#semaeopus

[linuxgamenews]

OFF GRID: Stealth Hacking game that is totally moddable

OFF GRID: Stealth Hacking game is available to Wishlist on Linux, Mac, and Windows PC. Which is the result of the work and dedication of developer Semaeopus. Working to make its way onto Steam. OFF GRID: Stealth Hacking is a 3rd person stealth hacking game where data is your most powerful weapon. While gameplay forgoes combat for hacking tools and ingenuity. Plus it is also totally moddable on Linux. Gameplay utilizes unique mechanics that allow you to shape the world. Which also includes the people around you using the data they unwittingly leave behind. It’s a stealth game where the player can truly hack. As well as shape objects in the setting. Which we introduced with an article back in 2014.

We don't have a firm release date yet.

Reaching out to Semaeopus via email, this is their reply. So far, we have a Steam page, but no release date for the Unity 3D game. Still, the gameplay has my attention with the familiar in-game terminal windows.

OFF GRID: Stealth Hacking Preview Trailer

The normal looking OFF GRID world is a dystopia. One that is also governed by an overreaching state. One that is always seeking to know more about the daily movements. Including the thoughts and search history of the general public. You play a non-tech savvy single dad, Joe, with no clue about the prying and spying. All due to the corporate sponsored government. But in this surveying state, you must figure out how to game the system in stealth. OFF GRID also supports Steam workshop. So players, modders, and hackers will be able to use the game to create. Coming up with new and unique levels with stories. So you search and hacking the Internet of things. Mod the game with full Steam Workshop support and a customized Unity editor. See how the dev's built OFF GRID using our maps, assets, and code.

Features:

Stealth and hacking gameplay based on the use of data and settings. Rather than weapons and combat

Hack into lifelike simulated networks and data in OFF GRID. Along with realistic hacking methods and tools. Including SSH, side jacking, and social handling of the AI

Modern storyline and missions related to real world events. All following data privacy and mass scrutiny

Fully moddable content letting players create new and unique levels. Whether complete fantasy or mimicking hacking in the real world

Amazing audio and original soundtrack from Jonas Jensen and Lyndon Holland. The BAFTA winning composer from the game Virginia

OFF GRID: Stealth Hacking game is available to Wishlist on Steam. Due to offers support for Linux, Mac, and Windows PC.

#off grid #stealth hacking #linux #gaming news #semaeopus #ubuntu #mac #windows #pc #unity

[offgridthegame]

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

[tqvcancun]

Los videojuegos para Linux más interesantes que vendrán en 2019

Año nuevo, nuevos proyectos que vendrán y esperemos que sea un año con muchas buenas noticias para Linux y el software libre en general. Ahora vamos a empezar con una lista de los videojuegos más famosos que prometen mucho y que aparecerán en este 2019 para nuestras distribuciones GNU/Linux. Como digo, no son cualquier título, son videojuegos muy interesantes que vamos a ir viendo como aparecen a lo largo del año…

La lista es bastante amplia, y como pudes comprobar, no se trata de títulos poco conocidos o de poca calidad, sino que Linux cada vez pisa más fuerte en el mundo de los videojuegos. Ya comentamos que terminó 2018 con más de 5000 títulos con soporte para nuestro sistema favorito, y seguirán en aumento… Pues aquí va la lista con el desarrollador y el género:

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});

Xenosis: Alien Infection – NerdRage Studios (aventura/supervivencia de ciencia ficción con inspiración retro)

Jon Shafer’s At the Gates – Conifer Games (juego de estrategia indie de la mano del diseñador de Civilization 5)

Tropico 6 – Limbic Entertainment (gestión de tu propia isla)

Stoneshard – Ink Stains Games (es un RPG basado en turnos ambientado en un mundo medieval)

Beyond Blue – E-Line Media (basado en futuro, es un juego de misterios y exploración en primera persona)

Voxel Tycoon – Voxel Tycoon (otro videojuego de estrategia pero orientado al transporte)

Eastshade – Eastshade Studios (ya hablamos de él, con un diseño excelente y unos gráficos grandiosos que puedes explorar)

The First Men – Pera Games (otro videojuego de estrategia en tiempo real basado en un mundo de fantasía)

Godhood – Abbey Games (videojuego de gestión la vieja escuela con tintes religiosos…)

Imperator: Rome – Paradox Development Studio (estrategica en tiempo real clásico sobre la Roma imperial)

Starmancer – Ominux Games (videojuego donde construir una estación espacial tras una catástrofe de la humanidad)

Monster Crown – Studio Aurum (juego retro donde tener tus monstruos…)

Jupiter Hell – ChaosForge (es un videojuego basado en turnos roguelike con una historia de sci-fi)

We Happy Few – Compulsion Games (un videojuego con un diseño cuidado en el que vivirás una intrigante historia en la Inglraterra de los años 60s del que también hemos hablado en LxA).

