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!
He’s out there as he’s a speaker at IndieCade today!
He’s talking about modding, digital activism, and why as a game
developer, you probably have less to say about a subject than your
audience does.
So without further ado: let’s talk about what makes Off Grid so unique!
Off Grid is first and foremost a fun yet challenging hacking game that opens a dialogue about the real world issues of data privacy, information security, and the mass surveillance state that surrounds us all. It has a compelling narrative and a sweet father-daughter relationship at its core.
It’s played with a controller, and we promise, no previous hacking knowledge is required. ;)
But if you wish to take it further, there’s so much more to it!
Replay & Community Input
We want Off Grid to continue on as a piece of
work that the community can shape along with us in order to make it
everything it can be.
It is an open stealth game with multiple solutions to levels and a
complex AI, creating missions that are fun to play through many times
over.
PLUS, the game is extensively moddable and the speed and ease
with which players and modders can turn around a level means that
interesting content and stories should be produced at a speed and scale
that will outstrip anything we could dream of as an indie development
team!
This is something we want to expand on here...
The 'South Park' of Hacking Games
Off Grid has dark humour at its centre, and the
state of this crazy googling, Orwellian hot mess of a world we live in
is ripe for modders to exploit humorous interpretations.
Off Grid is much like South Park in that important themes are wrapped up in tongue-in-cheek humour. Like South Park’s speedy turnaround of episodes to approach topical issues, Off Grid’s modding tools make it possible to produce a new level in a matter of days in order to ape news and current events.
The incredible importance and relevance of the issues around
hacking and data privacy in everyday life mean that there is a mine of
inspiration available for topical mods to be created and for streamers
to play and comment on.
In the video above, we took a real life
vulnerability and made it as a mod in the game to prove the tools could
used to tell stories of real life hacks. In this instance, we took Scott Helme's talk from Steelcon16 about the vulnerabilities of the Nissan Leaf,
and made a hackable car that carried the same weakness: a publicly
displayed VIN was used to access the app that controls the car's aircon,
battery, locks, and could get the car's location data.
The possibilities are endless! We look forward to the game being released and seeing the first official mods come back.
If
this sounds up your street and you have yet you back Off Grid, please
consider doing so now! We’d love to have you as a backer.
To all
of you that have backed and/or shared this campaign so far: we can’t
say thank you enough - it’s been an absolutely incredible few days!
THANK YOU!
The Off Grid Team
P.S. Don’t forget: please share this, retweet us, post the
link wherever you hang out online, and tell your friends! THANK YOU! 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!
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!
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!
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!
Launching on Tuesday, October 9th, you will have the opportunity to:
-PLAY A FREE DEMO of Off Grid
-Secure your copy from as little as £8 (SUPER EARLY BIRD!)
-Get your name or handle in the game
-Help shape the game via our FIRST ACCESS program!
...and much more!
The campaign goes live at 4pm BST. 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!
THANK YOU 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!
BIG NEWS! We'll be running a Kickstarter campaign in October!
Get ready for:
a playable demo
the first ever opportunity to secure a copy of Off Grid
a chance to get behind the scenes and help shape the game
The Kickstarter will go live:
Tuesday, October 9th
Please
consider backing us if you are able! If you're not able to, please
share, share, share. Every pledge, like, wishlist and follow means a
lot!
We'll be asking for feedback on our campaign via Discord
this week - hop on in there to get a preview of the campaign & tell
us what you think: https://discordapp.com/invite/NDEVwBJ
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.
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!
We weren’t only dealing with software bugs, we were dealing with ones that cause runtime errors in the human body. Rich got a fever that put him down for a large part of this Sprint and so most of what we got completed was down to Pontus’ herculean efforts.
Here’s a little trick for those Autodesk Maya users of you who aren’t in the know!
I’m often surprised by how many colleagues I’ve worked with in the past who are unaware of the flexibility of using Maya ascii files. Recently I had a friend working in a different version of Maya ask me to re-export some work for them…
You can always re-export, but a quicker fix that might be useful to know for future reference is that these are .ma Maya Ascii files which means they are human readable code.
You can open up the file in notepad or some other text editor and the file is fully editable in text form. Some more advanced users are able to use this to fix corrupted files, and it’s often used in automated pipelines to strip out non-essentials from large projects, or create generic lighting setups over multiple files.
For us this provides a win as if you scroll along it has the Maya version requirement on the first line. From here you can either rewrite it to match the version of Maya you are using or delete the entire line. (see photo attached for reference) Hope this helps!
