Nate Simpson at Space Creator Day talks about KSP 2.

[RayneCloud]

 

Honestly, this is really really worth a watch. I really appreciate the honesty here from Nate that there was a lot of underestimation and mistakes made and I feel very confident that the team is going to move forward in a good way.

[RayneCloud]

I mean, seriously, well done team!

[RayneCloud]

 

[Kerbart]

1.5 is a step in the right direction. Still, the talk is just that—talk and pretty pictures. We've seen that before and it disappointed before. I'll be overjoyed if 0.2 delivers, but I'm not hyped about it. I'll wait and see.

[moeggz]

I haven’t had a chance to watch Matt Lownes interview yet but I fully agree the space creator presentation was worth a watch and very appreciated.

There have been some toxic comments for sure, but I really appreciated the admittance that the trust breakdown came from the discrepancy of promised features and the current state.  Some comments  from IG made it seem (unintentionally I’m sure) like they thought the negative views some had for the game were unreasonable. 

Acknowledging that they were not unreasonable and how they (unintentionally) contributed to those views being formed was very appreciated. Pairing that with delivering a date for content being added was wonderful news.

Now I’m still going to wait for the release for final judgement, but if science is performant and low on bugs I’ll be very happy and ready to edit my steam review and start enjoying the game.

Because, as I’m glad they clearly see, the majority of negative feedback came from the lack of progress. Fix that, and you’ll see, I believe, a majority come around. And then they can talk as much or as little as they want because even tho the communication occasionally led to gripes, those gripes wouldn’t exist if the game was fun. That’s the fundamental issue, not communication strategy, and when that’s fixed things will get a lot more cheery I think.

[PDCWolf]

4 hours ago, RayneCloud said:

 

It'll never be compatible to me to hear "I have 30 years making games" and "we underestimated by a huge margin how long it'd take those tasks to be completed. In this case it was 4 years".

At least this interview puts the "wahh rushed into EA by evil t2" cries to rest.

[moeggz]

Ok having now watched the interview I have a few more comments. I appreciate both Matt for asking some tough questions and Nate for his straightforward responses. I’d like to affirm his comment that the negativity and worry was directed at the game and not at any individual, at least from me. And if science does the show part of show don’t tell I’m fairly confident they’ll win back most of the community.

My one little gripe is that it was said EA was chosen for player feedback. This still doesn’t make sense to me, I really feel they had to know how broken the game was at launch (heck the previews weren’t early access keys to the game but come here and play on these very powerful and known spec computers) but if science is good I can leave that in the past.

My feedback would be if you really want EA for feedback please start taking some universal requests and also communicate a bit more before updates. The wobbly conversation I think has been directed by feedback and I appreciate that. And I like the parts manager, but please please bring back opening a specific part by right clicking. That I think is as near a universal request as exists.

And it’s much easier to steer development in line with feedback if the feedback is open before all the programming is done. By this I mean if you want feedback on colonies start telling us how colonies work sometime before it launches. That said, I see how until this point there hasn’t been as much to have feedback on, and if balancing and ideas bounced off the community after science is released are impactful on development this gripe will mostly go away. 
 

Thanks for this more open communication, thanks even more for going “underpromise overdeliver” as we approach the delivery part. I’m excited to play For Science! (Gotta respect the ! Lol) If it’s good I hope to be one of the critical voices that you all have won over.

[KUAR]

15 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

It'll never be compatible to me to hear "I have 30 years making games" and "we underestimated by a huge margin how long it'd take those tasks to be completed. In this case it was 4 years".

At least this interview puts the "wahh rushed into EA by evil t2" cries to rest.

I don't think those are necessarily incompatible. I don't work in the industry but I do work around Agile software engineering. I can see how 80% of big games out there are basically the same and how KSP2 is novel in many ways. That's why we love it and why we're excited about it.

Platformers, first-person shooters, open-world exploration, and real-time strategy. They've been done many times before. I reckon an experienced developer could put a pretty good estimate in terms of sprint points on how long it would take to develop a new level in COD 14 (Modern Warfare 5) for instance, or to develop a new diplomatic feature in Civilisation 8. 

