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offgridthegame · 6 years

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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 runnning 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

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offgridthegame · 6 years

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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:

Stub-out of all levels

Stubbed out the game's level sequence and the logic that ties it all together then threw in a completion hack to 'play' the game end-to-end

- Made stub grey box rooms for all remaining levels - Created completeable mission scripts for missing levels - Created level.json and preconditions to make all levels tie together and the game "completeable" - Added dev laptop to all levels and added setting in the device so you can ‘hack’ the laptop to complete the mission. - Made a couple fo test builds and made sure the game is fully ‘completeable’ end-to-end.

Save System

- Set up save files to save persistent data (to last throughout a play-through, rather than just during missions)

Devices

- Added functionality to mission and device scripts to enable state to be saved. - Refactored devices to work towards formalising their operations, and allow for more modding potential.

Updating to Unity 2018 (and everything else)

Unity update, and updated just about everything else to latest versions at the same time. - Updated Unity project to run on 2018.1 - Sound engine & Unity integration updated to Wwise 2017.2.4 - Updated ReWired to 1.1.14.4 - Updated PostProcessing stack to v2 - also updated our settings system and postprocessing profiles to work with the new system - Updated Cinemachine - Added ProBuilder and Text Mesh Pro to project (giving nicer tools for modders since you can build things inside Unity instead of being limited to our levelkit pieces or using external 3D software to build things with)

App System

Needed to undergo some refactoring to ensure full functionality, this has meant a bit of digging around

Bug fixing

- Fixed a Mac path problem that was preventing levelkit work being done on Mac - Fixed a shader used in harbour that was using a deprecated function - Added workaround for Unity not handling nested Canvas Groups correctly (to fix issues with invisible selectable buttons in main menu screen) - Fixed level loading from mods (built-in levels and ones added as mods have a different path for level.json which needed to be taken into account when looking for available levels) Sprint complete! Thanks for following along with us. 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!

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offgridthegame · 6 years

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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...

Cracking the passwords

Maybe you’ve read the last two dev blog posts, and remember that we’ve been working on collecting social profiles about in-game characters? Nice way of keeping track of the people you’ve met during the game… though of course it’s a bit more than that. As in real life, such personal information can be used for all kinds of sinister purposes, like social engineering, and identity theft as well. Or, for guessing all kinds of badly chosen passwords and bypassing security questions for different services.

And that’s the last bit of the puzzle for our social profiling, at least for now. We’ve changed our Lua API a bit so now all the network-connected devices in the game can have specific owner, and configured to have passwords that can be guessed if you have collected enough personal information about the owner.

To make things a bit more interesting, if you have almost but not quite enough metadata about the device’s owner, you still have a chance of guessing the password. And to make sure the player never needs to blindly try every device, we made the targeting UI display some helpful information when targeting a device, telling you straight away if it’s worth a try, or if you already know the password. Or have no idea about the owner and you’d better just leave the device alone and look for a some more information.

To make this work, we modified our remote connection app, and also added new UI that lets the different apps display their own window with some custom content (modder-friendly, of course) on the screen. And then we used those to set up a password cracking app that uses the collected social profile data automatically.

(The devices still also have the old fully scriptable access check in place, so it’s also possible to configure them to give access based on any files in your inventory, a specific piece of information about a character, time of the day, or really just about what ever people can create with Lua and our modding API…)

Hunting bugs before GDC & PAX East

The rest of the sprint was filled with solving a long list of bugs and annoyances from the game, all the small things that we’ve noticed during the previous times we’ve had people playing the game. Most of that isn’t too interesting, but there was one worth mentioning:

Early ‘unauthorised’ access

In The Apostle level, we’ve had a laptop with key files to access all the doors in the building hidden in the basement. During EGX 2017, we noticed that one player was actually able to target and hack the laptop through the walls and floors way earlier in the mission than we had planned. The obvious solution would of course have been just blocking it somehow, maybe only connecting the laptop to a network once the player has started the objective for it. But that wouldn’t have been fun, or realistic would it?! We wanted to ensure that players intuitive enough to notice devices that could be hacked early as a shortcut were rewarded...

