as little as £8 (the SUPER EARLY BIRD deal is a steal!)
-Get your name or handle in the game
-Help shape the game via our FIRST ACCESS program (back at the PENTESTER level)
-Snag some official OFF GRID merch!

We are SO excited to bring you Off Grid!   To play the demo, visit the kickstarter campaign page and follow the link to the demo!

Help us make noise! 

Here's all the links you need: 

Website: http://offgridthegame.com/

DevBlog:  https://offgridthegame.blogspot.com/

Steam:  https://store.steampowered.com/app/526720/Off_Grid/

Kickstarter:  http://offgridthegame.com/kickstarter

Tweet suggestions: 

Support OFF GRID:  A game about data privacy and mass surveillance.
Launching on #kickstarter today with playable demo!
http://offgridthegame.com/kickstarter
#offgridthegame

OFF GRID: A stealth hacking adventure where data is your most powerful weapon.
LIVE ON KICKSTARTER TODAY!
http://offgridthegame.com/kickstarter
#offgridthegame

Hack like you have to.  Game the system.  Don't get caught - your daughter needs you.
Support @OffGridTheGame on Kickstarter TODAY!  LIVE AT 4PM BST!
http://offgridthegame.com/kickstarter
#offgridthegame



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!

OFF GRID DEMO AVAILABLE TODAY!

TODAY IS THE DAY!  The Off Grid Kickstarter campaign goes LIVE!

From 4pm BST onwards TODAY, you will have the opportunity to:

-PLAY A FREE DEMO of Off Grid
-Secure your copy from as little as £8 (SUPER EARLY BIRD - it's a steal!)
-Get your name or handle in the game
-Help shape the game via our FIRST ACCESS program!
-Snag some official OFF GRID merch

...and much more!

Back Off Grid

offgridthegame.com/kickstarter

Set your alarms!  That's:

4pm London / 5pm Berlin / 11am New York / 8am LA

Get in there quick to get the best deal on the game! Some reward tiers are limited... you don't want to miss out!

Help us spread the word! Share our posts, tell friends when you've backed, and let us know that you have by using #offgridthegame on social media!

THANKS FOR YOUR SUPPORT!

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 Round Up - 22.08.18 - Refreshed and Ready

When you spend so much of your time behind a screen and a keyboard, a true break from it is an absolute requirement every once in a while!  Just as Pontus hit the woods in Finland last month, this month Sarah and Rich met up with family and spent a week camping in the Rockies. 

Highlights included multiple excited loud-whisperings of 'MOOSE!' while wildly gesturing at a black mass in the trees, only to get closer and discover a cow!  Luckily, plenty of real moose were also spotted throughout the week. 

At the end of it, Rich had an afternoon in Boulder and got a chance to meet up with some local devs, too.

Then it was back to work, of course! 

And so it's time for another sprint update!  Here's what's been checked off the list this sprint:

Level Design

• Utilised ProBuilder to clean up old geometry and fix z-fighting issues
• Improved upon player route through existing levels

App System

• Rebuilt the App System - apps are now actually fully driven by the Lua scripts
• Expanded the Lua API to add more features specifically useful for apps (but of course available for other systems as well)

AI

• Data-driven work on AI, which included:
• Making InterestPoints general
• Creating Agent profiles to use and/or fix these points

Art

• New artist on board!  Yesss!
• New character models completed that will be part of a surprise reveal in the future!  
• New character concepts for LUT variations of moddable characters

Bug Fixing

• Fixed multiple bugs and inconsistent behaviours with apps

...plus a bunch of essential biz dev and planning tasks.

SPRINT COMPLETE!

Now we're focusing on the busy sprint ahead as we gear up for some big upcoming deadlines.  A couple of us are headed to EMF at the end of August for a weekend of making, breaking, hacking, crafting, ingeniuty and fun.  If you're planning to be there too, get in touch with Rich on twitter and ask to play the demo!

Thanks for following along!

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 Round Up - 18.06.18 - Cheat to complete!

This sprint included a major milestone… playing the game from start to finish! :D

That may be stretching the truth a bit, and included a bit of cheat… but here’s the detail on that, along with the rest of our work this sprint:

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!

Sprint Round Up - 17.05.18 - A different approach

Hello loyal devlog readers!

We’be been blogging about for awhile now, and think it’s time we change up the the way we’re approaching it.  There’s SO much going into each development sprint that we want to make it easier to understand what we’ve been doing.

