WatchClarkBand

I assure you that I was begging for more full time engineers.

Eh… I took the role at Intercept because I wanted to, not because I needed to. In all the ways capitalism has screwed people over, I’m a minor victim. There are so many worse injustices that should be solved well before anything I’ve experienced.

When I was at AMZN, there was one manager that a coworker and I used to talk about. My coworker once said of him, without one shred of irony, "that guy would stab his own mother in the back for $5." I completely agreed. Capitalism has been good to me, but man, it sets up some really toxic people to be in roles with power that they should never be able to wield.

Shana and I started at Intercept on the same day. She was still there when I left.

I just want to point out that everyone at Intercept only knew what they were told by PD and T2. Jeremy assured myself and everyone at Intercept around launch (when T2 was doing other rounds of layoffs) that neither PD nor Intercept would be hit with any layoffs. A day or two before I was walked out the door, he got a call informing him that he and I were being cut, and he had to do the exit meeting with me (as my manager). He asked "Paul said he was going to get a KSP tattoo upon launch, can I tell him not to do that?" He was told he couldn't pass on that info, and if I got inked before I was let go, that was just too bad for me. Luckily, I was only looking at artists at the time, and hadn't scheduled anything, but... if you believe anyone at Intercept had full view of the financials and strategic planning, you're mistaken.

As I said to a senior coworker who had also been in the games industry for a long time, "Game publishers are really just very niche hedge funds." He tilted his head and replied "You're not wrong, but when you put it that way..."

I am sad to see it end. As for Nate... look, cut the guy some slack. He's probably out of work, has a family to support, is wondering what's next, and while he has a thick skin, I certainly wouldn't want to read the vitriol that comes out daily if I were him. The one Reddit thread from a year and two months ago blaming me for the state of the game upon my departure was depressing enough for me, I can't imagine his perspective. If I were him, I'd take a long vacation, go someplace sunny and warm, and just unwind. Maybe it's my zen attitude these days. I've lost count of the number of video games I funded at kickstarters that never saw the light of day, or they launched but I never got my unlock key so I had to buy it all over again... (I'm looking at you, Homeworld 3.) Creative people are going to try to make creative things, and sometimes it's great, sometimes it's really bad, sometimes it's just okay but it's easier to call it a disaster because it's fun for people to pile on. There are only four games I play or pay attention to these days, and the community for all four games excrements on them constantly. So... I don't know, it's a trend? 70 people are out of work in the toughest time in decades for folks to find jobs in the games industry. They tried, it didn't work out, largely through no fault of the vast majority of those individuals. The @ShadowZone video was interesting. I'm sure more will come out later on. I hope the brilliant engineers I worked with get to move on to new projects where their talents won't go to waste, because they really are some top notch people. But yeah. Sad, and parts were a real pleasure.

And there are still three roles listed as being open for hire (although they are dead links). I's dotted, T's crossed, clearly. I hope the eminently employable folks there land on solid ground.

I agree, I find these discussions to be like any other "is Fender better than Gibson" or "is Toyota better than Honda" arguments. Both engines have their strengths and weaknesses, but importantly, both are built with assumptions that the game world will be an infinitely flat surface where "up" is a vector that points in the same direction everywhere. This alone makes any off-the-shelf game engine a thing that must be worked around to get the transforms and physics correct. That said, trying to do a custom game engine for a game like KSP would require, in itself, at least another dozen engineers and would add no less than two years to the development time.

I wanted the game to succeed. I'm generally not the type of person who takes extreme pleasure in the failures and pain of others. I think my largest frustration is the number of times I said "Folks, if we do Thing X, then Bad Thing Y will happen. We need to do Z instead," and other people replied with "no, we always do Thing X, we'll just fix it later," or some equivalent, and sure enough, Bad Thing Y happened. Do I feel vindicated? No. But I am aware that upon exiting myself and Jeremy, nothing really changed much, so perhaps that was another case of doing X when someone should have done Z.