In contrast, how long is it going to take (for example) to develop a new manoeuver system which (unlike KSP1) double-integrates the acceleration over time in two orders, taking into account staging and mass changes, and god knows how many other external dependencies, to figure out a predicted orbit after burn; present it in a user-friendly way; and provide tools to support execution?  When you think about the engineering challenges, re-designing that particular system so that it supports long and slow interstellar burns (DAWN-like) is actually a real headache with a lot of dependencies and unknowns, which hasn't been done in gaming before. The KSP1 equivalent now looks trivial.

And that's just one example - I'm sure there's others. The mechanics for interstellar, time-warp enabled multiplayer while simultaneously supporting automated colony/resource routes are a bit mind-bending.  And I suspect they've been re-building all the base systems to support that.

So, I'm not surprised that estimating on this job is an absolute nightmare. We had an equivalent in our business recently - on a multi-million pound programme, where we're supplying subsystems into to a high-profile larger system, we under-estimated by a factor of three the complexity of doing one particular work package because we didn't understand the problem well enough. And a supplier to us, to whom we'd passed derived requirements, fluffed it even worse.

[Guest]

Another problem with estimation is that it’s basically guesswork until you know your team’s velocity. The Star Theory to IG transition would have thrown any estimates off.

Even so it’s clear that something went wrong — four years is a lot!

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

4 hours ago, Periple said:

Even so it’s clear that something went wrong — four years is a lot!

I think we (as a community) need to get off that "Four years!" thing.  It is very obvious (at least to me) that the game that was advertised by Star Theory is a very different thing than was chosen by IG to be developed.  This mismatch of expectations is likely EXACTLY why the transition was made.  Sure, it would be great to hear some honest explanation - but they likely, legally, cannot talk about it.

So when we gripe about 2020 - I think we're being both unfair and unrealistic.

...

Having said that, I do think a LOT of the criticism about EA is both valid and necessary.  We (players) are getting rolled by an industry 'standard' that seems disingenuous.  Older players remember that going "Gold" meant a largely bug-free game and paying full price was worth it.  Now, going "EA" apparently means different things to players and developers.  We expect a largely functional product, maybe with a few bugs and lacking some features.  We DO NOT expect an Alpha experience that we have to pay for - especially when the price to play is effectively 'Full Price'.  The developers apparently disagree.  (Note: this observation is not limited to IG... it's happening across the industry).

I do look forward to "For Science!".  I may wait until the first post Science bug patch to play again... or I might load it up just to see what's changed.  Still don't know.  My tolerance for disappointment has diminished greatly.

[Guest]

9 minutes ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

I think we (as a community) need to get off that "Four years!" thing.  It is very obvious (at least to me) that the game that was advertised by Star Theory is a very different thing than was chosen by IG to be developed.  This mismatch of expectations is likely EXACTLY why the transition was made.  Sure, it would be great to hear some honest explanation - but they likely, legally, cannot talk about it.

There might be legal reasons but I think ethical and PR reasons are more important. You can’t be perfectly up-front about that kind of thing without assigning blame, and it is not a done thing to do that in public, for very good reasons.

Somebody screwed up, but it’s vanishingly unlikely for anyone to go on the record as to who, when, and how. 

[Lyneira]

I'm glad to see these strides being made and look forward to trying out For Science! in december!

[VlonaldKerman]

On 10/28/2023 at 1:32 PM, PDCWolf said:

It'll never be compatible to me to hear "I have 30 years making games" and "we underestimated by a huge margin how long it'd take those tasks to be completed. In this case it was 4 years".

At least this interview puts the "wahh rushed into EA by evil t2" cries to rest.

The claim that they just underestimated the time it would take to make the game is not just implausible, it’s impossible. Remember, when KSP 2 was announced for a full release in 2020, IT WAS 2019!!! “In this case it was 4 years” is very different if at that point you estimated it would take 10, but ended up taking 14, vs estimating it would take ONE and it ending up taking FOUR UP UNTIL NOW, WITH YEARS OF DEVELOPMENT LEFT. Not even the SLS took 4 years to do <1 year of estimated dev time.

