Is Squad working on a new game?

[Serenity]

42 minutes ago, nestor said:

NDA in bold but just curios to hear what type of game you would imagine us doing next if that was the case. 

A strategy/resource/management KSP, top down view and all of that.

Please haha .That would be something awesome  .

[TheSaint]

44 minutes ago, nestor said:

NDA in bold but just curios to hear what type of game you would imagine us doing next if that was the case. 

Well, I would guess that unless you guys really enjoy litigation, it would be something completely unlike a physics-based space exploration game....

[AHHans]

1 hour ago, nestor said:

NDA in bold but just curious to hear what type of game you would imagine us doing next if that was the case. 

Oerks.(*) Sorry, I'll have to think about this for a bit before I can give you an answer. (Edit: it's 11:30pm here, you might get an real answer tomorrow...)

I hope that you work on a new game for two reasons: one is that I really like KSP, so I give it a good chance that I also like another game made by the same people. And second I'm not sure if and for how long KSP will keep paying your bills, so having a "plan B" seems to be a good idea to me. Also keep in mind that this was before the breaking ground DLC came out. But even with regular new DLCs, I don't know for how long KSP will keep paying your bills.

P.S. (*) That's German for the sound when all the long-unused gears in someones head start turning again.

Edited August 20, 2019 by AHHans

[Clockwork13]

foreshadowed

[JPLRepo]

12 hours ago, TheSaint said:

Well, I would guess that unless you guys really enjoy litigation, it would be something completely unlike a physics-based space exploration game....

Why would there be litigation? From whom? against whom?

[klgraham1013]

14 hours ago, nestor said:

NDA in bold but just curious to hear what type of game you would imagine us doing next if that was the case. 

Luckily for you, I can see the future.  I suggest donning your aviators and honing your acrobatic aviation!  Pilot Wings: New Adventures for the Nintendo Super Switch is coming in 2021!  Build your whirligig flyers with a plethora of parts!  Race in high stakes competitive competitions and reach the top of the charts!  Your rivals are close behind!  Can you solve the conspiracy that lurks behind the famed international tournament!?  What darkness hides in the hidden depths!?  Take arms my friend!  Battle the Kraken Army in Pilot Wings: New Adventurers 2: The Darkening coming in 2023!  Mount an arsenal of tentacle killing bullet flingers to your faithful flyers!  Bombs ahoy in this thrilling, high stakes escapade from the wild jungles of Cambodia to the Egyptian pyramids!  Only you and your rag tag team can thwart the evil menace in Pilot Wings: New Adventures 3: This Time It's Personal coming in 2025!

[AHHans]

14 hours ago, AHHans said:

Oerks.(*) Sorry, I'll have to think about this for a bit before I can give you an answer. (Edit: it's 11:30pm here, you might get an real answer tomorrow...)

O.K. I had some more time to think about that, and the conclusion is:

... drumrolll ...

I have no real idea what kind of game you at SQUAD are working on!

It just depends on too many factors that I don't know about. What kind of people do you have running around at SQUAD looking for new work? Hardcore physics engine coders? Graphic artists? "Movie" directors? Story writers?
Did someone at SQUAD have a nice idea for a completely new game? Are you trying to do a somewhat-quick "asset flip" out of KSP? (Which could be good - even great - if done right!) Are you working on a new game that plays completely different than KSP, but internally re-uses a lot of KSP?

Some ideas are:

• Using mostly the existing KSP to tell a story, making the rocket building and flying parts a lot easier (e.g. by telling the player what to do) and focusing more on the story to attract a different player base. (Kind of "let a good story teller go crazy with the mission editor". )
• Maybe the above could also be used to make a educational program teach small children about how rockets and orbits work. (Or teach not-so-small children. )
• A more "XCOM like" KSP: where there is more variation and resource management in the base building part, and you do single missions with your rockets. Bound together by a story with not only a start but also a clear ending. This doesn't have to include shooting others, interplanetary transport can be exiting on its own.
• A submarine building game. ("KSP meets Subnautica") With (semi-)realistic physics.
• A graphical novel in space?
• A space-fortress building game. ("Forts in space")

Edit: P.S. Someone used the l-word. All these ideas are yours to do with whatever you want.

Edited August 21, 2019 by AHHans
Added P.S.

[r4pt0r]

I had another Dev say you Squad guys are helping Star Theory for KSP2, Have any switched over to actually being employees for Star Theory?

Have Harvester or Maxmaps sent any well wishes for the sequel? Or any of the old crew? I like to imagine some stay in touch as friends.

If these are against the NDA I get that as well.

 

 

As an aside to the others speculating, it may be worth noting that while Squad made KSP off one mans idea, and they may like space exploration too, if the company Squad makes another game it could just as easily be something completely unrelated to the space genre. Maybe a Medieval turnbased RPG. Might be an arcade racer. Just needs another spark, an idea that is good enough the company is willing to develop and see if its worth pursuing. But I wouldnt think they are going to resign themselves to being only craft building/space simulators. Splinter Cell and Just Dance are both Ubisoft games after all.

