- OFF GRID Universe Sneak Peek : Ascent Auditance Reception - 20 May 2026
This week we want to showcase the place where Joe spends his usual 9-5, Ascent Auditance. Unlike the flashy startups occupying the other floors of the building, Ascent is the kind of office that never evolved from the styling of the early 2000s. Technology is old, security is lacking and his boss is hiding something. Luckily you have some help from a friend.The office is closed at this time, how will Joe find a way in? Hacking, social engineering?The receptionist, Janet Brown, works 6 days a week, meaning she’s still in the office on Saturdays. Most of her working hours are spent either at the reception, the printer, or announcing people to her boss. Fax machines? What is this 2005?...Janet likes a clean working area, so there isn't much of interest, but she does have a habit of leaving magazines around, and what she reads might become useful for later hacks. There's also a fax machine…
- OFF GRID Sneak Peek : Firestream - 22 April 2026
This week we want to showcase one of the fictional companies that operates right next to Joe's workplace, Firestream. Like any good techno-hipster populated startup, it's got snappy catch phrases, beanbags, and a slide in place of the stairs. You will be able to explore this cool and snazzy environment to get some information across the network but first you need to infiltrate it.Firestream is one of the companies that rents a space in the building where Joe works, they provide Internet services to an array of different local businesses, but they are just starting out, and with growth comes cut corners, and lax security practice, gotta get ahead of the competition somehow!In terms of visual tone and styling, where Joe works is blue, cold, sterile and lifeless, reflecting the mundane reality of his day-to-day. In contrast, Firestream is loud, colourful and built around the kind of startu…
- OFF GRID - Character Sneak Peek : Joe's Room - 1 April 2026
In our last sneak peek we touched on some of the new environments, but there's plenty more to show you and the more we do the more insight we get into the characters in this world, this week we want to give you a glimpse of our main character, Joe! And where do you get the most insight on someone's inner life? The bedroom!Joe lives in the residential district, a normal happy going, totally-not-under-full-weight-of-a-surveillance-capitalistic-thumb suburban area for white collar workers of a satisfying and rewarding workplace.Normally, our environment reflects a lot about our life, his choice of house is that reflection. He lives here with his daughter Jen, just a normal 2-bed house, probably spends half his salary on rent, maybe a little bit more, but that is because he takes pride in his house, after all a man's home is his castle.Someone clearly used inspiration of an IGEA showroom.Jo…
- OFF GRID Universe Sneak Peek : Advertisement Story Telling - 25 February 2026
This week, we will be presenting a bit about the types of advertisements we have in the OFF GRID : Stealth Hacking universe. Don't press the skip button on this ad!NORVIK, the shipping company of the high seas, without them what would we do, right?Each region of the city has a different way of controlling it's populace, be it the workers outside the harbor, the white collar workers of the offices, or the writers near a newspaper agency. Each area of the world you explore will be very different from the last.Joe might make use of this information when dealing with the people he finds and the tools he has..."THE MOST TRUSTED NEWS IN THE COUNTRY" Are they really?You can see lots of different advertisements through OFF GRID, most look inoffensive, but all of them are trying to sell you a product, or a narrative, or trying to control public opinion in some sort of way. You can learn a lot ab…
- OFF GRID Universe Sneak Peak: Commercial District - 11 February 2026
As part of our more frequent dev updates, we would like to showcase in more detail some of the environment work we have been doing in OFF GRID. This week, we will be giving a sneak peak to the new external environment art used for the levels. > Joe looks up at the buildings and says "You are breathtaking", he was talking to the smogThe first iterations of the city environment lent itself to being quite cartoony, which deviated from the original concept of the game and what we were trying to achieve with it. We created a new asset pack of modular assets both for the players and us to create OFF GRID cities that feel fitting to the tone of the universe. The new reworked version of the cityscape next to Joe's workplaceThe commercial district is where Joe works, it's an accounting business called Ascent Auditance that has absolutely nothing suspicious going on behind the scenes, it's part o…
- New screenshots up! - 11 December 2025
We did mention that we are going to start posting more regularly to show progress, and so we have started with updated screenshots on the store page carousel. Here's a quick look at what we have put up, and we'll be following up with deeper dives and more screenshots on what has changed in each instance. Make sure to drop a line in the comments to let us know which of these you want us to post more detail on next time! We've been pushing the city's external environments and vistas to make the world feel more alive. Added some atmospheric details to make all the server-rooms fell that ice cold feeling you get when you walk into one! We have the screens on devices now able to to play animations and timeline sequences (a Unity feature) - to really push our environmental storytelling further. Those who played earlier builds will be relived to know that we have put a lot of work into the cha…
- OFF GRID Update: Serious Games Award Nomination + What’s Coming Next - 14 November 2025
Hi folks! Check this out! We’re painfully aware that we have been more than a bit quiet on here this year. Between the Studio's contract work and developing other funded IP (a necessity in the current games market with publishers only interested funding smaller games), posting updates slipped — we are really sorry about that, and huge thanks for sticking around and staying interested.Behind the scenes, though, we’ve been pushing the OFF GRID universe forward in a big way. And we’re finally at the point where we can start letting you in on what’s been happening.First up: the OFF GRID training game spinoff we were funded to develop over the past year, OFF GRID: Red Team has just been nominated in the Business category of the Serious Games Awards! If you happen to be in Utrecht and this sounds interesting, come play the game with us (and vote for it to win!). More info: conf.seriousgamesso…
