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Jarin

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Am I just not understanding game development, or is that a lot of core positions that are open, there? Lead Designer and Lead Artist seem to be kind of important to a game that's been in development for multiple years.

 

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1 minute ago, Jarin said:

Am I just not understanding game development, or is that a lot of core positions that are open, there? Lead Designer and Lead Artist seem to be kind of important to a game that's been in development for multiple years.

A lead is a team manager. They are very important in the long term, but a team can hobble along for a while without one if they have good leadership structure above and good production. It's a lot more work for the directors when they don't have good leads, but it's manageable short-term, so even if several leads leave the studio, things don't grind to a hold. The number of leads also depends on the number of IC roles. So if the teams have been growing through hire, the need for new leads might have only recently formed.

And that's if the positions are vacant already. We know that Intercept has been working on spinning up a small team for a new project, and it's possible that these vacancies are to replace people who will be moving to a new project. That would mean that the leads are still on KSP2 until new people are hired and teams are rearranged. This is normal practice for studios that want to keep their lights on, as they are basically paid to make a game for the publisher and a big chunk of income disappears once the game actually ships. Intercept is owned by T2, so the pressure isn't as high, but generally, their budget is still subject to approval, and approval is subject to Intercept showing that they're working on another game.

So all in all, this doesn't have to be an indicator of any sort of a problem.

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We shouldn't be so negative about this. If I understand game development correctly, it's possible to have more than one lead designer.

There was this slideshow panel that I remember where T2 wanted to make a mobile entry for all of their franchises. Perhaps this is intended for that?
It's more than possible that they're hiring a QA tester because they're in the last stages of development, and they want to make sure everything's up-to-scratch for release this year.

Edited by intelliCom
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I feel like this could be for DLC, or they could have a departure/vacancy. I wouldn't be so worried. Don't  forget that Squad is now helping with the development of KSP 2. So even if their were holes in Intercepts dev team, Squad can fill those roles in double-fold (in theory). 

Note- I assume most Squad devs speak espanol, so maybe there would be a communication barrier. I don't know :confused:

Edited by PlutoISaPlanet
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Movies and games are now getting so complex, that getting them to a point where delivered product meets customer expectation is a waiting game on technology to catch up, and with it, people who are familiar and good enough with that new technology or process to oversee and implement it.  

I had imagined that in stating 2022, they would likely release before 2025, because I'm willing to sign against the value of my house that any stated deadline that lies more than a year from it's claim will be delayed.  Even by 2025, they'd be right in line with projected timelines for games this big and complex.   Most movies now take 5-6 years, from public announcement to launch, and games can take anywhere from 6-10 years from announcement to launch, so even with a slight delay, they're still well under the normal development time line.  

Edited by Bosun
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2 minutes ago, Bosun said:

Movies and games are now getting so complex, that getting them to a point where delivered product meets customer expectation is a waiting game on technology to catch up, and with it, people who are familiar and good enough with that new technology or process to oversee and implement it.  

I had imagined that in stating 2022, they would likely release before 2025, because I'm willing to sign against the value of my house that any stated deadline that lies more than a year from it's claim will be delayed.  Even by 2025, they'd be right in line with projected timelines for games this big and complex.   Most movies now take 5-6 years now, from public announcement to launch, and games can take anywhere from 6-10 years from announcement to launch, so even with a slight delay, they're still well under the normal development time line.  

I will admit that it's a bit strange how they've only been showing us "pre-alpha" footage despite it having to release this year. There should be footage at least in beta by now.

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One factor that makes it more difficult, is that due to the extremely long development times, that public expectation has more time to change and adapt to rapidly released new hardware and process tech.  

I track some mods that developers are making for the Freespace 2 engine, that started when the game came out, and due to so many advances in shading and lighting and texturing, they've still not released it because by the time they've got a prototype release, there's so many new things that can do what they made better, and so they get stuck in a rut of continually trying to keep up with current tech, so that when the game is released, it's interesting and playable on modern machines.  

I imagine a slighter version of this cycle gets played out in development tracks of 3-4 years or longer.  

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1 hour ago, intelliCom said:

There should be footage at least in beta by now.

Definitely not. Beta is "Finished game, some bugs." I don't think summer was ever realistic for KSP2, so if we're looking at a fall release, there are 6-8 months of work until release, so maybe 4-7 until RC submission. Depending on the kind of game we're talking about, maybe it should be well into alpha by this point, but for a game like KSP, the alpha phase is going to be pretty short. Alpha is feature complete, fully playable, but potentially with major bugs that prevent completion of the game start-to-finish. If you're making an open world RPG game, going from alpha to beta can easily take a year or longer. But for something like KSP2, once it's in alpha, it's a stone's throw away from beta. And beta is basically polish. Unless they're coming in hot, with a pile of bugs, beta might be the last couple of months before RC is submitted.

So even if it really is still in pre-alpha, which we don't know - all of the footage we have is potentially months old - even then, there is time for a fall '22 release. Though, it is, potentially, starting to get tight. And if the game has already entered alpha, then it's well on schedule.