Instead we decided to just make sure the mission doesn’t break and still makes sense if someone happens to do this. So we added some new conversations that are triggered in this situation to explain what the player would have missed by skipping few objectives, and then we just let the player take it from there naturally. So now there’s a quite a different alternative progression through the level, which most will probably never find, but those who do can be proud :D

To do this, we realised we needed a few more ways for all the different Lua scripts to work together. They are sandboxed each into their own virtual machine, and can’t talk between reach other directly. So we added new features to our Mission API to allow people to store some custom data there, and access it from other scripts as needed. Simple thing, but allows endless amounts of interesting uses when creating missions and devices!

New assets and a makeover for the Apostle level

With some expos and demos coming up, we’ve been working on creating new props to flesh out our levels a little more, some of which have made their way into the latest build. Josh spent some time set dressing and doing some level tweaks, replacing some of the old whitebox geometry with the new assets he has been creating. The main focus was the delivery room at the beginning of the Apostle level, and the basement server room, both of which look much more lived in now. Here are some of the props that have gone in:

Intro-ducing

A major acheivement has been getting the Intro scene into the engine (anyone who has played the demo so far will know that there has been a placeholder animatic made of rendered stills for #QuiteSomeTime).

Rich and Steve worked tirelessley to iron out some fairly fundamental kinks in Unity’s Timeline tool, and with some not insignificant effort, managed to get a combination of mocap, custom events, Wwise audio engine calls combined with Unity audio, a video playing in the middle of it, and the whole thing to work within the frame work of our Lua defined missions. Phew! It’s exhausting just typing it out!

We’ll look forward to you checking this out soon at a show near you!

AI’s need coffee too

We did a good amount of work making the guards react to and use a variety of devices recently, recorded some new mocap and plugged that in, too. Steve worked on the AI and setup some new gestures for guards so that they can use the device as it should be used (dispensing a nice hot cup of coffee), but also so that they can be caught off guard (no pun intended) by a hacked machine that has been setup to spew steam or chuck coke cans at them (or whatever other amok state a device might have).

As with any new feature though, we have managed to create a bug or two... Above you can see a guard that’s more interested in finishing their coffee than chasing the player (which kind of fits the whole premise of the game really!).

BONUS STAGE IS BACK

Remember this? When we won the trophy at Bonus Stage last April? We sure do!

Well... Bonus Stage is back for year two alongside the London Games Fesitval and is now accepting entries! Be sure to enter by 23rd March. Rich was asked to help organise it this year, and of course he agreed - it is a great indie showcase that we’re proud to have been part of, and now support!

That’s a wrap for this sprint - look forward to seeing you at GDC or PAX East!

The Off Grid Team

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offgridthegame · 6 years

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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.

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offgridthegame · 6 years

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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!

#offgridthegame #unity3d #unity #modding #Lua #stealth #semaeopus #gamedev #game design #dataisyourmostpowerfulweapon #madewithunity #steam games #steam workshop #privacy #hacking #hacking games

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offgridthegame · 7 years

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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!

Nuts and Bolts

There are some things that are just expected to be in a game, and one of them is a way to configure the game's settings. For a good reason as well. Not only will you need to be able to adjust the volumes to your liking, but some things like graphics options, control mapping, and save game & mod management are absolute requirements for the game to be usable by different people, and on different hardware.

While we don't really need those options while developing the game, some of them are still handy for testing purposes. But more importantly, we've been working on other related systems like game saves, and building the options menus at the same time just makes sense.

In this sprint it's been just about the background systems: building up the UI hierarchy and navigation, and setting things up so the actual settings system will have a way to create some menus for users and a way of saving and applying those settings. Basically - design work with two very different end users in mind. On one end, the person playing the game, with a mouse or a gamepad in their hand trying to find the relevant settings and understand what each one of them actually does. And on the other end, us as the developers writing our mod loading system, or setting up the sound and graphics systems, and needing a simple and quick way to turn all the relevant values in our code into settings menu items.

Hopefully we've solved both sides of that design question now, and can get some actual settings menus up and working in the game in the next sprint!