- Get involved in playtesting Off Grid: Red Team - 26 March 2025
As we announced in our last update back in October, we are developing an experimental subgame, Off Grid: Red Team (OGRT), and playtesting is now currently in progress. Do you want to join in? Let us start by saying that if you haven’t signed up to test OGRT you still have time over the next couple weeks. Why would you want to? Well let our Playtesters tell you why: “Just finished the game, and it really is amazing, as I said before the interactions with the browser were amazing, the only thing I have to note about the interactions aside from some specific issues that i will report in the forum channel was the lack of forum posts, and i hope that changes“ “The game seems really good and looks great. Love the ARG with the websites. I’m trying my best not to go full-on hacker mode with the usual suite of tools. The last problems are really tough, though!” “The gameplay is pretty good, I en…
- EMF CAMP 2024 - 21 November 2024
A bit of background If you’ve never heard of EMF Camp, it stands for Electromagnetic Fields and is the largest outdoor gathering of hackers, tinkerers, and all-around tech enthusiasts in the UK. Picture a sprawling campsite filled with workshops, talks, blinking lights, and people building all sorts of weird and wonderful projects—everything from DIY satellite dishes to interactive art installations. It’s a unique blend of summer camp and tech festival, where the unofficial motto is: “If you can dream it, you can probably make it—just bring some duct tape and a Raspberry Pi.” EMF is part of a trio of rotating European summer hacker festivals, alongside CCCamp near Berlin and “The Dutch Camp” (which is never content with just one name—past versions include SHA, “Still Hacking Anyway,” and MCH, “May Contain Hackers”). These camps fill the summers between the more serious, wintertime gathe…
- OFF GRID DEV BLOG - "Hacking IRL" - 12 October 2024
Hello folks! We’ve been so busy pushing forward with OFF GRID that it’s been hard to find the right moment for an update—but here we are, and a lot has happened in the last four months! We teased a bit in the interim, but now we’re ready to dive into the details. First up, we had an amazing time at EMF Camp, the UK’s largest outdoor hacker gathering, where we ran workshops, caught up with friends who cameo in the game (mc.fly, pathfinder, Lauri Love, Darren, et al.), and connected with the wider community. We’ll have a full retrospective post coming soon, but in the meantime, there’s even bigger news… We're extremely proud to announce we’ve secured funding from Ufi to develop a companion experience to OFF GRID that takes players deeper into the world of infosec (in parallel to how OFF GRID takes players deeper into the world of hacker culture). Interested? Then read on! Team Updates We…
- Off Grid Dev Blog - "Expanding Horizons" - 24 May 2024
The sun is shining, our team has expanded and Off Grid development is in full steam ahead. It's a good time for some updates from us, don't you think? This is a long one so here is a summary of what you'll find below: Pontus - On Core Systems Melissa - On Layout and Props Diogo - On Gameplay Scripting Stef - On New Level Studio Announcements - EMF Festival! Wait did you say more team members? For the first half of this year we were joined fulltime by Melissa on Art and Diogo on Level Design. With their help we have been polishing and adding content to the main campaign in Off Grid, but more on that later. We have also been assisted by Pedro, who was with us early in the year working on scripting and tools, Elias, who has recently joined the team and is getting stuck into the Modding side of Off Grid and Raquel, our producer that is keeping us all on track! Pontus - On Core Systems Since…
- OFF GRID DEV BLOG - "HAPPY TRAILS" - 18 December 2023
Howdy y’all, we are probably (definitely) well overdue a new devblog update! It’s been a busy time in the Semaeopus offices (I mean when is it not!? We are making a big video game after all...and funding it by making other people's videogames in parallel) but these last few months have been especially packed on the OFF GRID front. We’ve built new mechanics, polished art, been on international adventures and welcomed a host of new talent onto the team. Here’s some highlights: Time For a Quick Vent While we've always talked about trying to focus on realism, and are perfectly aware that air vents rarely are large enough for a person to fit in, what would a stealth game be without being able to crawl through some air vents? We've had this feature planned almost from the first versions of the game, but now that we are trying to get more of the game levels completed it was the time to make su…
- Off Grid Dev Blog 4/2023 - "Still Alive" - 14 April 2023
How long has it been since we've posted something in our dev blog? 10 months?! Sounds like it's time to remedy that and give all of you an update about what's going on in the Off Grid development! Shall we get the excuses out of the way? It's not you, it's us. Jokes aside, we have been juggling other projects to keep the company wheels rolling and put bread on our tables. This meant that we needed to take a little break from Off Grid development to focus on contract work. Ultimately that would have made for some boring and heavily redacted blog posts! (Gotta respect those NDAs!) Our bad. We never planned to be this quiet for this long, and we know radio silence is not a good look for an indie game team. So, we are sorry about that! The Good news is that not only are we still alive but Off Grid development has been picking up pace. We even expanded our team. So let's introduce our newest…
- OFF GRID devblog "Keep it Clean"! - 1 June 2022
