CobraA1

Ramping up the variety is definitely something I'd like to see. As well as a few more planets, especially dwarf planets and a ringed gas giant. . . . and at least on Kerbin, I'd love to see more life. And some signs of civilization. They're a space going species - surely they have cities and towns on the continent that has the space center! Some procedural content could make that a reality.

For your own use, you can do whatever you want. If The Space Dino wants to put videos on YouTube or some other public site, then there's an audience to consider.

Set Steam to offline before going to work. Came back from work, finished one final contract. Went online, downloaded 1.2, updated the mods that I could update, started a new game.

That would probably require some coding, as I imagine they don't have employees working 24/7. It also risks a problem happening while they're away, which won't be discovered until they have developers on the clock again. Which would be bad if there's a major problem with the deployment. I'm sure they'd rather roll it out when they have people on the clock who can deal with problems as they arise.

As far as multiplayer goes - I really don't think the game lends itself to multiplayer very well, especially with the time warp system. The gameplay would have to change quite drastically to accommodate multiplayer in a way that's not frustrating. As far as graphics go: The detail of the parts has been improved over time, so they haven't been static. That said, nothing really groundbreaking has happened. Adding some sort of physically based rendering would look pretty sweet, and maybe a few (but optional) shaders to make it emulate a film camera. Some of the mods have added the ability to have vastly improved graphics, but at the expense of memory footprint: Even my 16 GB machine can choke on them. To that end: I'd like to see an improvement in how terrain is generated and rendered, possibly making it easier to mod the terrain generation. Current mods (as far as I know) currently count on hand-crafted material to do so, and if you're hand-crafting a planet, that's an incredible amount of memory. I think there's a lot of improvement possible in the realm of procedural generation.

There is a post somewhere by a squad dude acknowledging the Dev exodus. Had to dig around for it last night, but it's out there. Should have been in the Dev note though... something like the Dev team leaving certainly belongs in a weekly note... about devs Right here.

I'm going to make a note here that RoverDude has been making the rounds on Reddit noting that he's been treated pretty fairly by Squad and has no problems with them. He just has a full time job elsewhere. He also makes a passing mention to KSP being a contract situation, which leads me to think that most of the employees were hired under a temporary contract, and perhaps the contract ended. Maybe they were just temporary hires for 1.2?

I'm going to make a note here that RoverDude has been making the rounds on Reddit noting that he's been treated pretty fairly by Squad and has no problems with them. He just has a full time job elsewhere. He also makes a passing mention to KSP being a contract situation, which leads me to think that most of the employees were hired under a temporary contract, and perhaps the contract ended. Maybe they were just temporary hires for 1.2?

I do think that, for integrity's sake, they ought to keep to their promises. But, to be honest, I personally wouldn't be against paying for DLC or an expansion. This game was well worth the price, and I got way more out of it than I paid for.

@5thHorseman referenced this reddit post, which appears to come from a dev. The community manager confirmed it. It's possible they just haven't updated the staff directory yet.

That said, if you go to Squad's website, they give you a menu to go to either their marketing website, or to Kerbal Space Program. KSP has been a pretty successful game in its own right, and it has been (so far) treated as practically a second branch of their business. That said - with all of these developers leaving (including the founder of KSP), there may sadly be a ring of truth to what you are saying.

They're a marketing business based in Mexico. They actually had nothing to do with developing or publishing games until they allowed Felipe Falanghe (a.k.a. "HarvesteR") to write Kerbal Space Program.

Interestingly enough, this thread and another thread haven't been deleted yet, despite claims that they're shutting down all of the threads. I think it's best to take things with a grain of salt right now and let the situation sort itself out.

I've personally had a few contract jobs where the contract ended, and due to either real life issues, or to the organization not willing to renew the contract, had to go elsewhere. The optimist in me hopes this is just a case of maybe just a short term contract or something like that. The pessimist in me says this is still a lot of people leaving - what's up with that? Humm . . . followed a link from the reddit post that had some info about Squad and their employees, basically said that employees from other countries are easily underpaid because, to put it frankly: Mexico is a very poor country. $100 USD is the monthly minimum wage. Obviously Squad pays a lot more than that, but we're probably still talking wages well below what's livable in developed countries. For most modders that were hired, this would likely likely be "a summer job doing something I like just for some extra cash," rather than an actual full time / permanent position. It doesn't sound like it would actually pay enough to be a permanent position for people living in the USA or Europe. It could be as simple as it's really awkward to have a software development studio in the middle of a nation that is heavily struggling economically.

Finally finished my tech tree. I understand it's theoretically possible without leaving the Kerbin system, but I finished it with missions to Jool's moons. Next on my list: Rescue stranded Kerbils. Dunno how I'm going to rescue the one stranded on Eve. I'll also experiment with ways to improve things in the future. I rather brute-forced my way through it, basically using over-engineered rockets. I want to do things like SSTO rockets and aircraft, having stations in orbit and at Minimus so I can refuel.