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8 minutes ago, K^2 said:

Definitely not. Beta is "Finished game, some bugs." I don't think summer was ever realistic for KSP2, so if we're looking at a fall release, there are 6-8 months of work until release, so maybe 4-7 until RC submission. Depending on the kind of game we're talking about, maybe it should be well into alpha by this point, but for a game like KSP, the alpha phase is going to be pretty short. Alpha is feature complete, fully playable, but potentially with major bugs that prevent completion of the game start-to-finish. If you're making an open world RPG game, going from alpha to beta can easily take a year or longer. But for something like KSP2, once it's in alpha, it's a stone's throw away from beta. And beta is basically polish. Unless they're coming in hot, with a pile of bugs, beta might be the last couple of months before RC is submitted.

So even if it really is still in pre-alpha, which we don't know - all of the footage we have is potentially months old - even then, there is time for a fall '22 release. Though, it is, potentially, starting to get tight. And if the game has already entered alpha, then it's well on schedule.

So basically any trailer showing a video game prior to release would have to be considered beta footage? Even if it's a launch day trailer?

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I don't want to speak too much out of school - but:

Quote

Except Kerbal Space Program? 
    Why, KSP2, of course!  hehehe  
    (Sorry, I had to) 

The question was, 'what's your favorite game'. 
         
     
 

I don't know much about game design - but when the writers are getting a chance to play the game... 

I can only assume it's pretty far along. 

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1 hour ago, intelliCom said:

So basically any trailer showing a video game prior to release would have to be considered beta footage? Even if it's a launch day trailer?

Keep in mind, there is some variation, because it's not like there is a committee that decides what you should call each stage of development, but generally speaking, there's pre-production, pre-alpha, alpha, beta, release candidates, and release/gold. With day-zero patches, that whole beta-RC-gold becomes a little blurry. Like, when you're playing a "beta", especially if it was a pre-order incentive, it's often actually the RC version. But then, yeah, most of the promo footage would get captured in beta, because people almost never do these captures at the last moment. And even if the promo footage is captured super late, you usually wouldn't use the release version, because you often rely on dev tools, and there might not even be a dev build of the release version. In which case, one of the RC builds is usually used.

As for whether that will actually be called "beta footage," probably not. Devs aren't required to put that message there. That message exists when they know they're showing something unfinished that definitely will change. If there's beta footage that looks identical to shipped game, nobody's going to label it as beta footage.

Edit:

1 hour ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

I don't know much about game design - but when the writers are getting a chance to play the game... 

Eh, that doesn't have to be an indicator. We had all-hands play tests of games while ridiculously early in pre-alpha at one studio I worked at, and I've never been at a place where you can't just ask one of the engineers or designers for a build. Game studios generally encourage anyone on the team to play the games they're working on.

Edited by K^2
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1 hour ago, Gargamel said:

He's also a QA tester for KSP2 for his full time job... so regardless of the state it's in, he gets to play it. 

Cool - did not know that: only recently learned he's writing... And specifically the stuff most likely to help me get past the Mun/Minmus!

43 minutes ago, K^2 said:

We had all-hands play tests of games while ridiculously early in pre-alpha at one studio I worked at

I don't know anything about how studios operate, but that makes sense.  Guess that let's the team find out glaring errors in time to fix them early? 

Drawing from the history that the initial studio asked for 6 additional months development shortly after the reveal trailer in 2019 and the 'Fall 2021' prediction from May 2020 after the dust had settled from the studio switch, I guessed they were pretty far along. Assuming covid delay is a factor I speculated that writing and play testing was kind of 'end of the line' stuff for a studio. 

Thanks for the explanation 

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5 hours ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

Guess that let's the team find out glaring errors in time to fix them early?

Depends on the stage of development. Early on, it's more about feature testing, since most of the bugs are kind of obvious. Later on, yeah, it turns more into data gathering on performance and bugs. But there's also the aspect of trying to keep the team motivated. People tend to do better work on a project when they understand the project as a whole and are invested. Having everyone try various builds of the game early is a good way to achieve that.

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10 hours ago, Bosun said:

games can take anywhere from 6-10 years from announcement to launch

Wat. Where'd you pull this from?

 

Speaking of QA, one could call this job "playing", but it's exploiting the game down to its last byte in search for bugs or unintended behavior, then if something happens, it needs to be recreated, thoroughly reported and sent to programmers. It includes most ridiculous things like checking what happens when an integer for ship velocity value gets exceeded because they know well that some players will try to do it.

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9 hours ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

I don't know much about game design - but when the writers are getting a chance to play the game... 

I can only assume it's pretty far along. 

 

9 hours ago, Gargamel said:

He's also a QA tester for KSP2 for his full time job... so regardless of the state it's in, he gets to play it. 


Gargamel is correct... sort of.
I was a QA tester on KSP1 for 3 years, and on KSP2 for <classified>
But as of about a month ago I'm the full time writer.
 

54 minutes ago, The Aziz said:

Speaking of QA, one could call this job "playing", but it's exploiting the game down to its last byte in search for bugs or unintended behavior, then if something happens, it needs to be recreated, thoroughly reported and sent to programmers. It includes most ridiculous things like checking what happens when an integer for ship velocity value gets exceeded because they know well that some players will try to do it.