I also don’t buy the notion that they released the game on their own volition, in order to gather user feedback. A game intentionally releasing in a half baked state (even for early access) without prompting from its publisher and without oversight or objection from its publisher would be virtually unprecedented, I think.

However, I’m not too pressed about him lying (I think) in the interview. What’s he supposed to say? As long as the stuff he said about the future is at least 80% true, it’s good news. And either way, I can’t do anything about it, so I’ll just wait and see.

[MechBFP]

54 minutes ago, VlonaldKerman said:

The claim that they just underestimated the time it would take to make the game is not just implausible, it’s impossible. Remember, when KSP 2 was announced for a full release in 2020, IT WAS 2019!!! “In this case it was 4 years” is very different if at that point you estimated it would take 10, but ended up taking 14, vs estimating it would take ONE and it ending up taking FOUR UP UNTIL NOW, WITH YEARS OF DEVELOPMENT LEFT. Not even the SLS took 4 years to do <1 year of estimated dev time.

I also don’t buy the notion that they released the game on their own volition, in order to gather user feedback. A game intentionally releasing in a half baked state (even for early access) without prompting from its publisher and without oversight or objection from its publisher would be virtually unprecedented, I think.

However, I’m not too pressed about him lying (I think) in the interview. What’s he supposed to say? As long as the stuff he said about the future is at least 80% true, it’s good news. And either way, I can’t do anything about it, so I’ll just wait and see.

I’ve worked on a project before where the original estimate to completion was 6 months and it finally got finished just recently after 5 years since that original estimate was made.

There were a lot of reasons for that painfully long wait, and none of those reasons were included in the original estimate. I guarantee you that 4 year wait here has very little to do with actual hands on work but a myriad of other things that weren’t planned for. 

[VlonaldKerman]

1 minute ago, MechBFP said:

I’ve worked on a project before where the original estimate to completion was 6 months and it finally got finished just recently after 5 years since that original estimate was made.

Asking out of genuine curiosity/ information gathering: at what point did you become aware that the project was taking way too long? Because KSP 2 had been in development, as I understand it, for at least a couple of years in 2019. So they were, as far as they new (supposedly) 67% of the way through development at that time.

3 minutes ago, MechBFP said:

There were a lot of reasons for that painfully long wait, and none of those reasons were included in the original estimate. I guarantee you that 4 year wait here has very little to do with actual hands on work but a myriad of other things that weren’t planned for. 

Yes, I agree. I think, as others have stated, the vision for and direction of the game changed in 2019/20 at the same time as a lot of corporate shakeups. At that point, they should have been straightforward and honest with the community, rather than, “Nothings changed, new team, same game! Still developing!”

[Wheehaw Kerman]

20 hours ago, Periple said:

There might be legal reasons but I think ethical and PR reasons are more important. You can’t be perfectly up-front about that kind of thing without assigning blame, and it is not a done thing to do that in public, for very good reasons.

Somebody screwed up, but it’s vanishingly unlikely for anyone to go on the record as to who, when, and how. 

Agreed - we’re likely never going to find out what happened between the Star Theory trailed and the EA release.  It’d be mildly interesting, but unless TT decides to open up it’s basically unknowable.  

The unknowability is also why we need to treat the timeline-related speculation as uninformed and mostly not credible.  Nobody here except the IG folks know the history of the development, the dev planning, resource assignments, etc., etc.  Mostly it’s just groupthink.  
 

[PDCWolf]

21 hours ago, Periple said:

You can’t be perfectly up-front about that kind of thing without assigning blame

"Something big and bad did indeed happen, though we can't go into detail, but it took away this much development time" There you go. A statement crafted to at least mention that something happened without assigning blame or going into specifics.

It's not a case of hurting sensitivities, there's got to be an NDA somewhere, specially when Star Theory fell, and only upper management made it through to IG.

1 hour ago, Wheehaw Kerman said:

The unknowability is also why we need to treat the timeline-related speculation as uninformed and mostly not credible. 

I agree we'll bever have a source on what exactly happened, sadly (sadly because it'd be an amazing manual on what not to do) but at least we've got a couple of facts to go by now. Specially for those keen on believing their every word.

1. They blame themselves on underestimating.
2. Development started in 2017.
3. COVID wasn't that much of an issue.
4. Their studio is a revolving door.
5. T2 is not the bad guy.

