Hey there, friends! I’m glad to see you on board of “San Francisco”, a huge spacecraft travelling far, far way from planet Earth.
Where do I start?
The folks at HeroCraft (our publisher) asked me to tell you a little bit about the project “ Odysseus Kosmos and his Robot Quest”, how the idea behind the game was born and how the development is progressing. I’ll give it a shot, please don’t judge too harshly.
Most people probably won’t understand the way I feel about this, but… I should start way way back from wonderful classical adventures from the golden age of quests, such as Monkey Island, Full Throttle or Space Quest. If you are one of the few connoisseurs of the genre, you’ll know right away what masterpieces I’m talking about. If not, just take my word for it: these are wonderful (and rather complicated) games with great atmosphere that were practically super hits back in the day.
I am a fan of adventure games myself, and I’ve played almost all significant games in the genre and find some of them truly great. And naturally I have always dreamed about creating my own quest at least a bit similar to those marvelous games. So let’s just give each other an understanding nod (maybe you are a fan of adventure games just like me) and carry on.
Let’s start in the year 2014, when I’ve watched the movie “Interstellar” and was completely blown away by it. Once I got back from the movie theater, I jumped to reddit and other forums and started reading through user comments. Of course I wasn’t the only one who has taken the movie so close to heart. One of the most commented storylines was the story of Romilly played by David Gyasi, who had spent 23 years in orbit waiting for his crew. This has happened due to extreme time dilation.
This idea captured me. What would he do during these 23 years? How would he make the time pass: ship repairs, conducting experiments? It was then, when I thought it would be great to create a quest based on this idea, since the story fits into classical genre nicely: a handful of characters, a complicated plot, and a lot of issues with the spaceship, which have to be solved by the lone hero.
As time went on, I grew more and more fond of this idea. It was clear that I couldn’t copy the story from “Interstellar”. Furthermore, it was such a serious movie, whereas I always wanted to develop a fun game that would spread good mood and cheer and make people smile. I figured that Odysseus couldn’t be alone in orbit and so the robot Barton appeared. This patient and just a bit boring working unit keeps bothering Odysseus, whereas he prefers to laugh it off to make the robot go away. Later other details were added, so the storyline of Odysseus Kosmos is a lot different from the movie.
So I was thinking about the game for a lot time, but couldn’t get myself to start development. I was exploring Unity engine at that time and was proficient enough to launch a project (“Odysseus Kosmos” is not my first Unity-based indie title, I did a small arcade “16-bit Tank” before that). But I lacked that final resolution, a sign that would push me to start developing. I was just passing time waiting for this “sign”. Until finally a new game gave it to me.
I must note that the game is really popular and has a lot of fans. But I was so disappointed by it that I finally decided to build my own game.
What was the game? We’ll find out next time!
BTW, guys from HeroCraft asked me to tell you that whoever guesses the title of this game, wins a Steam key for the first Odysseus episode! (next Friday)
Thank you for paying attention, we will continue next time. Sign up for updates to follow if you’d like to read more.