From here on out, at the end of each sprint, we’ll be putting together a roundup of the development achievements each sprint, and then breaking the detail out into individual posts every week or two.  It means you’ll get more regular updates from us, and they should be a bit more bitesized and cover a specific theme or area across the last month of development.

Keep an eye out for Steve’s next post on save systems - coming soon!

Now for the sprint round up:

Devblog 30.04.18 - STEAMing Ahead!

As you can probably tell from our other posts on PAX East and GDC, there has been a fair amount of jet setting done for conferences and shows that broke up our regular development rhythm, but that doesn’t mean there hasn’t been a lot of dev work in the interim!

Now you NPC me, now you don’t

We’ve been working up new characters, ready to populate new levels and keep on with the content push. Below is another harbour worker that Josh has been working on the rig for.

And of course, thanks to our new character colour setup making use of the colour look up tables we have setup for creating easy variations, means that this character isn’t just a harbour worker, he can have many jobs!

Marching on to the US of A!

Hello!  We’ve got a whole lot of fun stuff coming up and it’s been a busy few weeks moving the game forward and prepping for all of these exciting things to come.


We’re headed to the US very soon - we’ll be attending GDC in San Francisco all of next week.  It’s the first time any of us from Semaeopus have made the trip over for GDC and we’re looking forward to it.  There’s going to be a few opportunities to get your hands on the latest build during GDC week:

• If you’ve got tickets to the SOLD OUT(!) GDC Experience Mixer on Wednesday 21st you’re in luck!   We’ll be there ready and waiting for you to play.
• We’ve got a few ‘pitch up and play’ events in our schedule, too - follow @OffGridTheGame + @RichMetson on twitter for updates on when and where.

After GDC, we’re headed to PAX East
in Boston from April 5-8th and Off Grid will be showcased as part of Figs & Co! 

We can’t wait!  If you’re attending, stop by, say hi, and play the game! Rich, Pontus and Steve will all be there ALL FOUR DAYS with our lastest demo at the ready. 
Now, on to all the juicy details on what we’ve been up to and what you might just see while playing the new demo…

Dev Blog - 21.02.18 - Upping our Profilers

It’s devblog time! 

Much of February has passed since the last sprint, and in that time, hearts and precious metals were shared across hipchat, though none were valentines from one dev to another, nor sadly, were they photos of our hard-earned Winter Olympic golds.  They were all lowpoly art, handcrafted by our stellar intern Josh, as he helped us prep marketing materials and create props for the game.  He’s been hard at work and done an awesome job for us. Thanks to our multi-cultural dev team, however, we did learn that Valentine’s Day in Finland is celebrated as ‘Friends Day’ - this is a notion we like.  And if you’re wondering, there’s fans of Team GB, Finland, and USA cheering across our virtual office spaces!  :)

Here’s what we’ve been up to:

Dev Blog Post 23.01.2017 - Drones and pwns

S’been a while, eh!

We decided to extend this sprint in the way we often do over christmas so that the team has a bit of time to experiment and perhaps take on a few tasks that require a good bit of thinking time. It’s paid off as usual, and so we have some great developments in the game to share with you with this blogpost. Read on for all the juicy details!

We are all directors now

We were very secretive some time ago (nearly 2 years back actually!) about how we were in a small set of selected developers given access to an alpha version if some new tools in Unity. Well…

Originally the tools were called ‘Director’, and with a lot of experimentation and some fairly comprehensive bug reporting they eventually became Unity Timeline, which Unity devs have now been enjoying since last summer!  We are now at the point where what we learnt from experimenting with the original Director tools can be put to good use. If you have played the Off Grid demo anywhere, then you will have seen the still frame animatic for the intro level which sets up the story of the game. We had a mocap session to get all this action captured and now that the Timeline tools have matured (and, more importantly, are stable) we are busy pulling this all together. The opening sequence of the game is going to change dramatically over the next couple of builds - how exciting!

To Octree or not to Octree

Steve had one pretty chunky task to do over the past month or so, and it’s been getting the drones to be substantially more drone-y.

So far we have worked on the basis that drones are just characters that happen to be hovering, but this means we lose the opportunity to move vertically and get to places that characters can’t, or via routes that they are unable to take. So the task at hand was to remedy this. Navigation meshes are two-dimensional, so we needed to take a new path - navigation volumes!

