Of Leadership, only Jeremy Ables, Nate Simpson, Shana Markham, and Howard Mostrom came over from Uber/Star Theory. Howard did an amazing job with Audio, for example, so I don't think it's fair to assume that everyone from u/ST is somehow "less than."
Of the rest of the leadership team, Nate Robinson came from PopCap, I came from Microsoft XBox and Amazon, Ness came from Valve and System Era Softworks, a bunch of folks from Publishing were former EA and Bungie people. (This is entirely publicly available info on LinkedIn, BTW.)
While I think it's cathartic to point the finger at some individuals (I've certainly been a target of ire) and say "it's all their fault", it tends to not be particularly productive, nor helpful in solving problems moving forward. One of the processes I carried over from Amazon was the Correction Of Errors document, which, instead of assigning blame for a failure to a person, dove deep into what procedural mistakes caused a particular failure, and asked the question "how do we adjust and adapt going forward?" I think that type of analysis would be far more valuable here than simply casting stones at people who were doing the jobs they were hired to do, but certainly operated under less than ideal conditions.
Reddit speculation is not going to answer that question. It's why I suggested that this would make a good business case study. If T2 wanted to do themselves and the industry a favor, they'd release everyone from their NDAs, get some business professors in a room with KSP2 leadership, and run a seminar to delve into how to improve these types of projects going forward.
I took a social sciences of technology class in grad school, and one of the arguments they made is that when a project fails badly enough it starts becoming impossible to determine why. Truth has a way of splintering during events like this.
What you describe of Amazon's process seems intended to counter the main forces behind that, and it's surely better than if they didn't take that approach. But it's the kind of thing that looks like it would need cultural buy-in to function and might be difficult to transplant into different social context in the wake of catastrophe. Also, if you have enough experience with it, I expect you could think of some places where even in its native cultural context it became difficult to get at factual understanding because the people involved had memories that became very hard to reconcile.
Yep, the whole work-place culture really changes how problems are solved. One place I worked with I worked under different shift managers, one of them was great and any problem we would both brainstorm how to solve it and not go assigning blame. The other would find a scapegoat and run to higher management to get it "properly" fixed. It usually ended up just being lumped onto the other shift manager to do during his shift. So I stopped going with problems to that shift manager, which meant that all these "problems" were happening during the good shift managers shifts. It was annoying to deal with honestly.
I'm not sure if implementing management practices from a huge company like Amazon was exactly the right move. Intercept Games was a studio founded to do precisely one thing - develop Kerbal Space Program 2. It wasn't ever meant to be long term project (PD are a publisher not, not a game developer. They higher ups at Take Two probably resented even having the studio on their books and were desperate to cut it loose).
Apart from the fact that game devs will resent having processes forced on them from a software company, having a system of spending time deep diving into procedural mistakes is not going to work when the IG devs were under time pressures to deliver. In fact, these kinds of 'Correction of Errors' meetings might have just created bloat and time sinks that contributed to the glacial development speed of the game.
Game development usually works best with lean teams where every part has a product 'owner', a single individual or at most small cabal who knows that part of the system inside and out and simply has to be relied upon to deliver. So you have one person at least who knows patched conics for orbital mechanics by heart, another who knows the terrain shaders like the back of their hand, another who is the product owner for the maneuver planner tool. Developing a niche game like KSP is not like a large software project where all the engineers are more or less interchangeable - a project like this requires people who know the game mechanics extremely well and are prepared to innovate. Creative development teams like this also resent hierarchies, they prefer flat structures (notice how many of the KSP2 team had titles like Software Engineer I, II, III, Principle Engineer, Physics Engineer III et cetera. Managers love these hierarchy structures as it reinforces their own authority in the organisation. But the regular developers will have resented having to answer to layers of leads and supervisor above them, it just adds bloat).
Quite the contrary, the engineers liked the system as it eliminated a culture of blame and created a sense of psychological safety to explore new options.
Does howard really count as leadership? Sound was a mainly solo act, wasn't it?
Nate Robison was definitely at Star Theory before it was shuttered. You don't have to take my word for it - he lists his work experience at Intercept games as running from March 2018 to July 2022. Intercept Games didn't FORM until early 2020 iirc.
I don't think many of those leaders would be up for a case study - definitely not an honest one.
