Get involved in playtesting OGRT!

As we announced in our last update back in October, we are developing an experimental subgame, Off Grid: Red Team (OGRT), and playtesting is now currently in progress.  Do you want to join in?

Here's some feedback from some of our early playtesters:

“Just finished the game, and it really is amazing, as I said before the interactions with the browser were amazing, the only thing I have to note about the interactions aside from some specific issues that i will report in the forum channel was the lack of forum posts, and i hope that changes“

“The gameplay is pretty good, I enjoyed it. I also like the element with real websites—I got tripped up a few times, but that was down to my lack of attention to detail. I was a bit gutted when it came to an end.”

"OGRT isn’t just engaging—it’s successfully challenging players to think like an attacker!"

Why We’re Building This  

OGRT is more than just a game—it’s a new approach to cybersecurity education. Our goal is to demonstrate how immersive gameplay can teach real-world security skills and help players develop an attacker mindset.  

Through interactive challenges and real-world-inspired mechanics, players are introduced to core cybersecurity principles in a hands-on way. Looking ahead, we see OGRT as a stepping stone into vocational training, mentorship programs, and even career pathways for those who develop problem-solving skills in this space, but also first an foremost, a fun and engaging experience. Games are systems we enjoy learning, we think we cna do something interesting here by layering in some real learnings that you take away as you enjoy exploring the OFF GRID world.  

Playtest OffGrid Red Team, sign up here!

We’ll be sharing more updates as we continue developing OGRT, and we appreciate your ongoing support—your backing has made this possible.  

Who’s Supporting Us  

This work wouldn’t be possible without the support of Ufi VocTech Trust a leading organization committed to transforming vocational learning through technology.  

Ufi’s mission is to improve access to lifelong learning, particularly in digital and technical skills. Their backing has helped us take OGRT from an experimental concept to a fully functional prototype, allowing us to explore how games can act as a bridge to practical cybersecurity education.  

To learn more about Ufi’s work, visit https://www.ufi.co.uk  

Off Grid Ongoing Development

Since October, significant progress has been made in refining the OffGrid world. One of the biggest milestones is the complete overhaul of the intro level, setting the stage for a more immersive experience.

The exterior environments of the first two levels have undergone a full rework, bringing them closer to the final vision.

The LevelKit has also been expanded with more modular assets, making it easier for both developers and modders to craft new environments.

Additionally, new environments—such as underground parking, maintenance hallways, laboratories, and garages—have been created using fresh assets.

The first iterations of improved lighting in the workplace level are underway, enhancing the game’s atmosphere. On the next update those of you who are part of our "Pentesters First Access" program can **expect a major upgrade** on that front, we are looking forward to seeing what you think!

Before we go we also want to let you know that we deepened the environmental storytelling you’ll experience in OffGrid, increasing the connection between players and narrative through the world itself. Overall, these updates mark a huge step forward in shaping a richer, more immersive game.

We'll keep cracking on, content is coming along, and we'll have a game for you as soon as we can. As always thanks for your persisting patience and support folks, it means a lot to us.

Best,

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 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:

Discord = OPEN! Dev chat TODAY 9pm BST / 4pm EDT

Good news!

We've been having fun today with a little soft launch of the Semaeopus discord server!

We invited our newsletter subscribers in for a little *exclusive* dev AMA session earlier - and now we're ready to welcome the rest of you out there in the big, wide world.

Join us in Discord!

https://discord.gg/NDEVwBJ

Get your questions ready...

The devs will be online again at 9pm BST / 4pm EDT / 1pm PDT today to welcome you and answer any qestions you have!

Look forward to chatting with you soon!


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!

Saving (and Loading!)

Hi all - Steve here.  I’m a programmer working on Off Grid - and I’ve had the pleasure of working on save systems recently.  :)

Ha!  This is really one of the short straws of game development.  When I was at Sony, it was almost a rite of passage; these were the days that not only did you have to save and load, but you were responsible for ensuring things didn’t die when the memory card (remember those?) was pulled out mid-operation.

Prior to this month, we had the beginnings of a save system in place, but were aware that certain things didn’t seem to be working quite as they should - so I took a look.