Using the magic of octrees, we subdivided each level down to the smallest size that contains no collidables, or down to a single unit cube, whichever is bigger. Then, each cube is tested to see which cubes it is adjacent to, to create a graph representing all the nodes. After that it’s simple - run A-Star on the network, and it’ll find a route through.

This will be available to LevelKit, so drones are accessible to all! There’s a few tweaks and kinks to work out, but overall it was a really satisfying feature to work on and should really change the way the game plays. You can run, but you can’t hide! Well you can hide. It’s a stealth game, after all.

Next will be to get them to move in a more dronelike manner, and perhaps optimise the navigation a little. But that may have to wait until after Steve’s put his cameraman hat back on for the upcoming sprint!

So much modding going on!

Josh has been hard at work testing the modding tools and refining his mods. In particular he expanded the museum of hacking he has been making.

The museum mod, which he initially designed to be just an interior, has expanded to allow for any future hackable devices to be added to it, no matter their size!

Josh then turned his attention to improving and developing the transport station map. The map has changed quite a bit since whiteboxing and still has a way to go. For a first attempt at a full level mod it is fairly ambitious due to it being a fairly large map with multiple ways to complete the same task.

The station has grown quite a bit to allow for more room for the guards and the player to navigate. This will also hopefully allow for a more interesting interior and gameplay possibilities.

Originally the apartments around the level were going to be just blocks that looked like apartments, but now some of them interiors to allow the player to find hidden data files or to find some higher ground to plan how they will tackle the mission.

The trainyard is still very much in progress, but has also changed quite considerably. The main additions to the train yard include a new walkway that allows the player to navigate to all 3 platforms. A warehouse has also been added which will include some puzzle elements for the player to complete. This is replacing the old puzzle element which involved moving the train carriages up and down the tracks as it was a bit clunky and confusing.

Meta-gamedesign

In the last sprint, Pontus redesigned the character profiles and our data files & SMS generation to handle metadata about the character personalities embedded in data files. That’s working pretty well, and we already built a quick app for testing this. So it’s time to take things a step further, which is why Pontus has spent this sprint working on the game design for how we’ll actually handle metadata collection and character profiling as a player experience. And how that will then tie in with adding a password cracking feature when the player connects to a remote (or local…) device using our SSH app.

The basic idea is that as the player collects different data files, the included metadata is automatically used to build a catalogue of character profiles, over time adding knowledge about new characters, and their personal information, their likes and dislikes, and pretty much whatever background info we (or modders) choose to add.

All the collected information will be available for the player to view at any time as a new tab in the pause menu, so it’s directly useful, for example, to try and guess what kind of approach might work best for distracting a specific guard away from your path. In addition to that, the amount of knowledge you have collected about a character is also then used to determine if you’ll be able to access devices belonging to that character. After considering calculating the access as a proportion of known metadata VS all existing data about a character, and realising that this would cause a few odd situations, we settled for a fixed limit for access, and allowing this to be set in each device’s Lua script so if the same character owns multiple devices, some can have easier, and some more difficult, passwords. We’ll likely also add an option for a device to require some specific piece of information instead of some count of any knowledge, but this should be used as a special case option in missions as it requires the mission creator to make sure that exact data is available to the player at the right time.

A fairly interesting side effect of this design is that it is kind of realistic, in the sense that it’s going to be easier to collect enough information about characters who have more metadata defined in their profiles. So, the more you share about yourself online and in social media, the easier it is for someone to learn enough about you to start guessing your passwords and to use the knowledge for identity theft and so on. And at the same time characters who have shared less about themselves (or, the mission creator has been more lazy ;)) will be more difficult to learn about, as you are more likely to just run into the same few bits of knowledge rather than learning something new.

Another interesting feature here is that your library of character knowledge will be persistent, so anything you learn about a character in one mission will be carried over to future ones. While this requires us to do a bit of a better job on the UI side to keep things manageable for the player, it also serves to create a longer game play loop, where social engineering can happen over a longer time span than just within a single mission.

Finally, we’re probably going to add few different apps for gaining access to devices, in the sense that the one based on knowledge about characters (so, basically just guessing badly chosen passwords through social engineering) is just going to be one of the tools available for the player. We’d also like to include other tools that target specific vulnerabilities on devices, and perhaps a late-game one that just uses a direct access to government-collected data.

Big News

With all that dev news it’s worth pointing out that we have some other big, juicy news coming soon. We are sooooooo close to being able to announce it that the anticipation almost hurts!