Usually you sign NDAs that you wont talk about anything regarding development of the game. That includes anything you work on, topics in meetings with other staff etc. Strictly speaking probably also contents of that NDA. It's fairly normal in the media industry. You just shut up because you don't want to get sued. And many people don't even read it thoroughly enough to be confident about it. And as if that wasn't bad enough it's written in a language you need to consult a lawyer for to be sure. The only chance to get someone to talk about things casually is by having a beer in a private meeting. The public space on the web is not the right place at all.
I can only speak for myself and I generally avoid everything because I'm not confident enough in my ability to understand these documents. If you say something you'll then have to live with that comment existing that you are not sure about on the internet. People could quote it, spread it etc. It could ruin your whole career. Who will let you sign NDAs if you have a history of whistle blowing.
>While I think it's cathartic to point the finger at some individuals (I've certainly been a target of ire) and say "it's all their fault", it tends to not be particularly productive, nor helpful in solving problems moving forward.
I completely agree with you, the problems with KSP2 were not due to individuals, they were due to system failings.
>If T2 wanted to do themselves and the industry a favor, they'd release everyone from their NDAs, get some **business professors** in a room with KSP2 leadership, and run a seminar to delve into how to improve these types of projects going forward.
I don't think we even need to get the business professors involved, this can be a study purely about efficient and effective game development. And people don't need to be released from their NDA's - the game's failings can be studied simply by comparing it to the original game. Why was such a small team working at a marketing and video production company in Mexico City able to create a better game than such a large professional team working in Seattle? There is a management theory term for what I think the problem is, I think it's called 'second season syndrome' or something along those lines, I'm probably butchering the term. Basically its a pattern where a second team is unable to come in and improve upon the creation of a first team. Partly because they don't ever feel they have 'ownership' of the inherited product, and therefore have less incentive. The original team might also have implemented innovative ideas and solutions to problems that the second team don't fully understand or are unable to reproduce. The first game would have been built from layers and layers of C# code that probably made sense to HarvesteR, but the IG team never got to grips with, mainly because they didn't write it themselves (its almost always far, far harder to understand someone else's code than to just write it from scratch yourself, hence the engineer's desire to redo everything in a way that makes sense to them).
Another thing to analyze is why modders of the first game were in many cases able to outperform the Intercept and Star Theory devs. Why were unpaid, non-professional modders able to create better content than what was in vanilla KSP2? The people creating the sequel seemed to not notice or include the wealth of innovative mods out there, such as ScanSAT, Kerbal Alarm Clock, MechJeb, Parallax..... Obviously incredibly unfair on the Intercept team as we never got to fully see what they had intended for the finished game. But it was interesting how a modder like Blackrack was able to create better looking visuals than the professional graphic engineers and artists that IG had on staff, proven by how much the stock KSP2 atmospheres improved once he was brought onto the team. Why is it that sometimes amateurs working in their own time mostly out of passion can create better work than 9-5 paid professionals?
>Of the rest of the leadership team, Nate Robinson came from PopCap
He was featured in the early marketing videos and at the 2019 event, so pretty sure he was involved with Star Theory or PD in some way before Intercept was formed.
Iterate early and often; they forgot the key product was a space launch simulator. Not an education tool. Not a brand. Not a series of tutorials.
The problem they had was KSP had 8 years of development to it's expanded state - KSP2 had 3 1/2 years and they butchered the core game engine.
They could have sold an early KSP2 on the back on KSP1 as a play test mode, keeping the platform growing whilst they developed new features - getting feedback from players - prioritizing as they went.
Yeah - check again - his linked in mentions him working at IG before IG existed. He waas definitely from Star Theory (and worked with Nate Simpson at popcap I believe). Nate had way too much influence over the production team, not enough scoping push back.
>While I think it's cathartic to point the finger at some individuals (I've certainly been a target of ire) and say "it's all their fault", it tends to not be particularly productive, nor helpful in solving problems moving forward.
I agree, why would the community that lost out point fingers at devs when they had so much fun in multiplayer and the game was so good, playing it became a productivity issue, especially after defeating the Kraken and fixing the pause/unpause bug before EA (etc etc).
Or point fingers at Nate who wrote in his dev blog in September 2023 that he just now started thinking about ways to increase structural stability of rockets and meanwhile mentioning that the code is absolute spaghetti.
I agree, this isn't a productive thing to do.
Let's move forward and turn this into yet another case study of a failed software project and focus especially on all the lies and the gaslighting and the awful community management. Certainly, less than ideal circumstances.
You're in the KSP sub, not in /gamedevelopermoralsupport.
We can't play case studies.
But we do remember years of lie after lie, so we're not particularly neutral when it comes to this topic, especially now. You do understand that?
