Skorj

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.

Interesting!

Jason Schreier is the only games journalist who reliably knows what he's talking about. EDIT: there was a tweet from the official KSP account saying some sort of development is still ongoing. So still up in the air I guess.

Sadly, it's confirmed by Jason Schreier. KSP2 is now past tense. Intercept Games is kil. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-01/take-two-interactive-shuts-down-two-game-studios?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTcxNDU5MzkzNCwiZXhwIjoxNzE1MTk4NzM0LCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJTQ1RPWlVEV1JHRzAwMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiJCMUVBQkI5NjQ2QUM0REZFQTJBRkI4MjI1MzgyQTJFQSJ9.bAGtiU7JzBiIoFWWcHxk0LHPfxjEHho9NhMqunueBxI Maybe we'll get bugfixes from a support team. Let's please show empathy for all the rank-and-file members of the dev team. I hope fortune favors them in their job hunt.

Except, if you've read the interviews with Felipe about the early days: KSP1 was created within a marketing company, not a gaming studio or even software company. They had no idea what they were doing, needed guidance, and (like most studios) were in no position to be picky about their publisher. Yes, they could have just kept trying by themselves, but I find it very hard to blame them for taking any publishing deal they could find. KSP is already a remarkable outlier for being created without a publisher in the first place.

Just to confirm from another professional dev: yes, this is how it works. I remember one particularly cruel layoff, where managers had to tell most members of their teams that they were being layed off (the worst part of the job for anyone not a sociopath), and then those managers found out they were being layed off. Just brutal. I really hope the dev team didn't find out from these forums, but that's all too common these days.

Sadly no new information there. There's recent news that Take2 has said they're not dropping support for KSP2, but that means very little. We don't know Take2's plans. Optimistically, the game has been transferred to a new studio (third times the charm). Realistically, there won't be a studio and bugfixes will be done by some support team.

To put it as simply as possible: The Creative Director is responsible for the creative direction of the game. The engineering leadership is responsible for code quality, game performance, and speed of the coding teams. You can certainly blame a creative director if a game isn't fun, or didn't focus on the elements of gameplay you like, or the art or sound were bad (like the horrid dot matrix UI font). But KSP2s real problems were IMO 90% on the engineering side. Major bugs that should never have existed even in shared internal builds, let alone release. Continuing inability to fix long-standing bugs. Very slow pace of feature development given the size of the team. The performance of the game at release. These are signs of bad engineering leadership. There's not much that senior leadership can do to fix bad engineering leadership, other than fire them (and that seems to have happened). But firing people who don't perform only helps if you can find good replacements, and AFAIK the engineering director position was never filled after the last guy left. There's an unhealthy cult of personality around creative directors in gaming.

I don't think people really understand this. People directed their ire at Nate because he's the face of the band, so to speak, and that is part of the job, but he's just not responsible for any of the technical problems or bugs. The art, we can blame him for the art, but I had no objective complaints there.

My sympathies to the dev team (whichever one it turns out to be). I hope fortune favors them in their next jobs. EDIT: I seriously hope this thread isn't how the dev team is finding out about the layoffs. That's been all too common with the gaming layoffs these past 6 months. Hopefully we'll get some sort of official communication tomorrow.

Obviously you show the most significant digits if you need to truncate a display. Time, distance, mass, whatever. Not really a question IMO