BIG NEWS! We'll be running a Kickstarter campaign in October!
Get ready for:
a playable demo
the first ever opportunity to secure a copy of Off Grid
a chance to get behind the scenes and help shape the game
The Kickstarter will go live:
Tuesday, October 9th
Please consider backing us if you are able! If you're not able to, please share, share, share! Every pledge, like, wishlist and follow means a lot!
We'll be asking for feedback on our campaign via Discord this week - hop on in there to get a preview of the campaign & tell us what you think: https://discordapp.com/invite/NDEVwBJ
Thanks everyone!
The Off Grid Team
P.S. If you haven't already, please join the mailing list for news and updates: http://offgridthegame.com/newsletter
Thursdays = Dev Stream Days!
Hello!
That's right, Thursdays are Dev Stream Days! We'll be chatting all things Off Grid, show you in-game play, hacking, modding, and more...
Ask questions via twitch, or in our Discord's #hack-the-planet channel! Join the discord here: https://discordapp.com/invite/NDEVwBJ
ICYMI: We've done a couple dev streams already! One featured hacker Darren Martyn, Pwnsauce of LulzSec fame, and in another, Rich intro'd the game and went through some basic lua device scripting.
If you haven’t already - be sure to wishlist Off Grid - each wishlist makes a big difference to us, and we really appreciate your support!
Discord = OPEN! Dev chat TODAY 9pm BST / 4pm EDT!
We've been having fun today with a little soft launch of the Semaeopus discord server!
We invited our newsletter subscribers in for a little exclusive dev AMA session earlier - and now we're ready to welcome the rest of you out there in the big, wide world!
Join us in Discord!
https://discord.gg/NDEVwBJ
Get your questions ready - the devs will be online again at 9pm BST / 4pm EDT / 1pm PDT today to welcome you and answer any qestions you have!
Look forward to chatting with you soon!
p.s. If you want in to the exclusive club that derives from our mailing list - sign up! We'll be happy to have ya! http://offgridthegame.com/newsletter
Sprint Roundup - 22.08.18
When you spend so much of your time behind a screen and a keyboard, a true break from it is an absolute requirement every once in a while! Just as Pontus hit the woods in Finland last month, this month Sarah and Rich met up with family and spent a week camping in the Rockies.
Highlights included multiple excited loud-whisperings of 'MOOSE!' while wildly gesturing at a black mass in the trees, only to get closer and discover a cow! Luckily, plenty of real moose were also spotted throughout the week.
At the end of it, Rich had an afternoon in Boulder and got a chance to meet up with some local devs, too.
Then it was back to work, of course!
And so it's time for another sprint update! Here's what's been checked off the list this sprint:
Level Design
Utilised ProBuilder to clean up old geometry and fix z-fighting issues
Improved upon player route through existing levels
App System
Rebuilt the App System - apps are now actually fully driven by the Lua scripts
Expanded the Lua API to add more features specifically useful for apps (but of course available for other systems as well)
AI
Data-driven work on AI, which included:
-Making InterestPoints general
-Creating Agent profiles to use and/or fix these points
Art
New artist on board! Yesss!
New character models completed that will be part of a surprise reveal in the future!
New character concepts for LUT variations of moddable characters
Bug Fixing
Fixed multiple bugs and inconsistent behaviours with apps
...plus a bunch of essential biz dev and planning tasks.
SPRINT COMPLETE!
Now we're focusing on the busy sprint ahead as we gear up for some big upcoming deadlines. A couple of us are headed to EMF at the end of August for a weekend of making, breaking, hacking, crafting, ingeniuty and fun. If you're planning to be there too, get in touch with Rich on twitter and ask to play the demo!
Thanks for following along!
The Off Grid Team
If you haven’t already - be sure to wishlist Off Grid - each wishlist makes a big difference to us, and we really appreciate your support!
Sprint Roundup 26.07.18
This sprint someone (Pontus!) spent a good chunk of it hanging out by a lakeside cabin in Finland.