Life is Strange 2 – Feral Interactive Linux port (nueva versión de este videojuego del que también hemos hablado)

Serious Sam 4: Planet Badass – Croteam (un fantástico shooter que te va a encantar)

Mosaic – Krillbite Studio (aventura 3D con puzzles 2D)

DiRT 4 – Feral Interactive Linux port (ya hemos hablado, así que poco que decir de este simulador de carreras)

Pathway – Robotality (aventura de estrategia basada en turnos para los amantes de este tipo de género)

Shadow of the Tomb Raider – Feral Interactive Linux port (ya sabes, Lara Croft continuará sus aventuras en Linux…)

KURSK – Jujubee S.A. (aventura y video-documental inspirado en el mundo real de la tragedia del submarino ruso KURSK)

Off Grid – Semaeopus (videojuego en 3º persona donde podrás combatir con armas hackeables)

Total War: THREE KINGDOMS – Feral Interactive Linux port (basado en turnos, es un juego de estrategia ambientado en eras pasadas, con heroes legendarios y reinos perdidos)

Overland – Finji (es un videojuego de supervivencia y estrategia post-apocaliptico)

Hellpoint – Cradle Games (otro RPG de sci-fi muy interesante)

Barotrauma – Undertow Games, FakeFish (exploración en 2D)

Psychonauts 2 – Double Fine Productions (otro título sobre una maravillosa aventura en 3D con personas increíbles)

Insurgency: Sandstorm – New World Interactive (FPS basado en tiempo por equipos para divertirte combatiendo)

Indivisible – Lab Zero Games (RPG con mucha acción en un mundo fantástico que te cautivará)

System Shock – Nightdive Studios (relanzamiento de este título de shooter en primera persona)

In The Valley of Gods – Valve (puede que no venga en 2019 si se retrasa, pero es una fantástica aventura 3D para explorar ruinas antiguas, tesoros, etc., como un auténtico arqueólogo)

Y estos solo son algunos de los que vendrán, habrá más… ¿Con cuántos títulos acabaremos 2019? Espero que sigan creciendo al ritmo que lo hacen actualmente.

El artículo Los videojuegos para Linux más interesantes que vendrán en 2019 ha sido originalmente publicado en Linux Adictos.

Fuente: Linux Adictos https://www.linuxadictos.com/los-videojuegos-para-linux-mas-interesantes-que-vendran-en-2019.html

#IFTTT #Linux Adictos

[bestgamesintheplanet]

OFF GRID (Semaeopus)

Data is your most powerful weapon.

Free to play (Windows, Mac, Linux)

#videogame #indiegame #gaming #itchio #semaeopus #off #grid #windows #mac #linux

[offgridthegame]

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

#offgridthegame #stealthgame #hackinggame #moddablegame #modding #moddable #modded games #dataisyourmostpowerfulweapon #data privacy #infosec #github #unity #madewithunity #Unity3D #steamworkshop #steam games #Lua #videogame #video games #gamedev #indiegames #indiedev #indiegamedev #Indiegame #indiesunplayed #loadingbar #semaeopus #game design #game settings #blocktober

[offgridthegame]

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

#offgridthegame #gdc #gdc 2018 #pax #pax east #pax east 2018 #London Games Festival #london games fesitval fringe #Bonus Stage #indiegames #Indiegame #indiegamedev #indiegameawards #indiedev #gamedev #game design #videogame #videogames #data privacy #dataisyourmostpowerfulweapon #stealthgame #hacking game #hacking games #hacking #hackinggame #moddablegame #modding #modded games #moddable #modders

[offgridthegame]

Sprint Update - 20.09.17 - Straight Outta Leftfield!

Phew!  We’re just about to pack up and head for Birmingham, as Off Grid has been selected as part of the Leftfield Collection at EGX!  We’re SO excited to be showing Off Grid at EGX and are looking forward to players responses to the game so far.  If you’re at the show, please come along and say hi! Also at EGX, we will be livestreaming a playthrough of Off Grid from the Twitch Stage on Thursday at 11:30am (BST).  Follow along online at:  twitch.tv/twitch. We’ve been toying with the idea of starting a twitch account for some time - and with the invitation to livestream from EGX, we finally have.  Very soon, we’ll be streaming live from twitch.tv/semaeopus!  Follow us as we chat through our monthly sprint updates, play through some of the games that inspire us, and bring in other indie devs to talk about game dev life. 