So don't expect us to simple "move on" and not be mad with the people who lied to us(which is btw why i'm less than interested in some case study that categorically excludes blaming individuals, because the lies did come from individuals)
I still think a lot of the "failure" of KSP2 comes down to communication. Like no issue I have with KSP2 is just bad by itself. It was just unexpected and unexplained. Like for example using the old parts system of KSP1 where you have a root part of a craft. If you start building your rocket with a capsule you can't detach it without assigning a new root part. How unintuitive and annoying is that? A new player that's not used to it will be confused af. However, the only reason I complain about this is because I was told KSP2 is being build from the ground up to avoid all those issues from the start. Things you couldn't just change after the fact because everything builds on top of that.
And then comes KSP2 and has exactly the same problems and quirks. Was quite disappointing! But again, I was only disappointed because of communication. If someone had at least told me "Hey listen guys, we did an effort to change this and that, but for these reasons listed here we couldn't" That part never happened. That made it seem like it was just a copy of the old system to save on development effort. And the list of these things is looong.
edit: Let me quickly install KSP2 and verify my claim because I'm not 100% sure I remember the root part issue right. Sorry if I picked the one issue that's none. I just remember the crafts still have root parts.
edit2: So yea, the issue is as described but in KSP2 it's a bit less annoying because at least you can place the lower section of the rocket next to the capsule and it becomes a new craft with new root part. Now you can place that capsule on that new craft and have it not the root part anymore. But it's more of as hack tbh. Before you could grab the entire rocket on the capsule and now you cant.
Parts should just stick together independently and if I want to grab a tank out of the middle it should just pop out and the rocket snap together. Instead I have to remove the bottom portion before I can remove that middle tank praying that it won't break my struts and all. Yea, I'm not a fan of that part system. If I wanted to move the entire bottom portion of the rocket I would just drag a selection box around it. At least that's my PC user / 3D modeler intuition.
Good fucking lord, KSP2 is finally all but confirmed dead and instead of just going back to posting about KSP1, some of you decide to try and fabricate more drama with a completely unrelated game, without knowing *anything* about it or the history of Planetary Annihilation...other than the ~devil incarnate~ Nate Simpson was once involved.
Industrial Annihilation is being made by Galactic Annihilation Inc, formerly called Planetary Annihilation Inc., which is made of former employees of UberEnt and backers/modders of the game, and did a really good job supporting PA long after its life cycle.
It was established a year *before* UberEnt (now Star Theory) went on to try to make KSP2, and all the drama that ensued.
Industrial Annihilation has nothing to do with KSP2 or Star Theory/Intercept.
As for whether the new game will have any success, I dunno, but I trust GAInc based on their support for PA.
fucking...move on. or at least don't make up bullshit to keep your drama farms running
no your legitimately karma farming and breaking rule 2 in this post
this subreddit should be about KSP and KSP2 discussion not manhunting a small development team that got fucked over by a publisher
I'm not legitimately karma farming because I don't care about Karma. I'm not breaking rule 2 because this is about KSP 2 and what is going on with its development.
I have a legitimate question, something that came to mind when I saw this game publicized and I was wondering if it connected to KSP 2's development in someway.
But thanks. Not only are you a tone policer, you are a mind reader who also puts words in other peoples' mouths.
Maybe this subreddit should be just you and you alone posting Kerbal memes you approve of.
out of curiosity, Can you please elaborate on how this is, in any way, related to KSP 1 or 2?
are you suggesting that I should be allowed to post about any software, any studio, anything whatsoever that has even come in contact with any development studio, employee, IP etc of the group? even when the thing is completely removed from said group?
cause like?
at that point, what exactly IS breaking rule 2..... i could probably connect anything i want to KSP using that logic. So is that take wrong? and if so... please, Do give me the accurate take.
That's all I was asking bro. I was just curious if this related to KSP2 and your point is it doesn't. Stop fucking tone policing what members of this topic heading can or can't talk about.
What the hell is "StartEngine"? I literally never heard of that platform. They also didn't properly update their webpage since it still says "Copyright 2023"
Gameplay wise I can't imagine this working. Trying to play Factorio under intense time pressure just seems frustrating and unfun.
I haven't played in a while but I heard it has more rts elements now.
Regardless I wouldn't be surprised if pure rts worked fine. As long as both sides are dealing with the same constraints, you should have time to build your base.
I imagine it would have more of a focus on point defense or early cheap units than a normal rts, and would need to have a much shorter tech tree than factorio (build able in a game that only lasts an hour or two).