You can find the newsletter signup page here!

If you aren’t already on our newsletter, please sign up!  If you are and you have any friends who you think might be interested, then please share and help us reach even more people anticipating the game!

Ta ta for now,

Rich, Pontus, Steve, Sarah and Josh.

Off Grid Development blog 8.11.2017 - Changing Times!

The times-they-are-a-changin.’  New horizons, a shake up, big things happening - this has been a heck of a sprint!

Blocktober

Completely unaware of our social media surroundings, Rich managed to spend a good portion of this sprint during October whiteboxing and completely miss the whiteboxing trend on Twitter that was #Blocktober! Nothing nearly as fancy as the timelapsed art passes from the Naughtly Dog team on how they constructed key hero sequences in the latest Uncharted, but we do have a new building for the intro scene in the player’s apartment. If you haven’t seen this yet at a demo I won’t give away any spoilers, but this level is where your hacking journey begins!

Indies Unplayed

We were extremely fortunate to be asked along to Indies Unplayed at Secret Weapon Loading Bar in Stratford. It’s always great to show the game and get player feedback. Many thanks to Lauren Francis

for having us along, it was a very cool little event and we had some really inspiring titles along side us. Below you can see a player learning the setup to our hero’s story in the intro cutscene we are currently making playable.

We got to play some fun new indie games and catch up with some old friends too, including old chum Tim Constant, who we last saw at Nottingham Gamecity in 2013!!!
Tim is working on a very cool dystopian job sim.  It’s a
#PapersPlease-like game, where you play an immigrant bouncer in a post-Brexit apocalypse:

‘Settings’ it up

It’s been quite short and quick sprint, so there are no new amazing game features to talk about from Pontus. But as promised, our settings system has now evolved from a bunch of background systems and code into an actual menu. With some actual settings you can adjust!

The graphics will definitely need more work, but the plan is to fill in more options and then do a second pass on the artwork and layout to make sure everything works well with the content. For now, everything is functional at least.

Web work

Apart from that, things were polished up in the web side, with some imrpovements and additions to our wiki and to automate our newsletter. That’s going to make our life easier, and hopefully also help any players/modders to find the right Lua API and instructions for how to set things up in LevelKit in the future. I would say “go and check it out” but there’s not really much interesting things in the wiki yet, at least unless you are one of the lucky ones who have access to our builds and the LevelKit already. In which case, you of course should go and check it out to get you started testing how to create your own content for the game!


No funny bugs fixed by Pontus this sprint, and no interesting game design work either. But there definitely will be next time, he’s already spent the past few days with XMind open for plotting some pretty big changes for the game…

Mod testing

This sprint Josh, our modding and level design intern, challenged himself to build a level using the modding tools. The aim was to learn how to build a typical level with a focus on the Lua scripting side of things rather than art, and then take those learnings and see where he could fill in the gaps on the wiki that he found wanting.

We’ll let him tell you a bit more himself though:

“So I started out by blocking out the map that I wanted to create. Once I had the basic level that I was happy with I got stuck in with the Lua scripting with which I managed to learn a great deal upon completion of the level.

One of my favourite parts of creating the mod was the conversations, as it was super simple to create but also great fun generating branching dialogue between characters.
          
Following this, I began work on a guide to building a level mod which has been added to the wiki.This is something that I felt would be important for potential modders to have to help make the modding experience more accessible.

This also resulted in a few new pages being created to explain some sections not covered on the wiki yet, such as the ability to add characters to your level. This is a very exciting and interesting feature which will allow you to create many gameplay elements, from conversations to patrolling guards.

I also had the pleasure of testing the new ability to upload mods to the steam workshop using the Level-kit tools.

Shortly after that it was decided that we should create a mod level that people can download that would demonstrate some of the pre-made devices that any modder can essentially drag and drop into their own mod. It will also be playable which I will turn into an interactive tutorial of how these devices were made to help new modders create their own from scratch.”

Farewell Harry!

Harry had his last sprint with us this month as he is moving to join the development team at Unity, but we made sure he had time to part with a gift for any of our followers who are devs interested in making their games moddable too.