The rest of us weren't envious AT ALL, of course, while we plugged away at our tasks while melting in the unusually hot English climes! Here's what we accomplished:
Level Design
Grey box work completed on a new level and its architecture, using probuilder to replace old modular geometry
Worked on the mission script, overall design and objective placement and the devices in it
Devices
Devices now can leave data, by either grabbing metadata from the using character's profile, or by a function that generates data within the device (or both)
- NPC's using devices leave data / e.g. vending machine use should leave purchase data
Device Lua can now grab data from its inventory
Devices are now set up to react to data they are sent (e.g. virus etc) via data sending and Device.SetState
Added hackable light groups and API for modders to use this
Lua API for device UI's now display the device's inventory
Character Controls
Recentred camera after idle delay
Bug fixing
Fixes complete for office worker on the roof issues (setting User Position for InterestPoints)
Fixed Videoplayer for cutscene
More detail on some of these ares of development will come throughout the month's devblogging.
Sprint complete! Thanks for following along with us! The Off Grid Team
If you haven’t already - be sure to wishlist Off Grid - each wishlist makes a big difference to us, and we really appreciate your support!
Off Grid named Gamesmaster's #1 indie game!
It's not every day you can pick up a magazine with a double page spread about Off Grid inside... but today you can!!
The August issue of Gamesmaster, GM332, is out now and features Off Grid in its IndieMaster section!
Off Grid is featured as #1 in Gamesmaster's list of 'the best in the indie scene' and given two glorious pages for you to feast your eyes upon.
Order a digital or print copy here: https://www.myfavouritemagazines.co.uk/gaming/gamesmaster-magazine-back-issues/gamesmaster-august-2018-issue-332/?force_sid=uu3rcl7l4nqjduv6rltaop8os3
We're in good company, too, there's some other great indie games listed alongside Off Grid for you to check out!
Happy reading! :D
Livestream with Pursuance Project TODAY!
Off Grid dev Rich Metson is going to be interviewed by Pursuance Project tech lead Steve Phillips in a livestream at 1pm PT / 4pm ET / 8pm UTC / 9pm BST.
We'll be talking activism, tools, and videogames, of course! They want allll the info about Off Grid - so listen in!
Don't miss it - here's the link: https://live.kickstarter.com/barrett-brown/live/interview-off-grid-where-data-is-your-most-powerful-weapon
Haven't heard of the Pursuance Project? Brainchild of founder Barret Brown, Pursuance is working to create a secure platform for collaboration in order to amplify the efforts of activists, journalists, & nonprofits.
Check out their kickstarter and learn more at: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/85883596/barrett-browns-pursuance-project/posts/2230500
Sprint Roundup 18.06.18
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.
You've already read about us recently making a trip to USA for GDC and PAX, and about the push for new content and polish we did before that. As things go, that kind of quick development tends to mean lots of new stuff is added at the last minute, and sometimes maybe not tested in every possible situation. Or there's a good chance there are some odd bugs and things that only appear after a while, or in very specific conditions. Things that in the long term would get noticed, added to our bug list, and eventually fixed... but in a 4-week rush, things sometimes go less than perfectly and some features might end up being a bit buggy.
In multiple ways, sometimes.
Most of my sprint was spent on fixing biggest issues we found in our PAX build, and most of that didn't end being much to talk about. But one of the bugs ended being a bit more interesting to figure out, and while I'd usually prefer talking about design, I though some insight on this side of game development could still have some value. So, this is going to be more or less accurate story of our guards not behaving as intended, as I saw the issue through bug reports on our Jira board, and watching people play the game & testing things myself afterwards trying to figure out what exactly was going wrong. And also a nice example of how the most obvious explanation often isn't quite true!
There's something wrong with our guards
So, the first thing I heard was one of the other team members saying our guards were sinking to the floor, in t-pose (which is basically a clean starting pose used for character animation, standing with your arms at 90 degree angle to your sides). Not what you'd want to see in the game, but my immediate guess was that there's just a missing animation file somewhere, which would be easy enough to open the animation tree, figure out what's missing, drop the file in, and it's fine.
The second problem, which was noticed during PAX, was that sometimes the guards just seemed to stare straight at the player, but not actually react in any way. Of course there's a distance check for how far away they can see you, and also the lights and shadows affect the player visibility, so it's not so easy to say for sure. But it seemed like they should have spotted the player.
So we did what you do when demoing a game at events, not being able to open Unity and debugger... we watched people playing it and noticed some things.