(No pretty pictures yet. We'll need to generate some menu content first, and when that's done and we have some menus to test things with, there's likely going to be a second pass on the UI design and a bit of polish on the layout and graphics. So the pics will have to wait until the next blog post...)

Mod Manager 2017

LevelKit has had a little bit of a redesign, here's some of the changes and new features:

Moddable apps can now be created and tested from within LevelKit, apps are created from a simple template and are then immediately accessible for testing when the game is connected via LevelKit Link.

We've refined how we layout levels within LevelKit, it's always been our plan to allow modders to create story lines that span multiple levels and this is now achievable.

When creating a new mission mod, you’ll be asked to fill out information about the first level.

Once you’re loaded into a level of a mission mod, our fancy new user interface will allow you to create more levels.

The same drop down allows the modder to easily switch the current level they’re editing!

Busy in our Workshop

One last surprise :)

We now support the uploading and updating of mods to Steam Workshop from directly within LevelKit! This is achieved with LevelKit link and will require the game to be running via the Steam client. We’re hoping that this pipeline will be easy for modders to use and give them more time in LevelKit!

Here’s a little preview of our Buzzer App being uploaded from LevelKit

Keeping it strictly business

It’s been a while since we have been able to use this line, but once again there have been a few exciting happenings on the Biz Dev side of Off Grid’s development that we won’t be able to go into much detail in yet, but hopefully we’ll be able to let you in on soon!

Gimme a G gimme a D gimme a C, whaddya get?

We’ve also been working on getting some acclaim abroad ;)

We have submitted the game to the IGF for consideration at GDC’s Independent Games Festival summit. We may be a little early in terms of completion for prize winning, but like everything in games, it takes getting your game in front of important people a few times before you start to get recognition (in our experience anyway). So we’ve decided to give it a punt and see what the IGF judges think to the Pre-Alpha version of the game. Rich also submitted a couple of proposals for talks to IGF summits in the Indie and Narrative categories. Rich and Sarah plan to be at (or possibly just around) GDC either way. If you are a dev and are going, or have been before, and fancy offering some tips, then please give us a shout!

UKIE saves the day

We’ve been interviewing to bring on a new team member and the good folks at UKIE allowed us to use their comfy meeting rooms. While we were there, Roll7 were having one of their team meetups, and Pontus and Rich got to test their in-progress game ‘Laser League’ with them. Thanks so much to UKIE for their hospitality and and Roll7 for inviting us to hang out and play :)

PR You Ready?

As always, the Loading Bar played host to all of us indies for not only our usual indie co-working, but also an little seminar of how indies can get help with and should approach PR. We had the eminently expert Stefano Petrullo come in and share his knowledge, and in the future we’ll look forward to hearing more from him!

CryptoParty like it’s December 31st 1983

Rich was asked along by the organisers of Cryproparty London, Silkie Carlo and Fabio Natali, to give a lightening talk about making a game about crypto, surveillance, and hacking your way out of an Orwellian world.

They also set it up so that while people were exchanging PGP keys and fortifying their security posture, Off Grid was available to play and Rich was there to chat about culture and its portrayal of surveillance, crypto and hacker culture. The event was fantastic - lots of good vibes and smart people to learn from, and included Mustafa Al-Bassam giving a talk on the case study of how the Tunisian government exploited social networks’ lack of use of encryption to snoop on its population.

Indies Unplayed

Last but not least, what are you up to this Sunday (the 29th)? If you are in London then head on over to the Stratford Loading Bar ‘Secret Weapon’ from 2-7pm to get your fill of up and coming indie treats at Indies Unplayed. We’ll be there too! You can swing by, play the demo if you missed us at EGX and just generally have a grand ol time. See you there?

That’s it for now, we have a fairly short sprint this time though, so catch you soon!

Rich, Pontus, and the Off Grid team!

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offgridthegame · 7 years

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What do you call one of the top ten best games at EGX?! OFF GRID!

Yes, you read that right! Off Grid snagged a pretty sweet accolade over the four days at EGX: Eurogamer staff rated Off Grid as one of the top ten games on the show floor. Read the article in full here.