In his time on the team, Harry’s done great work pushing modding in Unity 3d,
and so we’ve open sourced his work on the Lua framework that makes Off Grid moddable, enjoy!

https://github.com/Semaeopus/Unity-Lua

Out with the New in with the Old ;)

And with our youngest team member Harry heading to Unity we have gained the wonderful Steve Allen in his place. Steve comes with a bundle of  AAA and Indie experience, so much so that he qualifies for ‘industry veteran’ status, and we are pumped to have him aboard the good ship Semaeopus. I’ll stop rambling and let him introduce himself though:

Hello! I’m new here. I’ve joined the Off Grid team as a programmer, though will no doubt stick my nose in elsewhere. I’ve been programming games for, well, rather a long time, and am really excited to be part of the project. There’s lots of interesting stuff that still needs to be done and it’s already been a welcome change from the larger, corporate games I’ve been working on over the last few years. And who knows, next time I write one of these updates I might have done some work! - Steve

You’ll hear a lot more from Steve in the coming sprints, he’s already made good strides into impletmenting and extending new features in the Lua API for modders to play with, so watch this space!

Fixes and additions:

Harry’s last couple of weeks were also a great opportunity for us to dig into some of the bugs in our backlog that haven’t been top priority, but would be welcome fixes with a little effort. We had a fantastic flurry of small fixes from the team, with Harry leading the charge.

Main game:

Messaging with CryptoChat

We setup a small notification to say that a character is typeing while you are waiting for them to respond to you in a conversation. It’s essentially a ‘Smedley is typing’ animation much like you’d see when using a messaging app like whatsapp or imessage.

We also and fixed the pause time between messages, which just needed a little finessing to feel more real
.
And most importantly, we set up ‘B’ to skip single messages instead of all of the incoming messages from another character.

Include Mods in use, in save games

We now have save games recording what mods you have subsribed to so you can progress with your mods intact!

Saving NFC

NFC data is now being saved correctly.

Trailer video

We fixed a strange long wait at the end of our trailer that had been bugging us.

Player Phone

We fixed a bug to do with interactions when the player phone didn’t appear when doing swipe interaction or scanning things.

Stuck Running

We had a somewhat funny but awkward bug in our animation state machine where the player can get stuck if you were crawling and spammed the run button while getting up - the player would get stuck running in circles!  That is now fixed ;)

Look around you

The player character’s look-at IK needed more restriction on target height so that you didnt look at interesting objects on the floors above or below you.

Invisible walls and soft bathroom sinks

Lots of missing colliders were fixed.

LevelKit:

UV Warning

We updated asset importer post processing script to warn about missing normals and UVs on new models. This means as you are modding and making new geometry, the LevelKit tool will tell you if it is missing anything that could cause a later error.

Mod Content structure

We re-structured level directories so that the content a modder makes is in a neater structure.

Non Steam works / DRM free mod exports

Added Export as Zip option to build tab so that you can upload your mod anywhere for anyone (with a copy of the game) to try it out.

That’s all folks

Lots of big things happening so we’ll look forward to catching you next time.

Pontus, Rich, Sarah, Steve & Josh

Sprint Update 24.10.17 - Back in the Trenches

The sprint since EGX has been an interesting one.  Loads to follow up on with the multitude of interesting folks that took an interest in the game - including a whole raft of journalists, podcasters, Youtubers and Twitchers.  Have you read our EGX round up?!

But now it’s back to the trenches - that’s what you are here to read about anyway - where and how we have been getting our hands dirty!

Sprint Update - 20.09.17 - Straight Outta Leftfield!

Phew!  We’re just about to pack up and head for Birmingham, as Off Grid has been selected as part of the Leftfield Collection at EGX!  We’re SO excited to be showing Off Grid at EGX and are looking forward to players responses to the game so far.  If you’re at the show, please come along and say hi!

Also at EGX, we will be livestreaming a playthrough of Off Grid from the Twitch Stage on Thursday at 11:30am (BST).  Follow along online at:  twitch.tv/twitch.

We’ve been toying with the idea of starting a twitch account for some time - and with the invitation to livestream from EGX, we finally have.  Very soon, we’ll be streaming live from twitch.tv/semaeopus!  Follow us as we chat through our monthly sprint updates, play through some of the games that inspire us, and bring in other indie devs to talk about game dev life. 
In case you haven’t heard (we hope you have!) we are still looking for a C# Unity Programmer to join the team.  We’ve extended the application deadline to Monday 25th September, so if you’re a UK-based games programmer looking for a change, we want to hear from you.  If you’re at EGX, stop by our stand in Leftfield to say hi, talk to us about the position, and play Off Grid for yourself before you get that application in!

Now onto the sprint!

