How long can you hold her together: Engineering systems

“I cannot change the laws of physics, Captain! You’ve got to give me thirty minutes!” 

A warm hello from the systems team! Or more specifically, the part of the team working to make the engineering team (you) run around fixing the ship.

Our systems team consists of several experienced software developers and infrastructure specialists. Our responsibility is to develop the software that drives the ship and integrates the different systems together, as well as the peripheral devices the players will interact with. (We also have a separate professional team dedicated to audiovisual effects – more on that in a future blog post!)

Our ultimate goal is to make ESS Odysseus work as a whole, from the bridge controls to engineering systems to ambient sound and lighting. When an enemy ship is approaching, everyone will be aware. When a radioactive leak is detected, everyone will be warned. And when the unfortunate engineer accidentally pulls the wrong cable, everyone will hear the ship’s engines shut down.

The onboard engineering team is given special focus. It is up to them to fix everything that inevitably breaks up, be it damage received in battles, systems breaking due to a premature hyperspace jump, or disasters caused by the lack of maintenance.

We’re devising all sorts of tasks for the engineers, ranging from system calibration, power rerouting, brain teasers, to mechanical fixing of things. As an engineer, you can expect everything from routine, repetitious maintenance work to hectic repairs in the midst of battle.

A lot of thought has gone into the balance of active work and time available for personal plots and relationships. Each system that is fixed will need some time to re-calibrate itself to become functional again. There can only be a limited number of systems re-calibrating at a time, and thus all systems cannot always be fixed. This will allow engineers some spare time also during on-duty hours.

On the technical side, we’re going to use a host of Raspberry Pi computers as a a platform for the various tasks and puzzles for the engineering team to fix. The Raspberries will use various peripherals (cameras, lighted keypads, IoT sensors, GPIO, etc.) to interact with the players as they fix the systems. Subsystems communicate with our central backend server, which in turn integrates with the ships lights and audio and Empty Epsilon software, which is running the bridge.

The first puzzles and tasks have already been built, and we’re aiming to have a full end-to-end working system early next year. We’ll still have months to create more tasks, implement additional features, and integrate audiovisual effects.

We’re also taking reuse and documentation into consideration during development. All of the software and designs will be available as open source for other larps to utilize in the future.

We are eagerly waiting for you to experience what we create!

Sampo, System development team

Photos by Axelle Cazeneuve.