In case you haven’t heard (we hope you have!) we are still looking for a C# Unity Programmer to join the team.  We’ve extended the application deadline to Monday 25th September, so if you’re a UK-based games programmer looking for a change, we want to hear from you.  If you’re at EGX, stop by our stand in Leftfield to say hi, talk to us about the position, and play Off Grid for yourself before you get that application in! 

Now onto the sprint!

Rebuilding the harbour

Just a day after we began this sprint, we heard that we'd have a place at the Leftfield Collection at EGX.  So we sat down to re-plan our work for the sprint with that in mind.  One of the things we wanted to get working for EGX was the harbour level.

We've had some bare bones prototypes of what the harbour would be for a long time now, and a more complete, but still mostly unplayable whiteboxed version of the level for a while.  So it was time to start cleaning and refining that version into something with a bit more gameplay.

First task was to deal with the player path though the level, so we could guide the player from one objective to the next and make sure we can also place a few obstacles on the way.  The draft level was pretty much just open space, with some late-level locations close to the start, and very little for the player to do around the rest of the level.  Cue moving a few buildings around and erecting more fences to gate the player's path to different locations!

Add a couple of passes of lighting (with a few issues of lightmaps not loading correctly from AssetBundles sorted out); a few hours of placing colliders on objects to block the player from falling off the map; and a few days of writing mission objectives, devices, setting up triggers and so on, it's starting to resemble an actual mission!

There were a few additional problems we needed to sort out for this level as well.  Nothing too complicated, we just needed to create an ocean, and the sky...

It's a harbour, so we expect to see some water.  Which means we had to create some low-polygon style animated water in the level.  With a bit of modelling, a bit of C# and a custom shader to go with it, it's now working reasonably well.  We'll likely want to refine things later, especially if there's ever going to be a daytime level, and just to move more of the water animation to shader code.

When it comes to sky, we obviously couldn't use the same city skyline skybox we use for the newspaper office level, as half of the sky is supposed to be over ocean.  This was a fairly quick fix - we have a Blender project for rendering HDR panoramic skyboxes quickly - we just had to remove some buildings and add a lighthouse.  Lastly, we needed to change our fog setup a bit to fade out the ocean at the skyline nicely without making any far-away geometry stand out from the background too much.  That pretty much just meant having to use a black fog at far distance.  This works great for the city sky with black ground and buildings around, and looks still reasonable over the ocean as well (even if not completely realistic).

Drones and navigation

A big part of our plans for the harbour level is using drones to patrol around the area.  The plan was to get our old drone prefabs, make sure everything is up-to-date and works with everything that has changed in the game since the last time we've used them, and drop a few in the harbour.  Well, of course things don't always go as planned!  The drone AI's patrol behaviour is still a bit unreliable, but we still got something out of it in the end.  The patrol issue doesn't seem too complicated either, so we'll surely figure the problem out after EGX.

Apart from the drone itself and the AI, we needed to set things up so the drones could be restricted to certain parts of the level.  Basically, only in places where there's enough room for them to fly.  That called for some more navigation areas to separate "walkable" areas from "flyable", and of course the "walkable+flyable" which is fine for both humans and drones.  As the drone patrol routes are planned on the fly-based on data points in the level, and the player is able to add, remove and move those around, we needed to add few checks for the AI to figure out which patrol locations it can actually reach, and which ones should be ignored.

A nice extra from all this was, believe or not, it all helped improve our lighting in the levels as well!

We are using an automatic script that places LightProbes around the level to provide lighting for any moving characters etc, and also to provide the light level data around the level for our shadow/light stealth mechanic. And that script uses the navigation mesh as starting point. So now that we had some areas marked as flyable, and thus with more vertical space, we could easily use that information and place secondary set of LightProbes a bit higher in those places.

While doing that, we also managed to optimize the LightProbe placement code a fair bit as well, and that's a definite bonus since there are quite a few of them in each level.

See all the yellow dots connected by the pink lines?  You don't want to place them by hand. Any speed up in the placement code is worth it!

Other changes and Bugs Fixed:

New UI sounds. Loads of them. We got our sound designer to do a pass of new sound events for each specific part of the user interface, and now are no longer recycling the same button click sound for everything.

Apps with a use cost could not be turned on if the SPECTRUM app was not turned on first. Now we assume that if data view is off, you can certainly afford to use the app. (We might need to revisit this later if we add apps that cost more to use than what you can afford by default.)

