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So essentially, I'm here to talk today about a game that I'm working on called Off Grid.
I'll give you a bit of an overview of its development history so far.
Some of you may have heard of it because Rich Smithson, who's making Off Grid,
is always heavily involved with this event and Millie Waze.
I want to go through a few of the hacking and social engineering mechanics in our game
and also talk to you about what the talk is about, the modding that we're doing,
and how on Friday you can come and join me in a workshop and we can put you inside the game.
So who is this bozo? This is me, I'm Steph Keegan.
I'm an artist, writer, developer.
I've been working in the film industry and the games industry for several years.
I've been working mostly in VR for the last decade.
If any of you are VR fans out there, you may have heard of some of the things I've worked on,
the Pixel Ripped and Winlands.
And if you have played Winlands 2, you also might recognise my voice because that's me.
I'm Sorala.
It sort of tends to happen in indie games when you run out of budgets.
The developers end up being the characters.
Earlier this year, I joined the company Samaeopus, who are making Off Grid.
I just wanted to give you all a warning that I know very little about code.
I'm not a coder, I'm an artist.
And that will become imminently clear when I try to talk about more technical stuff in this talk.
Yeah, that's me.
So, Samaeopus is very hard to spell.
I'm always getting it wrong.
It's an indie game studio founded by Rich Metzen and Pointers Schoenberg.
Two very lovely guys, and sadly aren't here today, and they really wish they were.
They want to make games that matter.
So essentially, further the maturity of the medium and have something to say.
And at a talk, at another hacking conference years ago, Rich saw a talk that inspired him to make this game.
And they've been working Off Grid for roughly ten years, as is the way sometimes when you're trying to support yourself as an indie development team
and don't want to take money from the man, you have to support yourself.
So we're still going though.
Anyone who may have backed us on Kickstarter, don't worry.
It's still happening. We're still squirrelling away.
And for those of you who don't know, here is a quick trailer.
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Okay.
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Okay, so what is Off Grid?
It's a moddable stealth hacking game.
And it's not going to be, it's not broad, it's made by people who really care about the industry and know what they're talking about.
And so there are themes of net neutrality, privacy, digital rights.
But it's also made by British developers with a British sense of humour, so it's quite tongue in cheek and satirical.
It's set in the not too distant Orwellian future.
Or at least it was when we began making it 13 years ago, but it seems like it's just set in reality now, unfortunately.
And a bit of an overview, as you play as this character Joe, he's kind of a technophobe.
He doesn't know anything. He's basically me.
But he's sort of pulled into this world unexpectedly when his daughter, Jen, is arrested.
She's been involved in something, some sort of secretive hacking thing, fighting the man.
And their house is raided in the first, say, level introduction.
And suddenly Joe is thrust into this world and he doesn't know anything about it.
But he is led by a mysterious stranger called Smedley, who is a hacker friend of Jen's.
And with the help of Smedley, you begin to try and unravel what is going on.
So yes, in 2013, when - I'm going to say we, even though I wasn't involved back then, but it's just easier.
When we began thinking about it, we wanted it to be grounded for impact.
We wanted to make jokes and laugh, but we wanted it to matter.
So it was really important to us not to be alienating or confusing.
And so we were worried that our lore would be too heightened.
We're games developers, so we wanted to do weird things and exaggerate the tech and the things.
And back in 2013, some of our ideas seemed a bit out there.
We scaled back on some of our network and surveillance tech because they seemed too unrealistic.
And we really wanted to make mundane household objects hackable.
And some of them were ridiculous and in the end we were like, we can't put that in.
No one would believe it.
Now, a lot has changed.
The real world is actually outpacing our fiction, which is depressing, but great for us as devs.
Sorry, that's my fault, I'm wobbling around.
Ideas that we rejected for being too out there have now got back into the game.
Nothing ever stays on the clipping floor.
Yeah, we had to actually make the network and surveillance tools more pervasive for it to become more realistic.
So that was interesting.
And as for mundane objects on Wi-Fi, this is a cat toilet.
What really bothers me about this picture is this woman is not only watching her cat poop.
She's monitoring on the Wi-Fi at the same time.
What is that doing that your eyes aren't?
Yeah, I actually own that toilet.
Please don't hack my cat toilet.
So the conception of the game is that it would be a game about data privacy.
So inevitably mechanics are covering things like hiding, cloaking, covering your tracks, that kind of stuff.
So it naturally fell into a stealth genre kind of game.
But Rich and Pontus were keen to make it original and do their own thing.
So they wanted to kind of merge it and mesh it with a twist on the hacking genre.
And the way they've done that is they treat data like a tangible thing in the game.
So it's like a breadcrumb trail which you can pick up.
And I don't know if you can see that, but you have these kind of like Google glasses that can scan networks and you can see the data around you.
So essentially as you play the game, the main goals are to get physical access to the building.
You kind of want to scan for data and you use that to crackle social engineering to access networks.
But also you want to be careful how much you do that. You don't want to be discovered on the network.
And there's much more in depth, like Rich would tell you a lot more in detail about it, but I'm just going to give you a brief overview.
So my favorite thing about it actually is the NPCs.
So they built this NPC system and the NPCs are kind of driven by an AI that is goal oriented.
And so when you build an NPC, and that's what we're doing at my talk on Friday, is building you with NPCs, is you create a character profile for the NPC.
And there will be things like they like, things they dislike, their favorite song, their kind of personality type.
And with that information, as you scan and build up a much more detailed profile on them, it will help you do things like distract them better or brute force their passwords.
And in this picture is the guard is sleeping and the character Joe is scanning him for information, which he can then use to manipulate him later.