Here’s the write up on Off Grid (complete with a pretty accurate description of Rich and his conversational skils!):

While that accolade was certainly the highlight of our EGX experience this year - plenty of other great things happened over the four days:

Off Grid’s Twitch Debut

Thursday kicked off with an interview and live play through of Off Grid on the Twitch Stage. Rich talked to CaffCast and Spamfish in a livestream to over 2000 viewers - a first for both Rich and the game! Watch it here.

We now have our own twitch channel - be sure to subscribe! Rich took the opportunity to do some behind the scenes streaming while at EGX, so go have a gander at those if you’re interested. In the future, we hope to use it to do playthroughs of Off Grid, talk in more depth about our development process, and perhaps about some of the inspiration and influences behind the the game itself.

The Geek Show

Pontus (not often seen on camera!) was interviewed by The Geek Show for their podcast and YouTube channel. Get your glimpse of one of the powerhouses behind Off Grid here:

youtube

Friendly banter with the NCA

The National Crime Agency (NCA) had a stand at EGX and were handing out helpful information to all inquisitive passersby - including literature on the Computer Misuse Act and an NCA challenge.

Here’s a little closeup of their handout:

Big Red Barrel Duet with Yucatan Game

Fellow indie dev and Leftfield Collection exhibitor, Joe Bain, and Rich Metson were interviewed by the kind folks at Big Red Barrel.

They’ve put together a special EGX podcast, jam packed with all their favorite games. Listen in at about 56 minutes for the very best bits! ;)

What else did we love about EGX?

You’re right, we already said the highlight was being picked as ONE OF THE TOP TEN GAMES OF THE SHOW! :D That’s totally true - it is awesome.

Off Grid was also highlighted in OuttaSite’s indie picks at EGX, and the VGChartz write up, Games to Watch Out for from EGX.

But what else did we love about EGX and our participation in Leftfield Collection? Watching YOU play the game!

It’s always a treat to see how players make their way through the latest build - taking note what they find interesting and engaging, and what might be quickly passed over.

This year marked ten years of Leftfield at EGX - that’s ten years of showcasing great indie games alongside all the big hitters - thanks to David Hayward for all the effort supporting indie developers!

#offgridthegame #dataisyourmostpowerfulweapon #leftfieldcollection #EGX 2017 #EGX #eurogamer #indiegame #indiegames #stealthgame #hackinggame #gamedev #indiedev #madewithunity #indiegamedev

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offgridthegame · 6 years

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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!

As you can see above, changing the colour of the character texture swabs is really simple, but highly effective!

Bug Fixes

The nice thing about showing at GDC in a low key way is it made it into a little dry run for PAXEast, where we could discover and fix smaller issues. We worked in and around the fringes most the time - there were a couple fo things to do with level loading, and there were some small tweaks to the lua mission scripts.

Swag Factory

With the help of a family member who makes custom T-shirts, we setup a swag factory for the day. It’s incredible what you can do with a hot plate and some vinyl! We used this to experiment with some designs and do some custom one-off prints.

Here we are with a hoodie being finished on the press.

We also got 100 of our ‘classic’ Off Grid T-shirt design printed by a larger print shop so that we would have plenty on hand at PAX East. Combined with our custom tees and hoodies this is what the final haul looked like (above). The whole lot came to around 70lbs and had to be packed in two seperate bags to get them on the plane and under the weight limit.

New Trailer

It’s been a little while coming so hopefully you good folks have been excited to see the new trailer! (It’s been a relief for us to replace the old footage!) If you pay attention to the blog, then there are lots of features and such that this is your first opportunity to get a glimpse at unless you have been lucky enough to play the demo at a conference recently.

Check the trailer out here and give it a thumbsup on youtube!!!

Launching the Steam ‘Coming Soon’ Page

The other mad rush was to get the game reviewed and approved so we could launch the Steam ‘Coming Soon’ page for PAX. It’s a fairly straight forward process but there’s a lot of little things you have to get right. Luckily we did in the nick of time and with a little help from some friends over at Valve, the Steam Page went live while we were at PAX.

Please do head on over to the Steam page and have a gander, and remember to: Wishlist us on Steam now!!!