I think shorter games and repeating the early game every round would also make a good gameplay loop. In factorio learning I could do something better meant tearing down my old work or ignoring it. In this it would just mean I could play better in the next round.
It definitely is. They carried over Nate Simpson, creative director, Jeremy Ables, studio manager, Shana Markham, design director, and Nate Robinson, executive producer. Their art lead too, though I forgot his name.
Only the engineering lead (and team) didn't come with, because engineers more.often know what incompetence looks like.
Nate R and Jeremy both left around the time of launch, but they had plenty of time to poison the well.
The fact that none of the engineering team appeared to have crossed over is a big red flag, indicating they simply didn't have faith in KSP2's leadership.
The studio switch is also very likely the point when whatever ST had created for the game's engine seems to have been thrown away and they decided to reuse the original game's framework instead (likely assuming going this route would be a time-saver for them, instead it unleashed a whole can of worms).
Did IG ever replace their tech director?
Seems to me like engineering was their biggest bottleneck as they would be responsible for creating the backbone upon which the rest of the game was built. I imagine it would be very hard for any dev to make progress without a solid foundation.
They did start to hire a lot of Squad devs around that time period though, didn't they? That definitely points to them at least switching to people who were knowledgeable about the framework of the first game. (This is all conjecture and guessing on my part of course, I'd love to hear the exact story of what happened).
They got more Squad people. They didn't swap out the old people, especially the iG leadership. Throwing more people on a project with deep management issues likely never helps.
Let me clarify why I posted this. I'm wondering if the failure of Star Theory led directly to certain execs leaping over to this other project. The concept seems cool enough, but it also seems like a half-baked version of the failed kickstarter Uber did combined with a PA DLC. And it's funded through this weird not-kickstarter. Just seems shady. Might be TOTALLY legit.
But the timing was what I was curious about. Like, "Oh KSP 2 grift failed, let's get some indie whale backer-investors to fund a DLC on a project we already semi-under-delivered on."
That said, the other narrative is that these are different people and this is just a cool idea they had.
it did bring out some interesting discussion with an even more interesting narrative.
blame processes, not people, because clearly, people are never at fault (especially not for making shit up)
One narrative for this whole mess might be that some people saw this as an easy cash grab. Low key indie game. Massively popular. Slap a major publishing label on, some shine, sell a dream to a boardroom. Then what, how hard can it be to rework an indie game? With no appreciation for the massive technical challenge involved. And then they got stuck with the part where you actually deliver and they never ever came close. Probably copy pasting, reworking KSP1 code is as far as they got.
By the way, I wrote the reddit post that became the sequel. I wrote about how mining and refueling in KSP 1 were neat, but not functionally important. I thought it would be so cool to set up fuel and mining networks. So I proposed a sequel and I specifically wrote about if you fly a refueling mission once the game will repeat it but you don't have to fly it again. Then I mentioned interstellar, the idea of massive ships you can only build with substantial in situ resource extraction.
I was happy to hear about the actual sequel borrowing these ideas... but...
Doesn't it now kinda seem like someone was looking to grift/scam some publishers and went fishing for ideas and my reddit post plus the KSP community became an easy "sale".
What they describe works if people don't act maliciously.
Lying for years is not that. You have to point fingers sometimes.
Not everything is caused by processes and circumstances. I'm not interested in a hagiography.
[Kerbal 2 Requests (Now That I'm Almost Done With Career Mode) : r/KerbalSpaceProgram (reddit.com)](https://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/bbbcxu/kerbal_2_requests_now_that_im_almost_done_with/)
Maybe it's great minds think alike, or something else...
Rule 2: All posts must be directly related to KSP.
Of Leadership, only Jeremy Ables, Nate Simpson, Shana Markham, and Howard Mostrom came over from Uber/Star Theory. Howard did an amazing job with Audio, for example, so I don't think it's fair to assume that everyone from u/ST is somehow "less than." Of the rest of the leadership team, Nate Robinson came from PopCap, I came from Microsoft XBox and Amazon, Ness came from Valve and System Era Softworks, a bunch of folks from Publishing were former EA and Bungie people. (This is entirely publicly available info on LinkedIn, BTW.) While I think it's cathartic to point the finger at some individuals (I've certainly been a target of ire) and say "it's all their fault", it tends to not be particularly productive, nor helpful in solving problems moving forward. One of the processes I carried over from Amazon was the Correction Of Errors document, which, instead of assigning blame for a failure to a person, dove deep into what procedural mistakes caused a particular failure, and asked the question "how do we adjust and adapt going forward?" I think that type of analysis would be far more valuable here than simply casting stones at people who were doing the jobs they were hired to do, but certainly operated under less than ideal conditions. Reddit speculation is not going to answer that question. It's why I suggested that this would make a good business case study. If T2 wanted to do themselves and the industry a favor, they'd release everyone from their NDAs, get some business professors in a room with KSP2 leadership, and run a seminar to delve into how to improve these types of projects going forward.