There's probably more but those give you the biggest outline.

[Guest]

8 minutes ago, PDCWolf said:

Their studio is a revolving door.

Nate said the opposite. 

[Wheehaw Kerman]

19 minutes ago, PDCWolf said:

I agree we'll bever have a source on what exactly happened, sadly (sadly because it'd be an amazing manual on what not to do) but at least we've got a couple of facts to go by now. Specially for those keen on believing their every word.

1. They blame themselves on underestimating.
2. Development started in 2017.
3. COVID wasn't that much of an issue.
4. Their studio is a revolving door.
5. T2 is not the bad guy.

There's probably more but those give you the biggest outline.

With the possible exception of 1., unless there’s any credible inside information backing any of these up, they remain guesses or inferences at best, and extremely subjective and biased ones at that.

Nate certainly took the fall in Matt’s video for bad estimation.  Maybe that happened, or maybe him saying that was a communications decision and other factors were involved.  Again, though, all we can do is speculate.  Bad estimations like 1. are practically normal, though, and not just in software land.  I’ve seen projects in the energy space that have gone appallingly over schedule too.  Things happen.  And if you think we’re frustrated, imagine you’re an owner on year seven of what you thought was going to be a simple two year construction project…

2. And how much actual development was done during ST’s tenure,  of that, how much went out the window after IG took over, and why, and how long it took for IG to start meaningful development on the current game we can’t know until somebody breaks NDA.  Seven years, four years, who knows, and ultimately, it doesn’t matter - what matters is the product.

3.-5. are again just speculation, unless somebody on the inside talks, and pointless speculation at that, unless you’re emotionally invested in assigning blame to a scapegoat in a forum witch hunt.  And that matters to me less than the actual state and future progress of the game, which we can actually see and will find out.

Right now, the objectively observable state of the game indicates non-trivial and possibly accelerating progress on the EA.  The quantity and quality of bugfixes continues to improve, and progress on the roadmap, taking scope into consideration, is much faster than KSP1, as one would expect from a larger, professionally run studio.  I’ll be disappointed is For Science! plotzes, but right now, there’s cause for optimism and subjectively, the EA was never that terrible.  I’m past the twenty-five cents per hour stage at this point…

[Guest]

24 minutes ago, Wheehaw Kerman said:

Nate certainly took the fall in Matt’s video for bad estimation.

The creative director isn't (normally) responsible for estimating/scheduling. That would be production together with heads of disciplines. 

How this normally works is that the creative director owns the vision for the game and communicates it to production and the heads of discipline. Discipline heads determine what needs to be done in each discipline to make it a reality, and estimate that. Production then produces a schedule for the entire project. 

It's also a continuous negotiation -- the creative director might ask for something that's simply too big or too complicated; then they all work together to figure out how that could be scoped down to something achievable. 

Production owns the production schedule, heads of discipline own the estimates for each of their disciplines, and the creative director owns the product vision and when things need to be cut or scoped down decides what will stay and what will go.

This is also really difficult even in the best of times!

Edited October 30, 2023 by Periple

[PDCWolf]

48 minutes ago, Periple said:

Nate said the opposite. 

Ok you made me watch the video again. I misheard. He said the industry is a revolving door but that they're below the average. Of course, no sources for the average (google says 1 to 5 years which is not very useful information).

14 minutes ago, Wheehaw Kerman said:

With the possible exception of 1., unless there’s any credible inside information backing any of these up, they remain guesses or inferences at best, and extremely subjective and biased ones at that.

Nate certainly took the fall in Matt’s video for bad estimation.  Maybe that happened, or maybe him saying that was a communications decision and other factors were involved.  Again, though, all we can do is speculate.  Bad estimations like 1. are practically normal, though, and not just in software land.  I’ve seen projects in the energy space that have gone appallingly over schedule too.  Things happen.  And if you think we’re frustrated, imagine you’re an owner on year seven of what you thought was going to be a simple two year construction project…

2. And how much actual development was done during ST’s tenure,  of that, how much went out the window after IG took over, and why, and how long it took for IG to start meaningful development on the current game we can’t know until somebody breaks NDA.  Seven years, four years, who knows, and ultimately, it doesn’t matter - what matters is the product.