Wishlisting is important for getting Steam to feature you, and is an interesting marker for how you can predict the kind of range your sales will be in. Recently Jake Birkett wrote an interesting article on Gamasutra that goes into this.

Bonus Stage Returned

We saw the second inaugural Bonus Stage show return once again as part of the London Games Festival. This time we helped organise the event and we also got to return as the previous year’s winners. There were some great games on show including the very moody ‘Beyond Crimson Stars’ (below) by Ben Lunato.

We had a prize for the audience voted ‘Game of the Show’ again and this time it went to “Black Friday: The Ultimate Shopping Simulator” by Chelsey Webster, congrats Chelsey!

We’re looking forward to the next Bonus Stage - plans are already afoot!

That’s all for now, more news soon!

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offgridthegame · 6 years

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PAXEast 2018!

As part of our month of travels, Pontus, Rich, and Steve all made it out to PAXEast to show off the game. It’s a really friendly and inviting show and we’d definitely recoomend it. We were lucky enough to get to show the game as part of a little collective of friends all put together by Kinifi Games, called Figs & Co, run by husband and wife dev team Hollie and Chris Figueroa, those two are a total powerhouse, and we are so proud to call them friends!!

A nice thing about PAX is the airport is a 10 minute ride from the conference centre and the free airport shuttle drops you pretty much at the doorstep of the Boston Convention and Exhibition Centre (BCEC).

Hello Boston!

^ The setup!

Build up was pretty fun, and Hollie who does all the heavy lifting for organising the stand had done some stellar work to get everything together, not least because UPS lost our shipping pallets with all the banners, computers and gear 24hrs before the show. She is some kind of supernatural force because she managed to source everything we needed in that time and setup went ahead on schedule.

Last minute printing inside the conference centre was a major win. Rich had worked pretty tirelessly in the build up to the show to get a new trailer ready, setup the ‘Coming Soon’ page on steam and create a fancy QR code poster to take you to it, but not had time to print out handouts for wishlisting. It was relief to add this cherry on top with such convenience!

^ The team all land!

Off the plane (and after Rich and Steve made the mistake of trying to use the wheelchair-not-so-accessible subway system), we all settled into a much deserved team dinner.

There were omens that PAXEast was going to be good even before the showfloor opened: our AirBnB had a foam recreation of the Master Sword from Zelda just hanging out in the corner (see above!).

^The team at our stand (Rich, Pontus & Steve), all set up and ready to go!

Demoing the game itself was great as always for meeting players and getting feedback. We had a lot of really enthusiastic visitors to our stand and a couple completed the demo too.

The biggest lesson we learned was that the game really does benefit from the creation of an introspective space, and in our case, a chair to sit at. Our second day dragged and didn’t get as much footfall as our first, but the moment we got a chair in for people to sit and play on, was the moment the quality of the experience for our players visibly increased. Off Grid requires time to understand and enjoy due to its complexity, and something as small as a chair really does help with that.

Lots of friends were there, Ana and her VR retro game ‘Pixel Ripped’ above.

As well as our good friends and fellow London Indies, Mike and Angus, who are making the wonderful Pool Panic with Adult Swim games.

We had some stonking Boston breakfasts and fot a fairly hefty dose of Americana in at the same time. This one was in a tiny old rail carriage.

There was some of the funniest cosplay we’ve ever seen! Not sure if this guy was demoing a game or just making a statement.

We finished up PAX with a celebratory dinner at the Legal Seafood restaurant harbourside (in the Boston Harbour, where the historic Boston Tea Party took place no less).

We also had a day to take in some sights, which basically involved walking the Freedom Trail (yes, inspired by Steve and Pontus having played Fallout 4 rather than a keen interest U.S. Revolutionary War historical sites). This is not least given away by the fact that we ended our historic tour with the two most important sites to us:

The bar from the hit TV sitcom ‘Cheers.’

And the bench from Good Will Hunting where Robin Williams’ psychologist character finally makes some progress with Matt Damon’s troubled mathmatical genius.