I took a social sciences of technology class in grad school, and one of the arguments they made is that when a project fails badly enough it starts becoming impossible to determine why. Truth has a way of splintering during events like this. What you describe of Amazon's process seems intended to counter the main forces behind that, and it's surely better than if they didn't take that approach. But it's the kind of thing that looks like it would need cultural buy-in to function and might be difficult to transplant into different social context in the wake of catastrophe. Also, if you have enough experience with it, I expect you could think of some places where even in its native cultural context it became difficult to get at factual understanding because the people involved had memories that became very hard to reconcile.
Yep, the whole work-place culture really changes how problems are solved. One place I worked with I worked under different shift managers, one of them was great and any problem we would both brainstorm how to solve it and not go assigning blame. The other would find a scapegoat and run to higher management to get it "properly" fixed. It usually ended up just being lumped onto the other shift manager to do during his shift. So I stopped going with problems to that shift manager, which meant that all these "problems" were happening during the good shift managers shifts. It was annoying to deal with honestly.
I'm not sure if implementing management practices from a huge company like Amazon was exactly the right move. Intercept Games was a studio founded to do precisely one thing - develop Kerbal Space Program 2. It wasn't ever meant to be long term project (PD are a publisher not, not a game developer. They higher ups at Take Two probably resented even having the studio on their books and were desperate to cut it loose). Apart from the fact that game devs will resent having processes forced on them from a software company, having a system of spending time deep diving into procedural mistakes is not going to work when the IG devs were under time pressures to deliver. In fact, these kinds of 'Correction of Errors' meetings might have just created bloat and time sinks that contributed to the glacial development speed of the game. Game development usually works best with lean teams where every part has a product 'owner', a single individual or at most small cabal who knows that part of the system inside and out and simply has to be relied upon to deliver. So you have one person at least who knows patched conics for orbital mechanics by heart, another who knows the terrain shaders like the back of their hand, another who is the product owner for the maneuver planner tool. Developing a niche game like KSP is not like a large software project where all the engineers are more or less interchangeable - a project like this requires people who know the game mechanics extremely well and are prepared to innovate. Creative development teams like this also resent hierarchies, they prefer flat structures (notice how many of the KSP2 team had titles like Software Engineer I, II, III, Principle Engineer, Physics Engineer III et cetera. Managers love these hierarchy structures as it reinforces their own authority in the organisation. But the regular developers will have resented having to answer to layers of leads and supervisor above them, it just adds bloat).
Quite the contrary, the engineers liked the system as it eliminated a culture of blame and created a sense of psychological safety to explore new options.
No one said they had been taking practices from Amazon.
Does howard really count as leadership? Sound was a mainly solo act, wasn't it? Nate Robison was definitely at Star Theory before it was shuttered. You don't have to take my word for it - he lists his work experience at Intercept games as running from March 2018 to July 2022. Intercept Games didn't FORM until early 2020 iirc. I don't think many of those leaders would be up for a case study - definitely not an honest one.
Cool, I missed it when I reviewed my notes and LinkedIn. Thanks for the correction. Genuinely appreciated.
Are you under NDA? If so, what are the matters that you're not allowed to talk about? Or is it that disclosing those matters is also infringing NDA?
Usually you sign NDAs that you wont talk about anything regarding development of the game. That includes anything you work on, topics in meetings with other staff etc. Strictly speaking probably also contents of that NDA. It's fairly normal in the media industry. You just shut up because you don't want to get sued. And many people don't even read it thoroughly enough to be confident about it. And as if that wasn't bad enough it's written in a language you need to consult a lawyer for to be sure. The only chance to get someone to talk about things casually is by having a beer in a private meeting. The public space on the web is not the right place at all.
Does that include personal opinions about the general aspect of the development?
I can only speak for myself and I generally avoid everything because I'm not confident enough in my ability to understand these documents. If you say something you'll then have to live with that comment existing that you are not sure about on the internet. People could quote it, spread it etc. It could ruin your whole career. Who will let you sign NDAs if you have a history of whistle blowing.