Or you can just prank them. So yeah, you can distract them, send them somewhere, you know, like the whole "what was that?" kind of vibe.
And things like sending black facts to keep a secretary busy or that kind of stuff. So that's quite fun.
We've built a bunch of tools and devices that you can hack, but the software is open and moddable.
So we encourage people to come up with any weird and wacky ideas they have.
And there is no one way to solve a level. So you'll be able to figure out your own fun ways to distract these NPCs to get what you want.
Yeah, so you can hack vending machines, send black facts and mess with monitors.
Basically anything technical is hackable, which we thought was pushing our luck back in 2013 and now we're just making everything hackable.
Yeah, so I'm just going to check my time. Okay, we're doing good.
So the modding tools. This is some old footage of the sort of level kit we're building.
Yeah, this is some of the art inside the game. But we make it in Unity.
So when you do, obviously we are releasing the game as an individual game that we're making.
But the modding tools and the level kit is really open and it's built in Unity.
So if you wanted to build your own levels, you would use Unity.
And it was really important to us and in the ethos of everything about the game is that we don't have any special magic tools that we don't give you.
You know, normally in modding games the developers can do all these extra wonderful things because they have a whole team and those secret databases of their own stuff.
But we don't want to do that. And it can be frustrating for me as an artist because I want to do things and they say,
"Yeah, we can do that, but we're going to have to build a whole system so that the modders can do it too."
It's always the answer. So yeah, if I make a level, you'll be able to make the exact same level, essentially.
Using like Lua API and tools for scripting, you can create your own character purpose, as I mentioned.
You can build interactive objects. And even having conversations with people via text message in the game.
We have all these different modules you can use to build complex scenes.
And we do envision that you will make really better scenes than us and better games than us.
We're kind of excited to see what happens.
And you can use my art, and there's been several excellent artists before me.
Or you can import your own. There is no limit to what you do.
And you can script your own tools. The Google Glasses that the character wears has a bunch of tools for scanning networks
and all sorts of interesting things that Pontus and Rich have come up with.
And we also have a ton we want to do.
But there's no stopping you from developing your own tool in the game and scripting your own hacking tools.
And just as an example, as a story, this story is called Fosterage.
It was made in a mod by Yuri Martino, a very sweet man.
And he told this story about a boy who was fostered, finds out that he's adopted.
And it's just an example. You don't even have to set your mods in our world. You can do what you want.
And Lua is user-friendly, which is great.
And we're building a wiki that needs constant updating, as you all know.
And hopefully we'll get more people updating it in the long run.
But essentially it's all there. Like tomorrow I could give you everything you needed and you would be able to build a level.
And even me, a total dumb dumb artist, can do it.
And like I said before, I didn't know any code at the beginning of the year.
And now I'm writing Lua scripts so that I can make my characters do all sorts of things and run timeline animations.
And yeah, it's great.
And so what this talk is about is Mealyways.
So, McFly, as many of you probably know, I'm sure most of you know who McFly is.
He actually and a bunch of people built in 2019 Mealyways inside our mod of all stuff.
And it was really cool.
There'll be things you recognise in here, like the Mealyways flags and the dome.
And there's a rocket in here somewhere. I think you can see it very much in the distance of this picture.
There's a rocket, tiny rocket on the screen.
And so what they did is they built their own wiki page and sort of shared out the tasks to build all the art assets and took them up.
And then they made their own version of Mealyways in the mod and put themselves in it.
And if any of you know McFly online, you'll recognise his profile picture, you know, that 2D, that profile picture he uses, is actually his character in here.
And there's a lot we can add.
Obviously, things have changed. There's new things around.
We never really finished the scene.
So we're encouraging people to come on Friday and to add to the mod.
You can build assets.
Or there's updates 2023. There's things we don't have.
We don't have you, so we can put you in it.
And we encourage other villages to get involved.
And, yeah, there's no limit, really. Come along and see what we can do.
And these are the times that I will be running the workshops on Friday.
So essentially, yeah, you'll come and put yourself in the video game at 2.30 to 4.30 and 5 to 7.
And it's going to be in the workshop dome, which I believe is there somewhere.
And I've talked really fast because I was nervous about time.
So I have loads of time for questions. Who has questions?
[Applause]
The talk. So thank you very much for the talk.
You already had applause. This is nice.
But you can give a new round while you are thinking about if you have any questions.
If you have any questions, please line up at the microphone in the middle there.
If anyone wants to know something about the game or the workshop.
Oh, you have a question.
When is going to be released? Because I see it say coming soon.
Oh, I was hoping someone would ask that because I meant to bring that up.
So, yeah, it has been saying coming soon for a long time.
It's actually been saying coming out in 2019 for a long time as well, which it hasn't.
That's a very good question. So essentially, as is the way, it's been --
it did go on for a little while while we tried to keep afloat as a company
and did a lot of work just to build up money for ourselves and keep afloat.
But what's really been great this year is we've kicked up a gear again.
Especially one of the reasons I joined the team is to have a full-time artist working on it.
We're building levels now.
Pontus is working really hard on developing tools and vent crawling mechanics and that kind of stuff.
So I don't have an exact date for you, but progress is happening.
I would like to see it within a year.
But I couldn't tell you for sure at the moment. But it is -- progress is happening.
Okay. Thank you. Are there any more questions?
No. So if you are thinking of some questions, she will be here and giving workshops as well.
And she will be able to answer all your questions.
Then thank you very much for this interesting talk and the overview of the game.
And give one last round of applause, please. Thank you.
[ Applause ]
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