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!
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!
Friday, 26 October 2018
OFF GRID is 76% funded and officially loved by Kickstarter! <3
The campaign was given a 'PROJECT WE LOVE' badge earlier in the week! We had hopes and dreams
of getting that nice little bit of extra love from Kickstarter before
we started, and now we’ve got it. It feels good. Thanks Kickstarter!
BIG NEWS IS COMING
We have some tremendously fun news coming next week! Stay tuned - the news is going to break on Tuesday, October 30th. You don’t want to miss it!
Once the news is LIVE - please do us the favor of sharing it to
the masses. Tweet, blog, write an article, do a little video, share,
retweet, or write us a poem.
Would you like a clue? OF COURSE you'd like a clue! Here you are:
To celebrate the release of the aforementioned news, Rich will be doing a dev stream on Tuesday to chat about it all with you! Tune in via twitch.tv/semaeopus at 5pm UK time.
Now,
let's get to smashing the 80% milestone as soon as possible, folks!
Share and chat about it as much as you can! Perfect conversation for
all those Halloween parties this weekend... the mass surveillance state
that surrounds us all is downright frightening, after all.
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!
Halfway through the Kickstarter campaign and 73% funded is a great place to be - thank you!
You backers have given us a seriously wild ride: OFF GRID was 35% funded in 5 hours, 40% funded in 7 hours, AND THEN we hit the 50% mark within 21 hours!
It has been super exciting to have the support of all of you behind us. To be 50% funded within 24 hours? Astounding!
We still need £5,330 to meet our goal - and WE NEED YOUR HELP!
If you have yet to back OFF GRID
on Kickstarter - now would be the *perfect* time. Help us reach 100%
funded! Every single £, every single $, is hugely appreciated - please,
please, please share far and wide throughout your own networks.
We’d also like to hear from you: what would you like to hear
more about in these updates? Character backgrounds? More on hacking
gameplay? You tell us! Let us know in the comments below or in the
discord - join it here, if you haven't already.
There are 15 days left in the campaign, and a lot can happen in 15 days. We are excited!