The guards seemed to work fine, until they went for a coffee break. When they did, they sometimes seemed to continue drinking coffee, either just spending the rest of their working day hanging around the vending machines sipping coffee, or sometimes taking their coffee with them, going to patrol but constantly stopping to sip a bit more from their cups. (Actually, that sounds pretty realistic! :D Sadly it didn't look great, and wasn't the behavior we wanted from them. And they didn't bother to chase the player any more, which is less than optimal for a stealth game).
So, more info added to to Jira bug reports, and since we had just added the animations and related AI actions for the guards to do the coffee breaks (rather than just standing next to the vending machine for a bit to "take a break", something missing in the animation tree and probably in the AI action seemed a pretty likely explanation). Now I just had to survive people running into same issues over and over again until the PAX weekend was over and I was back at my desk with Unity again. Always great to see your work being broken again and again without being able to do anything about it! :D
Debugging and fixing the bug
The first thing I did was open a scene with few guards and a vending machine in it, and just let the game run with error log open to see if I could observe the same issues, and if there were any useful errors.
After half a day, I hadn't seen the "t-pose through floor" issue, but I definitely did notice the guards gave up their work day around the first coffee break. Sadly no useful errors appeared, and even with our AI tools open everything seemed fine, the guards took a break, and returned to patrol (based on what AI was doing), yet on-screen they stayed drinking coffee instead.
So, maybe we were right about animation issues. Time to open the Animator window.
(not the exact Animator setup I was facing, this screenshot is from earlier in sprint so it's missing some gestures we added later)
The states seemed OK, we were triggering a "gesture" with a number code to tell which gesture to play. It would then play one of the states, check for when the animation has completed, and then tell our animation controller script it's done. There are some issues with that, which I'll get into a bit later, but at least that should work for the guards to complete the gesture and get back to patrol. So I needed some other explanation.
...Half a day more of staring at the guards walking around the level, with various logs and inspector windows open, trying to see what could be wrong. And then I noticed it. The AI takes breaks when it runs out of "motivation." Motivation in this case is pretty much just a number we track, decreasing it a bit for every boring task they do, and then when it reaches 0, we tell the AI it wants to take a break, which will then restore the motivation. But for some reason it wasn't being restored. The guards would go for the coffee break, but somehow the coffee wasn't refreshing them at all, so they kept drinking more, and more, and more!
It turns out the gesture system was telling the animation system that it was done playing the gesture, but nothing was informing the rest of the AI that it's fine, you've completed your gesture action. So, with a few more lines of code the guards were now returning to patrol after few sips of coffee to refresh themselves.
Kind of. They were indeed returning to patrol, but would still sometimes keep staring at the player in front of them like you were invisible. Or happily drink their coffee as if they were thinking that the odd guy running around the office building in the middle of the night was someone else's problem during their coffee break. And that's where the aforementioned problem with the gesture animation setup comes to play. The characters would start the gesture, then go through the animations, and then tell the AI to complete the action and start doing something else. But what if the player walk past the guard while he is in middle of the gesture? We needed to add a way to break them away at any point if the AI tells there's something more important to do:
Slight pain to set up, but basically, every single animation state needs to have two exit transitions, one for when the animation completes normally, and other that can be triggered by the AI and set up to immediately interrupt everything and exit the gestures tree.
This seemed to work: I ran around the guards, interrupting them in different ways and at different times during their breaks, and they now reacted immediately, dropped their coffee cups, and started chasing me. Bug fixed!
...or more debugging and fixing more bugs.
While doing some final testing to confirm the bug was now gone, I somehow got the guards even more confused. Now they were correctly reacting to me and starting the chase, but then sometimes just ended up stopping in middle of everything, with their AI not able to figure out what to do.
That was odd, as based on the logs, the guard was happily chasing the player, waiting for the chance to fire his taser (probably with a grin on his face even though our characters in general don't have mouths!). He lost the sight of the player, so he made an estimate where the player might be, but couldn't find anything. And then it all goes wrong. At that point,the guards should go into search mode, where they select a bunch of search points from the level around them, then jog to each of those locations looking for the player, and after doing this for a while decide the player must have disappeared and return to normal patrol. But sometimes the guards would just completely give up instead - the AI not being able to come up with any sensible plan left the character frozen in place.
