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!
We've
got an update directly from Sophie, who works as an artist on OFF
GRID. She is fairly new to the team, but she's been doing a stellar
job! We hope you enjoy:
- -
Hi! Soph here!
I’m
here to keep the art side of things rolling on smoothly. Which mostly
means asset creation, like props, but also set dressing.
Modular Props
Let's
talk modular: doing things this way allows you to have just a few
meshes that you can make a lot of things out of. For the Apostle level,
I made a couple pieces of modular furniture to speed up asset creation.
Think
of it like an Ikea range where you could buy a desk, drawers,
cupboards, etc. that all fit together physically and look like part of a
family. Some of the pieces in that range will share exact parts, and
some will have unique ones. This is the basics of modular building.
Modular desk components.
With these six pieces I can make six variations of desks. Going
beyond these, you could make a broken desk with only three legs that is
being propped up with other assets, or you could scale the length of the
straight desk-top as much as fits the space you want (since the
textures are vertex-painted faces there’s no distortion).
Modular sofa components that can be put together in endless ways
Different from these desks, this four-piece sofa set is mostly
one-off models (they all share the same feet). Yet when placed in the
scene, there is no real end to the possibilities you can make with it.
Make a snaking three mile long sofa if you so wish!
The modular sofas creating a comfy space in the Apostle level
Set Dressing
Set dressing is pretty straight forward as a
concept. You’re placing things around the world to make it feel like a
more real lived-in environment. It’s a little more than just throwing
assets around the place (although that’s a lot of it), you need to think
about each environment differently.
In the run up to the
Kickstarter, I spent a lot of time in the Apostle offices discussing
with the team what the general feel of the place is, and then looking
room to room talking about what happens in these rooms in a gameplay
sense.
The Apostle is being closed. There are boxes everywhere as
stuff is being packed away to go elsewhere. These boxes are great for
the stealth aspect of the game, but also tell the story of what is
actually going on. Most of the larger offices are quite sparse, having
already been packed up, but a few offices are still very much in use.
Set
dressing has to work alongside the game in making the environments look
more interesting but not distract from what the player needs to do.
This means I can’t place new hackable devices around the place and not
block the player’s path. But what I can do is direct the player to
places of interest.
Set dressing is cleverly used to direct attention to this office in the Apostle level.
For instance, most of the offices don’t have much in them that the
player needs to notice, these are kept very sparse and all packed up.
But there is a particular journalist's office that is a key place in the
Apostle level, and it’s one of the few offices that’s still in use.
There’s things scattered around the desk, a coat that’s been left on a
hanger, a board with all the bits of information that the journalist has
been working with.
Fun with set dressing - a DIY standing desk.
There were a few other places less important to the player that I was
able to just have fun with. Such as this office where it’s being packed
away. A friend of mine wanted a standing desk but her work wouldn’t
give her one so she stacked things up to make her own one. I made a
little desk in honour of her here. I bet it really annoys the person on
the opposite desk!
A secret corner for slacking off!
Here the occupants of this office have used the fact the office is
moving as an excuse to move furniture around and create them a secret
coffee corner for slacking off.
Hope you've enjoyed!
Help OFF GRID succeed!
We have just 10 days to go with the campaign and need to raise another £4,318 in order to meet our goal. Please help us!
Share the campaign with others: if each of you shared just once, the
campaign would be shared to thousands of others. We need this exposure!
THANK YOU!
The Off Grid Team
p.s. Did you read the last update?! BIG NEWS coming Tuesday!
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!
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!