Rebuilding the harbour

Just a day after we began this sprint, we heard that we’d have a place at the Leftfield Collection at EGX.  So we sat down to re-plan our work for the sprint with that in mind.  One of the things we wanted to get working for EGX was the harbour level.

We’ve had some bare bones prototypes of what the harbour would be for a long time now, and a more complete, but still mostly unplayable whiteboxed version of the level for a while.  So it was time to start cleaning and refining that version into something with a bit more gameplay.

First task was to deal with the player path though the level, so we could guide the player from one objective to the next and make sure we can also place a few obstacles on the way.  The draft level was pretty much just open space, with some late-level locations close to the start, and very little for the player to do around the rest of the level.  Cue moving a few buildings around and erecting more fences to gate the player’s path to different locations!

Add a couple of passes of lighting (with a few issues of lightmaps not loading correctly from AssetBundles sorted out); a few hours of placing colliders on objects to block the player from falling off the map; and a few days of writing mission objectives, devices, setting up triggers and so on, it’s starting to resemble an actual mission!

There were a few additional problems we needed to sort out for this level as well.  Nothing too complicated, we just needed to create an ocean, and the sky…

It’s a harbour, so we expect to see some water.  Which means we had to create some low-polygon style animated water in the level.  With a bit of modelling, a bit of C# and a custom shader to go with it, it’s now working reasonably well.  We’ll likely want to refine things later, especially if there’s ever going to be a daytime level, and just to move more of the water animation to shader code.

When it comes to sky, we obviously couldn’t use the same city skyline skybox we use for the newspaper office level, as half of the sky is supposed to be over ocean.  This was a fairly quick fix - we have a Blender project for rendering HDR panoramic skyboxes quickly - we just had to remove some buildings and add a lighthouse.  Lastly, we needed to change our fog setup a bit to fade out the ocean at the skyline nicely without making any far-away geometry stand out from the background too much.  That pretty much just meant having to use a black fog at far distance.  This works great for the city sky with black ground and buildings around, and looks still reasonable over the ocean as well (even if not completely realistic).

Drones and navigation

A big part of our plans for the harbour level is using drones to patrol around the area.  The plan was to get our old drone prefabs, make sure everything is up-to-date and works with everything that has changed in the game since the last time we’ve used them, and drop a few in the harbour.  Well, of course things don’t always go as planned!  The drone AI’s patrol behaviour is still a bit unreliable, but we still got something out of it in the end.  The patrol issue doesn’t seem too complicated either, so we’ll surely figure the problem out after EGX.

Apart from the drone itself and the AI, we needed to set things up so the drones could be restricted to certain parts of the level.  Basically, only in places where there’s enough room for them to fly.  That called for some more navigation areas to separate “walkable” areas from “flyable”, and of course the “walkable+flyable” which is fine for both humans and drones.  As the drone patrol routes are planned on the fly-based on data points in the level, and the player is able to add, remove and move those around, we needed to add few checks for the AI to figure out which patrol locations it can actually reach, and which ones should be ignored.

A nice extra from all this was, believe or not, it all helped improve our lighting in the levels as well!

We are using an automatic script that places LightProbes around the level to provide lighting for any moving characters etc, and also to provide the light level data around the level for our shadow/light stealth mechanic. And that script uses the navigation mesh as starting point. So now that we had some areas marked as flyable, and thus with more vertical space, we could easily use that information and place secondary set of LightProbes a bit higher in those places.

While doing that, we also managed to optimize the LightProbe placement code a fair bit as well, and that’s a definite bonus since there are quite a few of them in each level.

See all the yellow dots connected by the pink lines?  You don’t want to place them by hand. Any speed up in the placement code is worth it!

Other changes and Bugs Fixed:

• New UI sounds. Loads of them. We got our sound designer to do a pass of new sound events for each specific part of the user interface, and now are no longer recycling the same button click sound for everything.
• Apps with a use cost could not be turned on if the SPECTRUM app was not turned on first. Now we assume that if data view is off, you can certainly afford to use the app. (We might need to revisit this later if we add apps that cost more to use than what you can afford by default.)
• Data meshes of data points placed in levels at design time were offset from the actual data point position.  (We had changed some geometry layers around since the data point prefab was made, and the code that moves overlapping data points away from each other was checking for its own location and not just other points)

Whats ‘Appening

Harry’s first port of call for the Sprint was to update the app system.