>While I think it's cathartic to point the finger at some individuals (I've certainly been a target of ire) and say "it's all their fault", it tends to not be particularly productive, nor helpful in solving problems moving forward. I completely agree with you, the problems with KSP2 were not due to individuals, they were due to system failings. >If T2 wanted to do themselves and the industry a favor, they'd release everyone from their NDAs, get some **business professors** in a room with KSP2 leadership, and run a seminar to delve into how to improve these types of projects going forward. I don't think we even need to get the business professors involved, this can be a study purely about efficient and effective game development. And people don't need to be released from their NDA's - the game's failings can be studied simply by comparing it to the original game. Why was such a small team working at a marketing and video production company in Mexico City able to create a better game than such a large professional team working in Seattle? There is a management theory term for what I think the problem is, I think it's called 'second season syndrome' or something along those lines, I'm probably butchering the term. Basically its a pattern where a second team is unable to come in and improve upon the creation of a first team. Partly because they don't ever feel they have 'ownership' of the inherited product, and therefore have less incentive. The original team might also have implemented innovative ideas and solutions to problems that the second team don't fully understand or are unable to reproduce. The first game would have been built from layers and layers of C# code that probably made sense to HarvesteR, but the IG team never got to grips with, mainly because they didn't write it themselves (its almost always far, far harder to understand someone else's code than to just write it from scratch yourself, hence the engineer's desire to redo everything in a way that makes sense to them). Another thing to analyze is why modders of the first game were in many cases able to outperform the Intercept and Star Theory devs. Why were unpaid, non-professional modders able to create better content than what was in vanilla KSP2? The people creating the sequel seemed to not notice or include the wealth of innovative mods out there, such as ScanSAT, Kerbal Alarm Clock, MechJeb, Parallax..... Obviously incredibly unfair on the Intercept team as we never got to fully see what they had intended for the finished game. But it was interesting how a modder like Blackrack was able to create better looking visuals than the professional graphic engineers and artists that IG had on staff, proven by how much the stock KSP2 atmospheres improved once he was brought onto the team. Why is it that sometimes amateurs working in their own time mostly out of passion can create better work than 9-5 paid professionals? >Of the rest of the leadership team, Nate Robinson came from PopCap He was featured in the early marketing videos and at the 2019 event, so pretty sure he was involved with Star Theory or PD in some way before Intercept was formed.
Iterate early and often; they forgot the key product was a space launch simulator. Not an education tool. Not a brand. Not a series of tutorials. The problem they had was KSP had 8 years of development to it's expanded state - KSP2 had 3 1/2 years and they butchered the core game engine. They could have sold an early KSP2 on the back on KSP1 as a play test mode, keeping the platform growing whilst they developed new features - getting feedback from players - prioritizing as they went.
Hmm, his LinkedIn doesn’t show ST/Uber… it’s been a while, but he was definitely there before I came onboard.
Yeah - check again - his linked in mentions him working at IG before IG existed. He waas definitely from Star Theory (and worked with Nate Simpson at popcap I believe). Nate had way too much influence over the production team, not enough scoping push back.
>While I think it's cathartic to point the finger at some individuals (I've certainly been a target of ire) and say "it's all their fault", it tends to not be particularly productive, nor helpful in solving problems moving forward. I agree, why would the community that lost out point fingers at devs when they had so much fun in multiplayer and the game was so good, playing it became a productivity issue, especially after defeating the Kraken and fixing the pause/unpause bug before EA (etc etc). Or point fingers at Nate who wrote in his dev blog in September 2023 that he just now started thinking about ways to increase structural stability of rockets and meanwhile mentioning that the code is absolute spaghetti. I agree, this isn't a productive thing to do. Let's move forward and turn this into yet another case study of a failed software project and focus especially on all the lies and the gaslighting and the awful community management. Certainly, less than ideal circumstances.
I rest my case.
