Skorj

WARN notices are not ambiguous (which is the point of the law). The WARN notice is for an office closure and the layoff of 70 people, which is about the size of the IG team. So, some specific individuals at IG might be given relocation offers or some other way to move within PD, but almost everyone is gone. Mass layoffs are almost never done across multiple days. Everyone knows on the same day. However, sometimes a company doesn't have their act together, and that day lags a bit from the public discovering the layoff (or has a panic layoff, then another round a few weeks later, but that's not this case) . Since a few ex-employees have made their layoff public, we know it's done. Lack of a public announcement to clarify the situation to the customers is a baffling absence. If there was a future for the game, we likely would have heard by now. I'd assume that we'll get the minimum of support work (bugfixes) needed for EU legal compliance and that's it. If they really do have a plan for future feature work, the lack of communication has already doomed that plan, as the recent Steam reviews are now Overwhelmingly Negative.

Sorry, that announcement was from the week before the studio closure. I expect the support team at PD will push those changes out eventually, since they seemed almost ready, but that may be the last we get.

The logical first step for KSP2 development was to re-write the core of KSP1, replacing the fundamental design mistakes in the physics engine with something that would be robust and scale to large craft. Nate even said they had done that as the starting point, back in 2019 or so. Once that is solid you start adding new content. It's clear now they didn't even finish the first step. My personal theory is that Nate was telling the truth at the time: ST built a solid foundation for KSP2, that IP was lost with the shuffle to IG, and the talent was no longer there to re-create it. But maybe that's overly optimistic of me and they simply never finished the first small project in 7 years of work.

The WARN Act notification went up at the beginning of the business week. The end of that week has come and gone with no real communication from the publisher, beyond a content-free "still supporting it" tweet. Nothing acknowledging the closure of IG and clarifying the future of the game. A week is far beyond the usual corporate caution in carefully wording an announcement and running it by legal; we're now in the realm of just being rude to the fans. What on Earth is going on over there? Heck, no one has even removed the future promises from the Steam store page, which is just asking for legal trouble in the EU. Steam recent reviews are now "Overwhelmingly Negative" due to fans assuming the worst, so a press release about the situation could only have made things better. Sad times when the corporate overlord can't even pretend to care.

I don't think I've liked a single game he's made, but I'd still likely give a proper space sim a try. If they're really constructing a full engine from scratch, the project has already failed (I think in the past 20 years only Factorio has managed both an engine and a good game).. But more likely they're building a physics engine for orbits on top of an existing game engine, which is the obvious way to go.

To me, the failure is even more fundamental. Since about 20 years ago, the firm cultural expectation was "you don't check in/merge to find out if it works, you check in/merge because you know (within reason) it works". If you merged in a change with an easy-to-find bug, your change would get reverted and you'd have an unhappy conversation with your manager. Test automation was a means to that end, but the burden was on you regardless. QA (if it existed) only happened after that, to find subtle hard-to-find bugs. I almost have to go back to the previous century to remember a time when it was OK to check in code that broke anything that affected other people, and even that was only early in a release cycle.

Bit of advice to anyone in the software industry from an old head: it's on you to be financially responsible with the sure and certain knowledge that you will be laid off multiple times in your career. No, I didn't do that before I was 30 either, but a wise man learns from the mistakes of others. Yes, it sucks, but it's a well-paying job you get to do indoors with no heavy lifting, and I have no regrets about my career choice. More advice to anyone who will listen: you generally benefit greatly from being willing to relocate to follow the hot hiring locations for good dev jobs, as that changes once or twice a decade. If you're in some place that "used to be" good for dev jobs, there's a real chance it's not coming back. Devs in one city might all be complaining about how hard it is to find any job at all, while teams in another city are desperate to hire anyone. There are good reasons why someone can't move (kids in school, spouse with a better job, etc), but don't let simple fear of change hold you back. I saw several office closures over my career, Only in one case were the junior devs not doing a good job. All the rest were either "turns out the product didn't sell well, end of company" or "senior management at a remote office got too arrogant with their demands, and corporate decided it was easier to close the office than put up with them". In every case senior leadership had make critical mistakes that doomed everyone, but it was rarely an indication of the skill of the junior devs. On the flipside, we always looked at hiring junior devs who were affected by such closures as a great opportunity to find talent, not a black mark against the devs.

I don't imagine there was any sort of competition. Rather, I'd say the art people delivered on their end, while the code people ... didn't.

I don't think they'd need to finish the game for a console release, just colonies would be enough as that's something KSP1 doesn't have. IMO the blocker is crash bugs, as consoles have actual standards when it comes to crash bugs (if little else), and it's not like the Sonic3D secret level select trick is going to work for them. I have a suspicion the long-standing major bugs in KSP2 aren't actually all that difficult to fix, just needs a different team to fix them, but obviously I'm just guessing.

No, no. In the VAB you set the docking port as "this specific part is the part that any other ship will use as the target when selecting this ship as the target". Unlike today where from ship A you select a part on ship B, instead the "target part" becomes just a property of a ship, like the root part or control-from-here part. You'd only need an action of any kind if you wanted to keep changing it around between ports. Given the bug patch release cycle, it looks like they probably did have one ready to go, with the fixes Nate noted in his last post. Color me skeptical that those fixes actually work, but I wouldn't be surprised if someone at PD pushed them out soon. After that, though. yeah. I don't think there will ever be any more feature work, just bugfixes, unless (A) colonies are much closer to done than I imagine, and (B) T2 thinks a console release will make a lot of money.