This is the "fun penalty", for sure. You see it in anything "fun". Why do most musicians get screwed by labels? There's a line out the door of other musicians willing to "make it". For any position where people are begging to work there, the employee is going to sacrifice for the "honor" of being there. The ONLY exception I saw for this was at MSFT and AMZN: Engineers, UX people, etc. all made the same total comp for their level whether they were working on Games, AWS, XBox, Windows, Office, whatever.

Yes, in the States, we managers call it the "fully burdened cost", and it tends to run from 33% to 50% over whatever an employees base salary is. Health insurance, unemployment insurance (paid to the state to cover support payment should the employee be terminated), taxes, the overhead of hardware (as you called out), all factor into this. At Amazon, I believe we used an internal number of $300k/year average for the FBC of any "professional" (non Fulfillment Center) employee, as the median total compensation (salary plus bonuses plus stock) for all employees below VP level was probably $225k/year (I could give breakdowns by role/experience level, but it's easy to Google or check on Glassdoor). Game engineers (and PMs, and UX folks) tend to be paid about 60-70% of the market rate for the same role in a non-entertainment company, based on my 25 years in software development in and out of games (that is to say, if I were to survey all the game studios at which I'd worked, people made, on average 1/3rd less than they could have made at a non-game company in the same role). In case someone wants to nitpick, at the time Amazon also had a salary cap of $160k/year, but salary was a small percentage of total compensation for anyone approaching that cap, as stocks and bonuses could equal multiples of base salary at the Senior or Principal Engineer or Engineering Manager level. So it's definitely not an apples to apples comparison. For obvious reasons, I will only speak about compensation at other companies based on my experience working for them.

When I was hired, my title was Senior Manager of Engineering. There was the Creative Director (Nate) , the Art Director (Ness) , the Design Director (Shana), and two roles were hired for Director of QA (I forget this guy's name)and Director of PM (Grant, although before him the other Nate was the head of Production with a Senior Manager title, IIRC). My title was updated to Technical Director about four months before we launched EA. All the Directors reported to Jeremy Ables, who was the Studio Manager. I asked Jeremy several times who his manager was, and he said he was always uncertain, which was... curious. Who did his annual reviews? Locally, Michael Cook was in charge of the KSP franchise, and there was some other nebulous org structure inside Private Division that I never quite sorted out before it got to Take2 in NYC. So that's the org, more or less.

At the time I was hired, I had about 700 hours in KSP1 as a player. I knew that this role was leading engineering for KSP2. My primary job was to build up an engineering team that could ship the game, and every candidate I spoke with I was able to tell them we were working on a KSP title. I believe any secrecy about what was being worked on predates Intercept Games.

Saying "I have no idea what's going on" definitely isn't a good status report. However, saying "I investigated X, Y, and Z, and they're definitely not involved" is useful because it narrows down the path of investigation. So many "smart" but naive engineers would crap on the notion of documentation, but I would usually insist that documenting what was tried and didn't work was as important as documenting the implemented approach as, inevitably, some new engineer (to the team or the problem space) would see some deficiency and then dive in investigating a path that was already proven to be untenable, wasting valuable time. There's nothing wrong with not solving a problem immediately, but good engineers should communicate the paths investigated but not taken.

Agree, it's in a solid state now. Nice work team!

Reported Version: v0.1.4 (latest) | Mods: none | Can replicate without mods? Yes OS: Windows 11 Home | CPU: Intel Core i9-13950HX | GPU: nVidia GeForce RTX 4080- Laptop GPU | RAM: 32GB DDR5 Shot a probe around Jool. Found that in map view, the tessellation would break down depending on view angle and I'd get even segments of the orbital lines instead of a continuously smooth curve. I wouldn't be surprised if the original implementation wasn't performant, but it looks like it's not tessellating consistently now. Did someone try to refactor this code and miss some test cases? Game looks and performs a lot better overall, nice work on the last patch. -Paul Furio Included Attachments:

Difficult bugs to fix, I'm sure. Nice work.

Nice work on the graphical perf updates. Tell Mike and Mortoc I said "nice job."

Pretty sure that happened on March 8th.

Nice job, folks.

You're welcome. Keep playing KSP2 and trust the rest of the Intercept team. They're on your side. Things can only get better!