PAXEast, thank you so much, you were fun! 10/10, we would def come back! :) p.s. If you read our previous post about GDC and no kids allowed - no worries here cause PAX East is totally kid friendly! Hollie and Chris even had their little one, Sofia, working the booth with them over the two days! ;P

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offgridthegame · 6 years

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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:

Drone Patrol

This month, Steve’s spent a lot of time trying to wrap his head around the AI in Off Grid, with some success! After a significant battle with drones, we coerced them into patroling, alerting the guards to Joe's presence, and then a bit more patroling. Implementing these behaviours helped lead to fixing missed issues with last month's 'NavCloud' work, which was largely theoretical - so it was good to see it working (eventually)! This was a bigger win than it may sound and lays a good foundation for future AI work, which we’re hoping to build on next month.

Machine of Cinema

We've also incorporated Unity's Cinemachine module into Off Grid. This caters for both cinematic/cut-scene cameras and gameplay cameras. Our existing cameras have been rebuilt using it, and adding new ones is now trivial. Worth looking at if you're a Unity developer!

MoCap + Unity Timeline + Cinemachine = <3

There’s been big ol’ heart eyes going on as we’ve been using Unity Timeline to integrate motion capture into an interactive cutscene and recreate our game intro in the engine.

Timeline is a fairly big feature and is impressive in how it is extendable. There have been a few frustrations as we went, though, as there are few key features missing, that seem like they ought to follow on from other elements of the engine - such us the Event triggers in rest of the animation tool set. Not to fear though, nothing we haven’t been able to find a good workaround for!

We are expecting the intro will be in a good enough state to put in the next build of the game in a few weeks time. It has been great to see the characters coming to life when their animations have been sat in a backup folder for well over 18 months! Now we can see breakfast being cooked, doors being kicked down and hacktivists being kidnapped in all their lowpoly glory.

Personal Data Records

In the last sprint we did some design work for social engineering, and modifications to our character profiles to make sure we had the data needed in place, so now it was time to actually start building things.

We've now added a "People" page to our pause menu, displaying all the characters you have found, and all of their background profile information you've learned about them. As you grab files that contain any metadata about people, the metadata is automatically added to the profiles. We also converted the character targeting app we did last sprint as a testing tool to display the collected information rather than everything, so you can easily just target any character you see to check what you know about them. Depending on how big our profiles grow through the game, we might end up limiting that a bit and instead just take you to the pause menu's People-page instead.

And talking about character changes, we've expanded a bit on our character customization options for level creation purposes (and the profiles at the same time). We've added some blend shapes to character models, ranging from thin to fat, and a "Gluttony" value in character profile files that will change the character model, but can also be used in mission scripting to change how the characters behave. Combined with the colour look-up textures we've added previously, and some clever design choices when building the models, it's possible to get quite a selection of different looking characters from the same base models!

Supporting the cause

As you well know by now, we aren’t just making a game about hacking and data privacy - we want to accurately portray hackers and hacker culture in a way that is too often overlooked in popular media.

Rich talked about this the end of last month when he demoed Off Grid at the CyberSalon Meetup: What is to be done? Games for Social Impact. Joined by Ben Greenaway, Simon Sarginson, and chaired by Rosa Carbo-Mascarell, it was a really in-depth event to get your teeth sunk into. The discussions and presentations roamed from how games address the emotions of surveillance to why simulating a riot in Riot:Civil Unrest can be seen and explored as a simulation and modelling tool in its own right - and how that uniquely quantifies the dynamics and strategies of something so intangible.

With all that said, Monday the 5th of February was a huge victory for justice and an opprtunity for one of the UK’s most eloquent hackers to stand up and cheer! We were incredibly pleased to watch Lauri Love’s extradition case finally be wrapped up this month. He’s been through a heck of a lot and withstood it with remarkable composure.

BIG NEWS

^^^ Is on the way! It is way too hard to keep secrets for so long, but sometimes in life you’ve just got to sit still and keep your lips sealed. What to say?! Just keep your eyes peeled - we should have soem big announcements very soon!

Next Month: See you in San Francisco!

It’s GDC time... and if you’re headed to San Francisco, you will be able to get your hands on our latest demo!! We’ll let you know when and where - just keep an eye on our social media!

Catch you soon! Rich, Pontus, Steve, Sarah & Josh

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