Oh yeah. Play testing is a big part of the QA job. And trying to dream up and anticipate what the players will do is one of the most challenging (and fun) parts of it. 

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2 hours ago, The Aziz said:

Speaking of QA, one could call this job "playing", but it's exploiting the game down to its last byte in search for bugs or unintended behavior, then if something happens, it needs to be recreated, thoroughly reported and sent to programmers. It includes most ridiculous things like checking what happens when an integer for ship velocity value gets exceeded because they know well that some players will try to do it.

  • I remember reporting a bug about rcs that wouldn't work if the mouse was over the tutorial window
  • Or reporting an error in gramma in one of the tutorials
  • Or creating an excel sheet for a bug report that had an issue with longer and longer loading problems the more crafts that existed in a save
  • Or creating a group of 55 tasks (launching/loading/landing/going to tracking station/going to KSC screen/saving) that I repeated exactly the same 10-20 times for a set of graphs to show how the main memory leak is affected by scene changes over multiple versions (a lot of scene changes involves loading the entire universe each time from the persistent file causes it)
  • Or creating a mod that shows parts coordinates to show how exactly robotic drift was affecting crafts (and docking port drift after 1.12.0 was released)
  • Or confirming someone else's bug report by planting lots of flags along biome boundaries to indicate that the biome and the terrain weren't quite right (1.2 prerelease)
  • One I don't remember reporting is how textboxes seem to need the mouse to stay inside of the text box or when typing the text box can act weird.

Game testing isn't all about just playing the game like a normal person does. A lot of testing is the small nitty gritty stuff.

Then there's the process of figuring out how to replicate a bug consistently

Then there's the process of honing in on the root cause of a bug so that the person fixing it doesn't have to waste time doing part of digging it out.

I wouldn't call it playing. Its fun for me, but its not playing in the sense a lot of people would think.

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26 minutes ago, Anth12 said:
  • I remember reporting a bug about rcs that wouldn't work if the mouse was over the tutorial window
  • Or reporting an error in gramma in one of the tutorials
  • Or creating an excel sheet for a bug report that had an issue with longer and longer loading problems the more crafts that existed in a save
  • Or creating a group of 55 tasks (launching/loading/landing/going to tracking station/going to KSC screen/saving) that I repeated exactly the same 10-20 times for a set of graphs to show how the main memory leak is affected by scene changes over multiple versions (a lot of scene changes involves loading the entire universe each time from the persistent file causes it)
  • Or creating a mod that shows parts coordinates to show how exactly robotic drift was affecting crafts (and docking port drift after 1.12.0 was released)
  • Or confirming someone else's bug report by planting lots of flags along biome boundaries to indicate that the biome and the terrain weren't quite right (1.2 prerelease)
  • One I don't remember reporting is how textboxes seem to need the mouse to stay inside of the text box or when typing the text box can act weird.

Game testing isn't all about just playing the game like a normal person does. A lot of testing is the small nitty gritty stuff.

Then there's the process of figuring out how to replicate a bug consistently

Then there's the process of honing in on the root cause of a bug so that the person fixing it doesn't have to waste time doing part of digging it out.

I wouldn't call it playing. Its fun for me, but its not playing in the sense a lot of people would think.

Could not have said it better myself  :happy:

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As a modder, I can attest to that.  Having a bug reported is only the first step.  Being able to reliability replicate it is absolutely necessary in order to be able to fix it.  Sometimes ( and this only applies to modded installs) it can take hours just to eliminate installed mods which don't impact the bug.  Once that's done, it easier to fix.

I would have loved to have been offered a job with Intercept.

 

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1 hour ago, Anth12 said:

Game testing isn't all about just playing the game like a normal person does. A lot of testing is the small nitty gritty stuff.

For part testing in ReStock we set up a QA sheet listing all the parts and would go through and systematically test the parts, once assigned to be tested by the creators, in various environments for a whole range of specific areas that would be common problem areas. We would then mark track the issues on the sheet, open a Git Issue for it and then link to the issue in the tracker so that we could easily track all the QA. It worked really well in that it created a lot of undesired work for the part creators ( :D ) but in the end it resulted in a great experience for the users of the mod. This was almost exclusive to part QA but there was almost zero 'playing' of the game and just isolated case testing.

8SPboCk.png

Just a preview of sheet... with all the hard work and input from the part creators, its now very green. :D 

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30 minutes ago, Poodmund said:

For part testing in ReStock we set up a QA sheet listing all the parts and would go through and systematically test the parts, once assigned to be tested by the creators, in various environments for a whole range of specific areas that would be common problem areas. We would then mark track the issues on the sheet, open a Git Issue for it and then link to the issue in the tracker so that we could easily track all the QA. It worked really well in that it created a lot of undesired work for the part creators ( :D ) but in the end it resulted in a great experience for the users of the mod. This was almost exclusive to part QA but there was almost zero 'playing' of the game and just isolated case testing.

8SPboCk.png

Just a preview of sheet... with all the hard work and input from the part creators, its now very green. :D 

Very nice to see this and gain an insight into your process.

Great mod

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