The beginning

How did it all begin? Where did we pick up the idea for Odysseus, and how did it develop into the project? Let’s look back for insights on what we have done so far and where we are heading from here.

The idea for Odysseus was born during the Finnish larp writer convention X-Con in November of 2016. I and our co-producer Sanna decided that it would be cool to create a game that would take place in the setting of the episode “33” of Battlestar Galactica.

“33” is the very first episode of the new series, in which the survivor fleet is escaping their still somewhat unknown enemy by jumping from one location to another whenever the enemy fleet reaches them. Due to other engagements, the project stayed dormant for almost a year before we had time to start putting the pieces together.

We invited our third co-producer Antti to join the project and had a few discussions about our goals and vision. In those meetings, we decided that we wanted to set the game into a universe of our own design and to keep BSG only as a source for inspiration and ideas. There were several reasons for this. Immaterial rights, of course, but also the freedom to create what we want without being too tied to the original lore.

Also, there had already been larps taking place in the BSG universe, so we didn’t want to make something too much alike – though there will of course be some common elements between the games. We also decided to pick up ideas and themes from few other sci-fi series, Stargate Universe being the one most worth mentioning. There will be no wormholes in our game, but we aim to have land missions which have a strong resemblance to Stargate missions.

Early on, we also decided that we want to make the game an international event. There have been only a few international games held in Finland, and we wanted to change the situation. Our first design choice was to run the game at least twice – once in Finnish for local players, and once in English as an international run. Every year, more and more Finnish players go abroad to participate in interesting larps, and we thought it was time to arrange a large (in our standards) international game in Finland as well.

We officially introduced Odysseus in X-Con 2017 and started to recruit new members to the team. We started building the world and listing ideas for technology and the overall setup, as well as designing the player experience. During spring 2018, we filled most key roles, and by now we have nearly forty people working on the project. We are happy that we have an extremely talented crew full of people who are highly motivated in creating an awesome game experience. Our first major task will be to secure the location, and we are focused on documenting our design choices and making decisions on the systems we plan to use. We are creating a clear roadmap for the upcoming year, and production documentation will be a key factor in all our production choices.

In our next blog posts, we will introduce our main organizing team as well as give you a sneak peek into our trailer footage and tell you a little bit about the systems and technology we are planning to use.

Laura, Producer of Odysseus