Hello and welcome to the latest devblog. As we are now firmly into tech and feature lock and finalising all systems to help speed up developing content, this last couple of sprints we decided to get to grips with the AI and get it cleaner and easier to write and use for gameplay. It made sense to do a pass to tie up loose ends and close the door on some of the AI designs or features that had been left open ended (thanks to the modular system they can always be further added to later!). But in digging around and doing code review, we came across a few other things that deserved some attention too... OnMissionStart() While doing AI clean-up, we ran (once again) into the complicated mess our mission start-up process had grown into over the years, and decided it's time to give that a thorough look as well. Since this all was something that had just been built gradually as we've added new fe…
- Development Update: "Look who's talking!" - 3 March 2022
Welcome back to another episode of the OFF GRID DevBlog, lots of interesting interactions to tell you all about, so let's dive right in! You talkin' to me? We've recently been working on some levels that have more neutral NPCs around, rather than just guards you'd need to avoid. So it started making sense to add some way of just walking to someone and having a conversation with them. And why limit that to just conversations, when we could just as well allow the level creator (or modder) to script any kind of interaction, in the same way that you can script what MissionObjects do... Turns out that this was a bit of an awkward addition at this point in development, we hadn't really planned for it when making our interaction system in the first place, it was all set up for targeting and interacting with devices only. To add to that, the setup we'd used for MissionObject scripting wasn't…
- Off Grid Development Update November 2021 - 3 March 2022
Once again it's time for a new Off Grid development update, and we certainly have a bunch of interesting changes to the game to talk about this time! Streamlined item use and interactions Deciding to continue with the gameplay and user experience-improvements we started in the last sprint by adding visual indicators for game characters to better telegraph their actions and state to the player, we've made some more major changes to the the game. The old Quickslot system where the player had to select the item the player character would use for interactions beforehand, by pausing the game, and assigning an item to the character's "hand", is now gone. If that item was something that would be sued constantly during gameplay that system would have made sense, but since it's pretty much always just a single-use for a specific interaction, we wanted to replace that system with something bit mo…
- Sprint Roundup : Intelligiable Artificial Intelligence - 24 August 2021
Hello Folks, If you've been following along on the devblog for a while you will know that OFF GRID's NPC A.I. is quite extensible, moddable and able to create interesting dynamic behaviours, we've been continuing to refine and polish this of recent, and this blog will dig into a few of those changes. One of the things those of you who are players in our First-Access testing groups have commented on regularly is that these complex behaviours can be hard to pick up on some times. Fundamentally there is one word used in game development to describe this, it's down to having a lack of "Juice". Creating juice in a given system is essentially the art of designing satisfying player feedback with animation and audio, and we have been digging into this specifically in the context of our AI recently. NPC reactions It's a small thing, but up until now you could only tell NPCs were receiving data b…
- Sprint Roundup: Spring Forward - 9 March 2021
Welcome Folks and Happy 2021, and how good does it feel to be finally well out of 2020?! Thanks for bearing with us while we got this you, we missed December's update, but here we are, back in the swing of things, and so finally here is your back-to-regular dev update! Give me an 'A', give me an 'I', what does that Spell?! On the last sprint roundup we mentioned that we started to work in some improvements in the AI to give more flexibility to the NPCs. So what exactly are these improvements? To start, some bugs were fixed, some unused features were removed and others simplified. But the main thing improved was the possibility to change, add or remove any aspect of the NPC behaviour in run time, like, for example, actions and goals, and with this came a round of improvements on our AI debugging tool, the AI Explorer: The default way to change any NPC behaviour is still as it has always…
- Sprint Round Up - 09.10.20 - Meta work - 9 October 2020
Welcome friends, time for another sprint update! In the last couple of sprints we did a fair amount of checking existing game systems, making sure everything works as intended, and adding some long-planned polish here and there to make those existing features look and feel better. Most visible changes from player's perspective would be improvements to how meaning and use of metadata is communicated to the player, with better messaging about what data has new metadata, making sure player knows when they gain new metadata, and making the effect of collecting data about someone more visible in the UI. One of the improvements we did was the addition of the save slots, we believe that this change will make the save system cleaner and quicker to use. Each slot (the current number of available slots is 3, but that value can be increased before launch) can have one manual save and one auto save…
- Sprint Roundup 29.07.20: An iterative process - 29 July 2020
Devblog time! From making all characters playable, API improvements, and an overhaul of our setting systems, we've packed a lot in to the most recent sprints this summer. New character spawn system On the last sprint roundup, we talked about the new NPC creation system - a more flexible system to create various types of NPCs. That was the phase one of a bigger goal: to improve and simplify the process to spawn all characters - NPCs or playable ones. The second (and final) phase was all about making all characters playable! Now all character prefabs are generic, and every character can be a NPC or playable. To change between these two states now just requires defining in a single line in the mission script, which, for examples, looks just like this: characterType = "npc". The game will automatically handle add the needed components and connections to make the character controlled by the…