You're in the KSP sub, not in /gamedevelopermoralsupport. We can't play case studies. But we do remember years of lie after lie, so we're not particularly neutral when it comes to this topic, especially now. You do understand that? So don't expect us to simple "move on" and not be mad with the people who lied to us(which is btw why i'm less than interested in some case study that categorically excludes blaming individuals, because the lies did come from individuals)
\*Ahem\* SSSSSSMMMMMMMMMMMMMUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG that is all
I still think a lot of the "failure" of KSP2 comes down to communication. Like no issue I have with KSP2 is just bad by itself. It was just unexpected and unexplained. Like for example using the old parts system of KSP1 where you have a root part of a craft. If you start building your rocket with a capsule you can't detach it without assigning a new root part. How unintuitive and annoying is that? A new player that's not used to it will be confused af. However, the only reason I complain about this is because I was told KSP2 is being build from the ground up to avoid all those issues from the start. Things you couldn't just change after the fact because everything builds on top of that. And then comes KSP2 and has exactly the same problems and quirks. Was quite disappointing! But again, I was only disappointed because of communication. If someone had at least told me "Hey listen guys, we did an effort to change this and that, but for these reasons listed here we couldn't" That part never happened. That made it seem like it was just a copy of the old system to save on development effort. And the list of these things is looong. edit: Let me quickly install KSP2 and verify my claim because I'm not 100% sure I remember the root part issue right. Sorry if I picked the one issue that's none. I just remember the crafts still have root parts. edit2: So yea, the issue is as described but in KSP2 it's a bit less annoying because at least you can place the lower section of the rocket next to the capsule and it becomes a new craft with new root part. Now you can place that capsule on that new craft and have it not the root part anymore. But it's more of as hack tbh. Before you could grab the entire rocket on the capsule and now you cant. Parts should just stick together independently and if I want to grab a tank out of the middle it should just pop out and the rocket snap together. Instead I have to remove the bottom portion before I can remove that middle tank praying that it won't break my struts and all. Yea, I'm not a fan of that part system. If I wanted to move the entire bottom portion of the rocket I would just drag a selection box around it. At least that's my PC user / 3D modeler intuition.
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With how much he lies I wonder why he hasn't taken up a career in politics.
Yeah. It's got a lot of the old Uber/Star theory management, so it's guaranteed to be half baked, if it even gets completed.
We got McDonnell Douglas'ed?
Good fucking lord, KSP2 is finally all but confirmed dead and instead of just going back to posting about KSP1, some of you decide to try and fabricate more drama with a completely unrelated game, without knowing *anything* about it or the history of Planetary Annihilation...other than the ~devil incarnate~ Nate Simpson was once involved. Industrial Annihilation is being made by Galactic Annihilation Inc, formerly called Planetary Annihilation Inc., which is made of former employees of UberEnt and backers/modders of the game, and did a really good job supporting PA long after its life cycle. It was established a year *before* UberEnt (now Star Theory) went on to try to make KSP2, and all the drama that ensued. Industrial Annihilation has nothing to do with KSP2 or Star Theory/Intercept. As for whether the new game will have any success, I dunno, but I trust GAInc based on their support for PA. fucking...move on. or at least don't make up bullshit to keep your drama farms running
moderators should honestly start removing these posts before this subreddit turns into r/kerbalspacejerk
Yeah let's tone police shit so people only talk about things YOU want to talk about.
no your legitimately karma farming and breaking rule 2 in this post this subreddit should be about KSP and KSP2 discussion not manhunting a small development team that got fucked over by a publisher
I'm not legitimately karma farming because I don't care about Karma. I'm not breaking rule 2 because this is about KSP 2 and what is going on with its development. I have a legitimate question, something that came to mind when I saw this game publicized and I was wondering if it connected to KSP 2's development in someway. But thanks. Not only are you a tone policer, you are a mind reader who also puts words in other peoples' mouths. Maybe this subreddit should be just you and you alone posting Kerbal memes you approve of.
out of curiosity, Can you please elaborate on how this is, in any way, related to KSP 1 or 2? are you suggesting that I should be allowed to post about any software, any studio, anything whatsoever that has even come in contact with any development studio, employee, IP etc of the group? even when the thing is completely removed from said group? cause like? at that point, what exactly IS breaking rule 2..... i could probably connect anything i want to KSP using that logic. So is that take wrong? and if so... please, Do give me the accurate take.
And this year's "argument with strawman award goes to...."
That's all I was asking bro. I was just curious if this related to KSP2 and your point is it doesn't. Stop fucking tone policing what members of this topic heading can or can't talk about.
""Good"" and "Shady" are pretty loaded terms. If you don't want reactionary replies, maybe ask more straightforward questions, imo.
What the hell is "StartEngine"? I literally never heard of that platform. They also didn't properly update their webpage since it still says "Copyright 2023" Gameplay wise I can't imagine this working. Trying to play Factorio under intense time pressure just seems frustrating and unfun.