Data meshes of data points placed in levels at design time were offset from the actual data point position.  (We had changed some geometry layers around since the data point prefab was made, and the code that moves overlapping data points away from each other was checking for its own location and not just other points)

Whats ‘Appening

Harry’s first port of call for the Sprint was to update the app system.

Apps can now have multiple actions and options

These are presented as two sub menus. We’ll be getting into this in future posts when we show you some new incarnations of the apps you might already be familiar with if you have played the game with us at an expo or a modding workshop.

Apps can now also react differently depending on what kind of targets are passed into them

So apps can display different functionality for devices vs. data, and even different types of data,

Now app are much more flexible and extensible

This is a fairly in depth point, but it’s safe to say that this opens up a myriad of things modders can call and do with the rest of the API when modding their own hacking tools.

New app for interacting with drones called FlySwatter

This used all of the above and was put in as a working example of how to use the new systems, a kind of test case. It might not stick around as a final tool in the game or it might evolve and merger with other tools, but that is what is great about the Off Grid modding system there is a lot of space for interesting tools to grow.

Continued work on the save system

We faced a few last minute headaches, but we have got autosaves and checkpointing working nicely ready for the EGX show floor.

New team member!

Josh has joined us as a design intern - he is testing modding tools, helping with documentation and helping to design hackable objects.  We’re really pleased to have him on board and hope you all join us in welcoming him to the team!

Here’s a little from him about what he’s been up to:

Hi there, my name is Josh and I have been working on the Off Grid mod tools producing some light-hearted hacks - primarily making Joe his very own disco room where he can party the night away with disco lights and lots of balloons!

This involved me taking a look at the pipeline for adding custom 3D assets into the levelkit and getting acquainted with lua, both of which were a very enjoyable experience, and you can see the results for yourself!   While fairly new to the modding workflow, I have had a blast with it so far and I am definitely looking forward to making a full story-based level in future. 

Speaking of levels, I have also had the pleasure of checking out and testing the demo level of Off Grid!

During testing, my aim was to identify bugs and explain to the team the steps to recreate specific bugs. For example:

missing text on main menu - this was a tricky one that only appeared at certain resolutions, but was easily fixed by the team once identified

menu navigation with a controller - as most people will be playing Off Grid at EGX, I thought it would be important to test the controller experience, which lead me to a few navigation issues when using UI menus

missing colliders:  I spent several hours walking around the demo level trying to identify anything that I could walk through

When working my way through the Off Grid mod tools, I was able to give feedback on the wiki and add to a few pages myself. I was responsible for adding the Art Pipeline to the wiki in order to help modders to add their own works of art to Off Grid Levelkit.  I am absolutely loving putting some of my skills into practice and helping with the project - for me its a dream come true!

Characters Ahoy!

The team spent a chunk of this sprint getting together new ‘docker’ type NPCs for the harbour level, with a little help from our good friend Silvia Bartoli.  There was some wrangling to do as the NPCs are quite a complex array of components and AI behaviours and actions. They require ‘Ears’, viewcones, personalities, all the AI actions available to them, patrol routes, and related props like flashlights or tazers.

We’ve also got a new character editing ‘tool’ for re-colouring the characters.  This guy above is making the most of the metallic values on the colour lookup tables. :)

We specifically designed the geometry of the characters to make it easy for players to make distinct variations.  Above, you can see the same character with a different colour lookup table applied, giving him a different skin colour, hair-do, and even profession - all done with a couple of switched textures. 

We have also added blend shapes to the characters that players and modders in future builds will be able to control via lua - so when they spawn an NPC, they can define the model type, their weight via blend shape and their colour with colour lookup tables and textures.

The Experience

As mentioned, we spent a lot of time on mission scripting and refining player experience ahead of EGX - this meant new mission content for both the new Harbour level and the older Apostle HQ.

You can see the newly re-implemented drone above. These are now spawn-able through level kit as a guard type.  We also put in a bunch of smaller and less noticeable gameplay script fixes to make the conversations read better and player experience smoother, including a conversation introducing the light meter tool for sneaking through shadows.

PR You Ready?!

Rich has organised the next London Indies meetup on Friday October 6th, featuring Stefano Petrullo from Rennaisance PR.  He’ll be joining us all the the Loading Bar in Dalston to talk about how to market your games, how to engage a PR firm and evaluate whether they can add value to what you are doing, and how and why, in his view, events are so important for indies! It’s a 4pm start on the Friday and a nice way to wind down a work week with your fellow game devs.  Check out all the details and RSVP here - look forward to seeing you!

And speaking of marketing - did you receive the very first Off Grid newsletter this month?!  If not, SIGN UP now!  What are you waiting for?!

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