• Apps can now have multiple actions and options
• These are presented as two sub menus. We’ll be getting into this in future posts when we show you some new incarnations of the apps you might already be familiar with if you have played the game with us at an expo or a modding workshop.
• Apps can now also react differently depending on what kind of targets are passed into them
•  So apps can display different functionality for devices vs. data, and even different types of data
• Now app are much more flexible and extensible
•  This is a fairly in depth point, but it’s safe to say that this opens up a myriad of things modders can call and do with the rest of the API when modding their own hacking tools.

• New app for interacting with drones called FlySwatter
•  This used all of the above and was put in as a working example of how to use the new systems, a kind of test case. It might not stick around as a final tool in the game or it might evolve and merger with other tools, but that is what is great about the Off Grid modding system there is a lot of space for interesting tools to grow. 
•  Continued work on the save system
• We faced a few last minute headaches, but we have got autosaves and checkpointing working nicely ready for the EGX show floor.

New team member!

Josh has joined us as a design intern - he is testing modding tools, helping with documentation and helping to design hackable objects.  We’re really pleased to have him on board and hope you all join us in welcoming him to the team!

Here’s a little from him about what he’s been up to:

Hi there, my name is Josh and I have been working on the Off Grid mod tools
producing some light-hearted hacks - primarily making Joe his very own
disco room where he can party the night away with disco lights and lots
of balloons!

This involved me taking a look at the pipeline for adding custom 3D assets into the levelkit and getting acquainted with lua, both of which were a very enjoyable experience, and you can see the results for yourself! While fairly new to the modding workflow, I have had a blast with it so far and I am definitely looking forward to making a full story-based level in future.

Speaking of levels, I have also had the pleasure of checking out and testing the demo level of Off Grid!

During testing, my aim was to identify bugs and explain to the team the steps to recreate specific bugs. For example:

• missing text on main menu - this was a tricky one that only appeared at certain resolutions, but was easily fixed by the team once
  identified

• menu navigation with a controller - as most people
  will be playing Off Grid at EGX, I thought it would be important to test
  the controller experience, which lead me to a few navigation issues when
  using UI menus


• missing colliders:  I spent several hours walking around the demo level trying to identify anything that I could walk through

When working my way through the Off Grid mod tools, I was able to give feedback on the wiki and add to a few pages myself. I was responsible for adding the Art Pipeline to the wiki in order to help modders to add their own works of art to Off Grid Levelkit. I am absolutely loving putting some of my skills into practice and helping with the project - for me its a dream come true!

Characters Ahoy!

The team spent a chunk of this sprint getting together new ‘docker’ type NPCs for the harbour level, with a little help from our good friend Silvia Bartoli.  There was some wrangling to do as the NPCs are quite a complex array of components and AI behaviours and actions. They require ‘Ears’, viewcones, personalities, all the AI actions available to them, patrol routes, and related props like flashlights or tazers.

We’ve also got a new character editing ‘tool’ for re-colouring the characters.  This guy above is making the most of the metallic values on the colour lookup tables. :)

We specifically designed the geometry of the characters to make it easy for players to make distinct variations.  Above, you can see the same character with a different colour lookup table applied, giving him a different skin colour, hair-do, and even profession - all done with a couple of switched textures.

We have also added blend shapes to the characters that players and modders in future builds will be able to control via lua - so when they spawn an NPC, they can define the model type, their weight via blend shape and their colour with colour lookup tables and textures.

The Experience

As mentioned, we spent a lot of time on mission scripting and refining player experience ahead of EGX - this meant new mission content for both the new Harbour level and the older Apostle HQ.

You can see the newly re-implemented drone above. These are now spawn-able through level kit as a guard type.  We also put in a bunch of smaller and less noticeable gameplay script fixes to make the conversations read better and player experience smoother, including a conversation introducing the
light meter tool for sneaking through shadows.

PR You Ready?!

Rich has organised the next London Indies meetup on Friday October 6th, featuring Stefano Petrullo from Rennaisance PR.  He’ll be joining us all the the Loading Bar in Dalston to talk about how to market your games, how to engage a PR firm and evaluate whether they can
add value to what you are doing, and how and why, in his view, events
are so important for indies!

It’s a 4pm start on the Friday and a nice way to wind down a work week with your fellow game devs.  Check out all the details and RSVP here - look forward to seeing you!

And speaking of marketing - did you receive the very first Off Grid newsletter this month?!  If not, SIGN UP now!  What are you waiting for?!