So I spent another hour running around the level, trying to get the guard to see me, and then trying to escape him in different ways and in different places, looking for some kind of pattern at least. Let's just say it's not easy - the guards are pretty good at catching you. Eventually, I noticed that this only happened sometimes (but not always) when I was running up the stairs from our test scene lobby. To be fair, that's just about the only way I could actually escape from the guards in that level, so it took a while before I even started considering that the stairs might have something to do with it. And of course, verifying that as the reason was even harder, since now it wasn't enough to get the guards to see me and then escape, but I also had to make that happen so I'd escape exactly at right time while running in the stairs, with enough distance between me and the guard.
Indeed, that ended up being the very specific situation which was triggering the AI confusion. I probably would have never even ran into it if I hadn't spent that much time testing for the animation/AI/coffee break issue in the same level. After some nosing around in our code, I found an old hack we had put in place earlier to prevent the guards from using stairs (we had some issues with bit too steep incline on some stairs earlier, but the limitation should have been removed already). I found a line of code that was pretty much saying “if your target is more than 2 meters above or below you, you can't go there.” And, annoyingly, it was doing it bit too late to really work nicely to start with, so the AI had already set the target and planned for it, and then that line was just saying that the plan can't be done. Not that the AI would have any other plan to work with, so all it could do was throw its hands up in the air (metaphorically, although I'd really like to actually add an animation for that in the game!) and give up.
Done!
So, after few days, and staring through tons of code, and carefully observing the Animator trees, and our AI inspector, and tracking values in the code, what we thought was one bug somewhere messing up the guards and making them not see the player (and maybe play wrong animations) it actually ended being a bunch of separate issues that all just happened to surface at the same time, plus one more which I only found because of all the testing I had to do to figure out the others.
As for the "Sinking into floor in T-pose" bug I started with? I was never able to replicate it. Not a single time during all this, even though I even had a screenshot as evidence. Maybe it was some even more odd glitch, or maybe it was fixed as a side-effect of something else I did, I have no idea. But I haven't heard any complaints about that happening from the rest of the team either, so I decided to just mark that bug as "fixed" in Jira as well. :D
Also, after getting annoyed about trying to get spotted and escape a very specific situation again and again, while also trying to monitor logs and other stuff, I ended making good use of our Lua apps system, and made one that turns the player invisible. That took about 10 minutes to do, so at least our apps system is showing some great potential here. I don't see this one being an actual feature in the game for obvious reasons, but it is great tool for testing the levels and debugging AI!
That's it for now, maybe I'll get to talk about more design-y stuff next time!
Pontus
If you haven’t already - be sure to Wishlist on Steam - each wishlist makes a big difference to us, and we really appreciate your support!
Saving (and Loading!)
Hi all - Steve here. I’m a programmer working on Off Grid - and I’ve had the pleasure of working on save systems recently. :)
Ha! This is really one of the short straws of game development. When I was at Sony, it was almost a rite of passage; these were the days that not only did you have to save and load, but you were responsible for ensuring things didn't die when the memory card (remember those?) was pulled out mid-operation.
Prior to this month, we had the beginnings of a save system in place, but were aware that certain things didn't seem to be working quite as they should - so I took a look.
What I discovered was that we kept a save in memory as well as writing it to disk. This is a good thing - loading a checkpoint is faster. But a side effect was that there were two code paths to reinstating a save - to load it from disk, or to just reference the save data as game data. The danger with this is that the in-memory data can reference 'live' game data, which means the save on disk diverges with this during gameplay. Lots of copying data later, the bits that weren't working quite correctly now seem much happier.
The other work I've done was on a system level. Saving and loading requires making a list of all the files available. Previously, we loaded all of these into memory - but as we cannot know how big they're going to be, this will eventually cause us all sorts of problems. I've instead created a header at the top of each save file, containing the information we need to present to the player. Load the first 1000 bytes or so of each file, grab the header, close the file.
Saving and loading done then? Certainly not! We will still have new data that needs to be added to our save structure, and I bet there are still some bugs in there. But I'm confident that we are on firmer ground than we were a month ago.