Edited August 21, 2019 by r4pt0r

[Lisias]

2 hours ago, JPLRepo said:

Why would there be litigation? From whom? against whom?

Non compete clausules. The same thing that prevents HarvesteR to make a Curupira Space Program or something.

* Curupira is a local folklore characterer.

[klgraham1013]

1 hour ago, JPLRepo said:

Why would there be litigation? From whom? against whom?

All those people that got sued for making Doom clones.

3 minutes ago, Lisias said:

Non compete clausules. The same thing that prevents HarvesteR to make a Curupira Space Program or something.

* Curupira is a local folklore characterer.

I doubt there is any such thing.  That'd be like saying ex members of Bioware couldn't make an Obsidian rpg.

@AHHans Don't forget that Squad sold KSP to Take Two.  Anything with Kerbals in it will need to be approved by Take Two.  I think it's more than likely that the next Squad game won't be connected to KSP.

[Lisias]

14 minutes ago, klgraham1013 said:

All those people that got sued for making Doom clones.

Not so fast. These things happen since the Pong era.

Magnavox sued Atari due the Pong game. Later, Atari sued Magnavox due Pac Man. There are plenty of cases in History about this. Some with happy ends, some not that much.

http://mentalfloss.com/article/55078/11-times-video-games-led-lawsuits

14 minutes ago, klgraham1013 said:

I doubt there is any such thing.  That'd be like saying ex members of Bioware couldn't make an Obsidian rpg.

It does.

https://www.cheapassgamer.com/topic/59051-ea-calls-ubisoft-on-forcing-non-compete-clauses-on-workers-in-letter/

Edited August 21, 2019 by Lisias
Bad quoting fixed

[AHHans]

14 minutes ago, klgraham1013 said:

Don't forget that Squad sold KSP to Take Two.  Anything with Kerbals in it will need to be approved by Take Two.  I think it's more than likely that the next Squad game won't be connected to KSP.

None of my suggestions requires Kerbals. You could replace them with humans or other aliens.

And even if: why should Take Two not allow SQUAD to make a KSP related game, as long as it doesn't compete against KSP 2? (And as long as they get their "fair" share of the earnings.)

[MechBFP]

1 hour ago, Lisias said:

Non compete clausules. The same thing that prevents HarvesteR to make a Curupira Space Program or something.

Wouldn’t happen with a parent company (Take Two) running things. Squad would just be “asked” to stop working on it if Take Two didn’t like it. 

[Lisias]

1 hour ago, MechBFP said:

Wouldn’t happen with a parent company (Take Two) running things. Squad would just be “asked” to stop working on it if Take Two didn’t like it. 

It's not how things work. A Company cannot forbid someone to exercise a fundamental right (the right to work) just because they don't like it.

They must take a previous agreement from you. Written agreement. Then they have such options. That agreement is the non compete clause on the contract you sign when is hired.

Even to "ask" without that agreement can be a legal liability - you risk a  denounce by extortion depending on how you "ask".

In the very end, it's on the Contract you signed. It's not something that you are forced by law to accept. Check the Contract and follow what's agreed there.

These information can be easily found on Goggle (or by chatting to a friend laywer), so may I ask to prevent derailing (yet more) this thread, please?  create a new one or hit me in a message for links if you want.

[MechBFP]

2 minutes ago, Lisias said:

It's not how things work. A Company cannot forbid someone to exercise a fundamental right (the right to work) just because they don't like it.

They must take a previous agreement from you. Written agreement. Then they have such options. That agreement is the non compete clause on the contract you sign when is hired.

Even to "ask" without that agreement can be a legal liability - you risk a  denounce by extortion depending on how you "ask".

In the very end, it's on the Contract you signed. It's not something that you are forced by law to accept. Check the Contract and follow what's agreed there.

These information can be easily found on Goggle (or by chatting to a friend laywer), so may I ask to prevent derailing (yet more) this thread, please?  create a new one or hit me in a message for links if you want.

If you didn’t want to derail the thread why didn’t you just PM me?

[TheSaint]

Two things:

1. IANAL. I didn't even sleep at a Holiday Inn Express last night. But I have friends in the video game industry and have spent many hours listening to their travails in dealing with similar contract issues involving large corporations.

2. I have no inside information concerning whatever contractual agreements exist between Squad and TTI. Having such information would certainly inform this conversation. But, it would also make this conversation subject to NDA, so there is that.