What I discovered was that we kept a save in memory as well as writing it to disk.  This is a good thing - loading a checkpoint is faster.  But a side effect was that there were two code paths to reinstating a save - to load it from disk, or to just reference the save data as game data.  The danger with this is that the in-memory data can reference ‘live’ game data, which means the save on disk diverges with this during gameplay.  Lots of copying data later, the bits that weren’t working quite correctly now seem much happier.

The other work I’ve done was on a system level.  Saving and loading requires making a list of all the files available. Previously, we loaded all of these into memory - but as we cannot know how big they’re going to be, this will eventually cause us all sorts of problems. I’ve instead created a header at the top of each save file, containing the information we need to present to the player. Load the first 1000 bytes or so of each file, grab the header, close the file.

Saving and loading done then? Certainly not!  We will still have new data that needs to be added to our save structure, and I bet there are still some bugs in there.  But I’m confident that we are on firmer ground than we were a month ago.

Til next time!

Steve

Dev Blog Post 5.12.2017 - Social Engineering and Distracting Noises

We’ve been working with a bit smaller team for this sprint, so this is going to be slightly shorter blog post than usually. And we’ll switch the format slightly as well, so you’ll get a section from both of us telling about what we’ve been up to…

Steve:

My first month has flown by! It’s been great to get started and become acquainted with Unity, which has impressed me. I started off on Off Grid by poking around the existing code, and playing the demo level, which gives an good overview of where the project is. After that I was forced to do some real work; first of all, I exposed the ‘Noise’ system to Lua, meaning modders will be able to play sounds that the AI will investigate. I’ve also fiddled with the camera, with the Lua setup, the wiki, and a fair few under the hood changes that hopefully will help us create new content more quickly. Exciting times ahead!

Pontus:

Character profiling

We had already previously converted the text files we use to describe each character’s personalities and background information from old XML files into Lua. But as we'de designed some of our data mechanics, and especially the social engineering aspect of hacking and privacy bit further, we realised the profile format we had would not do the job.

So, in this sprint I’ve worked on re-designing the character profiles to use a tag-based system that allows us, and the modders, to easily add pretty much any amount of background information about the characters, and tag that data in a way that lets us then attach those tags to different data points, files and whatever inside the game, and hook it into the AI’s behaviours easily.

(and same as with our mission progression system and many other things, the design goals and explanation how it works ended being much more complicated than the actual implementation, so no need to worry, this is really simple system for modders to use and should be very extensible and flexible for all the crazy weird hacking stories and tools modders might come up with which we never even thought about…)

While doing the required changes for this, I also added few quality-of-life improvements, so the levels can now automatically load character profile files, and the image files used for character colour customization, both from the level’s own folders and from the Common folder used for sharing things that might be used in multiple levels. This means that we don’t need to duplicate character files to each separate level where the same character might appear, and also modders will have easy access to some pre-made characters they can use in their own levels without having to even bother with the actual character profile files until they want to create some new characters of their own.

Sending SMS, with Lua

We are then using those character profiles to generate text messages (and eventually e-mails, and other files as well) that get sent to all the characters, and that the player than intercept, read though, and use to learn about the characters (maybe to figure out how to distract a specific guard, or to help guessing someone’s password, and so on).

This is nothing new, the SMS system has been in place for long time already. But the source file we used for the SMS templates was the last remaining XML file in the game, so of course that had to be converted to Lua as well… If nothing else, it’s more consistent and easier for everyone to deal with the same language throughout the project, but it’s much more human-readable syntax as well.

To take things a bit further than that, we thought that maybe the actual code used to generate the messages could also be moved into Lua. This certainly isn’t something you’d want to mess around for every mod you make, as it’s a bit more complicated than the rest of our mission and character files, and the actual content you see in-game can be changed easily by just creating different character profiles anyway. But exposing that code to the modders might open some interesting opportunities, maybe for localizing the message generation to some language with different grammar than what English has, or to build something more complicated than what the base game needs to go with some awesome mod you are making. We’ll see what happens!

Oh, and of course I made sure both the template file and the actual message generator code can be loaded from both the Common folders as well as from the level-specific folders, just like with the character profiles.

Outro

That’s everything for now! We’re not quite sure yet if we’ll have a short sprint (and one more blog post this year) or if we should just make it a long one and return back to you in 2018! Either way, we’ll make sure to let you now when the next blog post is out!