The 0.25 Plan

Hey guys. It’s time we show you our grand plan for update 0.25.

Now, we want to make something crystal clear before we carry on. This is a plan, and to borrow a quote from military history; No plan survives contact with the enemy. The enemy here aren't mongol hordes, chichimeca raiders or Ghandi’s nuclear missiles (Civ 5 bitterness aside). The enemy are bugs. The enemy are features ending up not as cool or fun as they were on paper. Or art assets more complex than drafted or code conflicts. Thus, we have to adapt. Maybe a feature is cut, or a new one pops up. Or the plan for something goes into a radically different direction.

I’ll give you a small example. The game mechanics planned for the Admin Facility in were originally far simpler (somewhat similar to the Market from Age of Empires) and not very interesting overall. We redesigned them into a proper gameplay-enhancing set of mechanics that we are confident will be much more interesting than what we had before, which wasn’t much more than a UI to convert one currency into another. The bottom line is, things change, so please don’t take this list as is and understand that our ideas are likely to continue evolving. This list here has merely our current goals at the time of this post.

So, without further ado, here’s the (current) plan:

Administration Building
A new facility at KSC which will allow you to choose from a set of Strategies to boost certain areas of your space program, usually at the expense of some other area. Start an Unpaid Internship Program to increase your Science gains at the cost of Reputation, or take up an Open Source Technologies Initiative to boost your Reputation gains at the cost of decreased Science rewards. All these combinations will be possible using Strategies, along with many more. Also, Strategies are fully mod-enabled and new ones can be added very easily. Just keep in mind, however, you can only take up a limited amount of strategies at a time, so choose wisely.

New effects
We’ve done a huge overhaul on particle and sound fx. We’ve got much better-looking and better-sounding explosions and rocket effects coming.

Spaceplane Part Overhaul
We are adding several new parts, along with the integration of fan-favorite mod Spaceplane Plus.

Accessibility improvements
More markers on your navball and a pointer to where your node is?A way to transfer Kerbals without them leaving their craft? A button to push your thrust all the way to 100%? We’re adding all that.

Kerbal Experience
Recovering Kerbals will now reward your reputation based on where they’ve been (and what they’ve done there), and their accomplishments will be stored in persistent ‘career’ logs for each crewmember.

Difficulty panel
We’re setting up a much needed Difficulty Options panel, to allow you to set up the game to your liking. Does reverting flights make everything too easy? Try disabling that to see what playing with no room for error feels like. Are you constantly broke without cash to continue? Give yourself some extra boost off the start by increasing your starting Funds. The list of tweakable options goes on, but you get the idea.

Classified
You’ll have to wait for this one a bit longer. If we had our way, we would tell no one about it and just let you guys discover it through gameplay with hilarious results.

So there you have it. That’s our grand plan for 0.25. We are doing our best to bring all this to you, and hope you will be understanding if it changes a little on the way.