Someone Explain the Stages of KSP2’s development to me.

[Dr. Kerbal]

So. I’m confused. That does it mean it’s Pre-Alpha. And what do game delvipers tyr to accomplish in Pre-Alpha, Alpha, and Beta. And what goals do you think the Dave’s will set and try to accomplish.

[K^2]

37 minutes ago, Dr. Kerbal said:

So. I’m confused. That does it mean it’s Pre-Alpha. And what do game delvipers tyr to accomplish in Pre-Alpha, Alpha, and Beta. And what goals do you think the Dave’s will set and try to accomplish.

It varies a little from studio to studio, but vaguely speaking, alpha is feature-complete. That means, you can in principle do anything in pre-alpha that you'll be able to do in final game and all tech and parts are available. Some of it might still have unpolished or (rarely) even placeholder looks, but it's all there. Game might run horrible, it might crash, and getting to some of the content might require using dev menu or cheats. But it's all there.

Beta has most of the polish and optimization in place. The game should play the way it will play when it ships. There could be some balancing changes, and there might still be bugs, but there shouldn't be any problems that completeliy prevent you from playing through the whole game. During beta, all you are doing is fixing problems that prevent you from releasing the game.

Consequently, pre-alpha is the stage of game development that isn't feature complete. Things can be missing, including some very important parts of the game. Some content is entirely place-holder. So you shouldn't expect anything you see to be in its final state.

People would also some times specifically call out pre-production. Production is kind of an umbrella term for pretty much every stage of development once the game is approved and resources, which is primarily people who will be making the game, are allocated to the project. So when you see somebody showing prototypes or concept art from pre-production, you need to understand that it's all made by skeleton crew and main purpose is to get the game approved for production, so it's really just a mock-up of what they intend the game to look like. When a game in pre-production is approved for production, it's said to have green light.

Clear on the other side of the development cycle is release candidate (RC). When the developers say that they have a release candidate, they mean that they are done with beta stage of development and have what they think might be the final version of the game. The RC then undergoes rigorous testing as if it was a final game published across target platforms. If serious problems are found, they are fixed, and another RC version is released. Finally, once RC passes all the tests, it becomes the final version and is sometimes said to have gone gold.

Each part of development would typically be broken up into milestones and vertical slices, both of which you can think of as sets of goals developers expect to achieve by certain time. Milestones are usually internal goals, while vertical slices are presented to the publishers in form of a playable early version of the game. These can happen during every stage of production, and there is usually a vertical slice corresponding to the game going from pre-alpha to alpha and from alpha to beta, subject to approval from both the studio leadership and publishing. Now, not every studio is going to have vertical slices, but it's becoming very common, and I think Private Division would expect its studios to follow this pattern.

So the full cycle is something like this. Game concept enters pre-production when a few people are allocated on proving that concept. Often, the pre-production team is working towards the first vertical slice. That vertical slice is then a sort of a demo prototype of the game that can be played by studio heads and people from publishing to approve the game for production. If the game enters production, it is now in the pre-alpha stage working towards alpha. There can be a few more vertical slices along the way, which are used to make decisions on how the game is to be taking shape. Eventually, there is a vertical slice separating pre-alpha from alpha that goes through approval, and if everyone is satisfied with the feature set, the game is then in alpha. The difference between pre-alpha and post-alpha vertical slices is that pre-alpha slices just give you an idea of what the game will play like, while post-alpha slices should give you the full experience, albeit, within certain expectations for quality. At the final vertical slice of alpha, the game is to be approved for beta, and so that vertical slice is the first fully playable version of the game. From there on, there might be more vertical slices, but the team is generally working towards RC which you can almost think of as the very final vertical slice.

 

So what we know about KSP2 is that it's in pre-alpha. We also know that it's in full production. Technically, the game left pre-production before the first teaser at E3, but I would argue that we should only count proper production from a few months after Intercept took over, because they had to basically re-do the road map, which seems to have been approved, and that's why we now have the official 2022 release plan.

What this means is that the game is still missing a lot of its core features, but it's far past a prototype phase. Most of the content being made is intended to show up in final game and not just act as placeholder. Though, some amount of place-holder content is going to still be present until the game is ready to enter alpha stage. There are going to be parts of the game the devs will happily show us the progress on, like the new parts and some screenshots, but also a lot of the parts that are just not ready to be shown to anyone either because they aren't finished or because they don't work well at this point.