That said, I would be shocked if there is no non-compete clause buried in the contract between Squad and TTI. Remember, TTI bought KSP, they didn't buy Squad. They would be crazy to not protect that investment from competition if they can do so. And since they don't own Squad, they can't force them to do anything outside of a contractual agreement. And, from my admittedly second-hand experience, non-compete clause cases are very fluid things. They depend a lot on:

• How congenial is the working relationship between the competing companies?
• How threatened does the offended party actually feel by the competing product?
• How much money can the threatened party afford to throw at the problem?
• How much money can the threatening party afford to throw at the problem?
• How much does the judge and/or jury actually understand the product and/or market in question?

In other words, a whole lot of factors that have very little to do with the question, "Is the product actually competing with the product that was sold?" Trying to wiggle around a non-compete clause is a crap shoot. A very expensive crap shoot. And one that most companies in their right mind won't bet on.

4 hours ago, klgraham1013 said:

All those people that got sued for making Doom clones.

Those people didn't have contracts with non-compete clauses with Id. That's the difference.

4 hours ago, klgraham1013 said:

I doubt there is any such thing.  That'd be like saying ex members of Bioware couldn't make an Obsidian rpg.

Ex-employees are different. If the employee hasn't signed anything, they are free to do as they please. Squad employees could leave the company and go work with another software company and make "Nermal Space Expedition" all they like. As long as they haven't signed a non-compete contract. And, even if they have, if the company is big enough, and has enough money and lawyers to make TTI think it isn't worth their effort to pursue, they can probably still get away with it even if they did sign a non-compete contract. See above.

=============================================================

To bring it back on topic, given all of the info above, I would guess that Squad will work on a game that builds on their strengths but is in a completely different genre than KSP. Something that is popular, but hasn't been tapped out, somewhere they can still innovate. A niche game, a blockbuster would ruin them (as counter-intuitive as that sounds). Unity-based, obviously. Physics-centered. I'm not psychic, I have no crystal ball, so I can't really say what they are working on. But if it were me, I would look at the Factorio-like engine-building genre, but in 3D with real physics. Just throwing out ideas.

The obvious exception to all of this would be if Squad were to contract directly with TTI to produce another Kerbal-themed game. Maybe with a tie-in to (or even integration with) KSP2? Kerbal planetary exploration, maybe?

[BigFatStupidHead]

6 hours ago, klgraham1013 said:

Luckily for you, I can see the future.  I suggest donning your aviators and honing your acrobatic aviation!  Pilot Wings: New Adventures for the Nintendo Super Switch is coming in 2021!  Build your whirligig flyers with a plethora of parts!  Race in high stakes competitive competitions and reach the top of the charts!  Your rivals are close behind!  Can you solve the conspiracy that lurks behind the famed international tournament!?  What darkness hides in the hidden depths!?  Take arms my friend!  Battle the Kraken Army in Pilot Wings: New Adventurers 2: The Darkening coming in 2023!  Mount an arsenal of tentacle killing bullet flingers to your faithful flyers!  Bombs ahoy in this thrilling, high stakes escapade from the wild jungles of Cambodia to the Egyptian pyramids!  Only you and your rag tag team can thwart the evil menace in Pilot Wings: New Adventures 3: This Time It's Personal coming in 2025!

I could seriously see myself playing that.

[Loskene]

Well I guess this one turned out to be N/A. We are getting a new game, but it isn't Squad making it. Everybody wins?

[MechBFP]

4 minutes ago, Loskene said:

Well I guess this one turned out to be N/A. We are getting a new game, but it isn't Squad making it. Everybody wins?

They might not be making it but they are actually working on it.

[JPLRepo]

The owners of Squad sold Squad and KSP IP to Take Two. So I think you guys have got it wrong.

[TheSaint]

21 minutes ago, JPLRepo said:

The owners of Squad sold Squad and KSP IP to Take Two. So I think you guys have got it wrong.

Maybe you are privileged to information I am not. But if Squad was purchased by TTI at the time that TTI purchased KSP, that would contradict what was said by Squad staff at the time of the purchase.

 

[klgraham1013]

4 hours ago, JPLRepo said:

The owners of Squad sold Squad and KSP IP to Take Two.

The sell of Squad must have been under NDA then.

[Serenity]

I am kinda confused...so this new game(not KSP2), the one we talking about here, will be made by the people who sold Squad or it will be made by Take Two's Squad?

Edited August 21, 2019 by Boyster

[Lisias]

1 hour ago, Boyster said:

I am kinda confused...

All of this is just wild speculation. It's meant to be confused, it's an open sky public brainstorming.

TL;DR: who can talk, doesn't really knows. Who knows, can't really talk.

So we ended up making educated guesses based (or biased) on what we think we know, getting new bits of information and then makind new re-educated guesses. 

There's a lot to learn on this things. It happens that you can't foresee what you are going to learn.

Edited August 22, 2019 by Lisias
Hit "Save" too soon.

[Superfluous J]

I hope they're working on a new game. You can barely keep a company afloat working on a single game when it DOESN'T have a sequel looming.