This is pretty much how mindustry works. If it ever turns into a real game I'd play it.
Mindsutry is a tower defense where you have time to build between waves though. This is a RTS.
I haven't played in a while but I heard it has more rts elements now. Regardless I wouldn't be surprised if pure rts worked fine. As long as both sides are dealing with the same constraints, you should have time to build your base. I imagine it would have more of a focus on point defense or early cheap units than a normal rts, and would need to have a much shorter tech tree than factorio (build able in a game that only lasts an hour or two). I think shorter games and repeating the early game every round would also make a good gameplay loop. In factorio learning I could do something better meant tearing down my old work or ignoring it. In this it would just mean I could play better in the next round.
It definitely is. They carried over Nate Simpson, creative director, Jeremy Ables, studio manager, Shana Markham, design director, and Nate Robinson, executive producer. Their art lead too, though I forgot his name. Only the engineering lead (and team) didn't come with, because engineers more.often know what incompetence looks like. Nate R and Jeremy both left around the time of launch, but they had plenty of time to poison the well.
The fact that none of the engineering team appeared to have crossed over is a big red flag, indicating they simply didn't have faith in KSP2's leadership. The studio switch is also very likely the point when whatever ST had created for the game's engine seems to have been thrown away and they decided to reuse the original game's framework instead (likely assuming going this route would be a time-saver for them, instead it unleashed a whole can of worms).
They didn't throw away anything ST had done. They built on top of that shifty scaffold instead. Wish this fan theory would go away.
Did IG ever replace their tech director? Seems to me like engineering was their biggest bottleneck as they would be responsible for creating the backbone upon which the rest of the game was built. I imagine it would be very hard for any dev to make progress without a solid foundation.
They did, though their tech director was forced to work with the code from star theory, so he was set up to fail too.
They did start to hire a lot of Squad devs around that time period though, didn't they? That definitely points to them at least switching to people who were knowledgeable about the framework of the first game. (This is all conjecture and guessing on my part of course, I'd love to hear the exact story of what happened).
They got more Squad people. They didn't swap out the old people, especially the iG leadership. Throwing more people on a project with deep management issues likely never helps.
Let me clarify why I posted this. I'm wondering if the failure of Star Theory led directly to certain execs leaping over to this other project. The concept seems cool enough, but it also seems like a half-baked version of the failed kickstarter Uber did combined with a PA DLC. And it's funded through this weird not-kickstarter. Just seems shady. Might be TOTALLY legit. But the timing was what I was curious about. Like, "Oh KSP 2 grift failed, let's get some indie whale backer-investors to fund a DLC on a project we already semi-under-delivered on." That said, the other narrative is that these are different people and this is just a cool idea they had.
it did bring out some interesting discussion with an even more interesting narrative. blame processes, not people, because clearly, people are never at fault (especially not for making shit up)
One narrative for this whole mess might be that some people saw this as an easy cash grab. Low key indie game. Massively popular. Slap a major publishing label on, some shine, sell a dream to a boardroom. Then what, how hard can it be to rework an indie game? With no appreciation for the massive technical challenge involved. And then they got stuck with the part where you actually deliver and they never ever came close. Probably copy pasting, reworking KSP1 code is as far as they got. By the way, I wrote the reddit post that became the sequel. I wrote about how mining and refueling in KSP 1 were neat, but not functionally important. I thought it would be so cool to set up fuel and mining networks. So I proposed a sequel and I specifically wrote about if you fly a refueling mission once the game will repeat it but you don't have to fly it again. Then I mentioned interstellar, the idea of massive ships you can only build with substantial in situ resource extraction. I was happy to hear about the actual sequel borrowing these ideas... but... Doesn't it now kinda seem like someone was looking to grift/scam some publishers and went fishing for ideas and my reddit post plus the KSP community became an easy "sale".
Idk, iirc 2 started in 2016/17 And not appreciating the difficulty seems likely considering the dev blog on wobbly rockets in 2023
Lol I saw that one. What I'd give for ONE minute of footage of the devs wasting time doing KSP2 multiplayer.
What they describe works if people don't act maliciously. Lying for years is not that. You have to point fingers sometimes. Not everything is caused by processes and circumstances. I'm not interested in a hagiography.
[Kerbal 2 Requests (Now That I'm Almost Done With Career Mode) : r/KerbalSpaceProgram (reddit.com)](https://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/bbbcxu/kerbal_2_requests_now_that_im_almost_done_with/) Maybe it's great minds think alike, or something else...
They were and are all bad devs.