Yeah, it was clear to me from my 90 minutes before refunding that the team didn't know any sort of modern best practices. With UI examples, you can at least make a slight excuse that UI test automation is hard (especially early on when the UI is constantly being changed). But the bugs in the maneuver node? The simple fact that maneuver node bugs made it into the internal daily build, let alone any sort of release candidate, said it all. That's where you start, before you even have a second planet or a VAB or anything. You get fuel burn and maneuver planning working, and you write very robust test automation around it so it can never regress. Both because it's the core mechanic of the whole game, and because it's so easy to write tests for. The fact that there were any easily-found game breaking bugs, and the team just lived with them? I can't even. I can't even begin to even.

I never felt the need to build Star Destroyers or other 1000-part ships. I really like KSP1 as a mission-based rocket sim. I spent endless hours making reusable boosters with which I could do a re-entry burn from orbit and land hands-off at the KSC. Buggy and crashy as it is, I still find it fun. I think most people who post on this forum would have loved a "KSP1 without the bugs" before any of the new stuff in KSP2, but we're a pretty small niche. Still, does anyone think that "KSP1 without the bugs" would have gone worse than what we actually got?

That's the software development industry, though. I understand it coming as a shock the first time someone gets ambushed by a layoff. In part, that's on us senior people for not communicating it well to the junior people on the team, as part of mentoring about the industry as a whole. I think I failed in that way. But software development is simply not an industry in which you can expect continuous employment. We have it better than actors or construction workers for sure, jobs can last years at a time. While I believe anyone in any job should try to have 6 months living expenses saved up for when things go bad, that's doubly true for dev work. You will spend months unemployed, so be ready either with savings or another job to fall back on. I used to work with a guy would work the office job during the day and bartend at night. I though that was silly at the time. How wrong I was; he had it figured out.

Because that's the job. If they told us stuff not approved by corporate, they'd be bad CMs. They work for the company, not for you. Plus, you're unfairly assuming they still have control of their accounts.

I totally agree on the (lack of) communication. This is a real jerk move towards the player base, even by AAA standards. That's AAA publishers for you, always lowering the bar. I disagree on the "corporate greed" part though. When a team just can't deliver, it makes no sense to keep funding them. It's unfortunate and disruptive for the junior team members just doing the tasks assigned to them at the speed and quality expected of them, and I feel for them (been there), but then as an industry we understand that a failed project isn't any sort of black mark on the resume of a junior dev. Long term, staying with a bad team teaches bad practices, which is career poison. Better to move to a team that does things right and learn how a good shop is run, much as the next few months will suck.

Good point that there will always be a need to improvise. Heck, that's half the fun of KSP. But for docking ports, consider that the port could have "I'm the target" in its part menu, and you could set it in the VAB, and never have to mess with it unless you had multiple docking ports. Sure would be nice to have "control from here" be stageable, too.

IMO, KSP is a dead IP now. It's rude of Take2 not to have a statement to players about the future of the game, but aside from not being jerks there would be little point. I'd love to see bugfixes for the top 20 issues (I might pick KSP2 up on sale for $5 if they did), but I'd understand if T2 didn't bother, and just buried the IP. Poor Kerbals. KSP1 is still fun though!

IMO, the right answer for parts is that a right click on the part should bring up the menu for the part you clicked on, and any parts contained within it. Yes, you can still hide a part from that if you try hard enough, but it's simple and right for almost all craft. However, that misses the bigger problem: you should never need the part menus. Anything you want to do through them should be do-able through staging and/or action groups. In other words, anything you can do through any part menu should be available from both staging and action groups (and there should be no difference between those: a stage is just a sequenced action group).

I don't expect we'll see anything more of the Kerbal IP, but that doesn't mean someone can't make a great rocket game. Much as I like the Kerbals, it was the physics sim that was the real appeal for me. Having expressive characters in the world the rockets launch from is key, IMO, but they could be something other than Kerbals.

While I agree the KSP2 codebase really is that bad, there are some amazing support teams out there. I've known guys who support vast libraries of legaicy code with just a small team, and are very fast at fixing bugs. There's a knack to supporting a large codebase without really understanding it.

Dakota is just the CM. Never blame the CM for what corporate instructs them to say. Nate is a great PR guy - look at all the hype KSP2 had at launch! Will anyone trust him again? Gamers are notoriously bad consumers, so who knows. For sure I'd never trust Nate to run a studio again, as he lacks a technical background and has demonstrated he lacks the magic needed to lead an engineering team without an engineering background.

We know for sure that the IG offices in Seattle are closed. We know for sure that Nate's LinkedIn now shows him working for PD, not IG. We can conclude with some confidence that IG, the studio, is history. We don't know what happened to all the devs there, but any merging of them into other parts of PD would likely involve relocation (the WARN act distinguishes between layoffs and site closures, this is the latter). We know some sort of KSP2 work is still ongoing. While it's possible that KSP2 feature development will continue at another studio, that's unlikely given current industry trends. More likely, the game will move to a support group focusing on bugfixes.

Nate Simpson changed his current employer in his LinkedIn page recently from Intercept Games to Private Division.

Yeah, the tweet is just reflexive corpo-speak, and all it tells us is there exists at least one dev still working on KSP2. I think it very likely at this point that the team was ambushed by this news, and everyone who would post rumor control is either gone, or struggling to get straight answers front their corporate overlords. Either way, my sympathies for Dakota.

This corporate announcement doesn't tell us much. Someone somewhere is continuing to work on KSP2. OK. But clearly something major has happened, and the answer is "it's complicated", or official rumor control posts would have happened immediately. Communities have very little effect on what's going on at a game studio. Beyond submitting bug reports, and the general feeling of the community about whether a given feature is fun, the "community" is basically ignored. The "positivity" or "negativity" of the forums doesn't affect anything meaningful except the mental health of the poor community managers.