3.-5. are again just speculation, unless somebody on the inside talks, and pointless speculation at that, unless you’re emotionally invested in assigning blame to a scapegoat in a forum witch hunt.  And that matters to me less than the actual state and future progress of the game, which we can actually see and will find out.

Right now, the objectively observable state of the game indicates non-trivial and possibly accelerating progress on the EA.  The quantity and quality of bugfixes continues to improve, and progress on the roadmap, taking scope into consideration, is much faster than KSP1, as one would expect from a larger, professionally run studio.  I’ll be disappointed is For Science! plotzes, but right now, there’s cause for optimism and subjectively, the EA was never that terrible.  I’m past the twenty-five cents per hour stage at this point…

My bad for assuming these things were already common knowledge. It seems you've missed out on some stuff and I should've sourced them:

1. From the video above.
2. Development started in 2017. They never said anything about having to restart from scratch or throwing stuff away. THAT is speculation.
3. COVID wasn't that much of an issue. This is the one where the source is not at hand. Thankfully I'm not as passionate in assigning blame to a scapegoat like the prominent voices saying T2 was the bad guy  for almost a year now.
4. Their studio is a revolving door. > Read my reply to Periple above. Nate does say their turnover is below the industry average, after saying the industry itself is a revolving door, so it's a misheard on my part.
5. From the video above as well. 13:40

[Guest]

11 minutes ago, PDCWolf said:

Ok you made me watch the video again. I misheard. He said the industry is a revolving door but that they're below the average. Of course, no sources for the average (google says 1 to 5 years which is not very useful information).

I think the median is about two years. It is super volatile from both sides. Workers tend to job hop because that’s often the most effective way to advance your career, and studios/publishers go through cycles of exuberant hiring and panicky layoffs. If you’re looking for a steady retirement job you’ll most likely have better luck in some other industry.

[Spicat]

1 hour ago, PDCWolf said:

COVID wasn't that much of an issue. This is the one where the source is not at hand. Thankfully I'm not as passionate in assigning blame to a scapegoat like the prominent voices saying T2 was the bad guy  for almost a year now.

The official twitter said the opposite in 2020:

(The delay was probably not just covid, but it was an issue apparently)

[Wheehaw Kerman]

1 hour ago, PDCWolf said:

Ok you made me watch the video again. I misheard. He said the industry is a revolving door but that they're below the average. Of course, no sources for the average (google says 1 to 5 years which is not very useful information).

My bad for assuming these things were already common knowledge. It seems you've missed out on some stuff and I should've sourced them:

1. From the video above.
2. Development started in 2017. They never said anything about having to restart from scratch or throwing stuff away. THAT is speculation.
3. COVID wasn't that much of an issue. This is the one where the source is not at hand. Thankfully I'm not as passionate in assigning blame to a scapegoat like the prominent voices saying T2 was the bad guy  for almost a year now.
4. Their studio is a revolving door. > Read my reply to Periple above. Nate does say their turnover is below the industry average, after saying the industry itself is a revolving door, so it's a misheard on my part.
5. From the video above as well. 13:40

This is a great illustration of what I’m talking about - I’ve watched the video a few times, and my earlier post took that knowledge into account.  You’re conflating your frame with knowledge - the sourcing isn’t the point, the  interpretation is.

1. As I noted, Nate took the fall for the estimation.  You can take his words as literal truth, selectively or otherwise, or question whether there might not be a lot left unsaid, glossed over, and so forth.  Given how project teams do scheduling and the corporate environment, I suspect the latter, but we can’t really know until somebody breaks NDA - getting worked up about it, or assigning too much value or meaning to it, is pointless.

Ditto 2. - as I said, beyond that statement, which tells us nothing beyond the date, whether Nate meant start of development or the initial legal work, what’s happened since 2017 is unknowable, and ultimately irrelevant.  We know the current status of the EA - we aren’t going to find out who did what when and why.   To your point about TT, well, yes; in the absence of anything concrete, there’s not a heck of a lot of value in demonizing them, either.

3. Much the same - Nate makes a high level statement.  We can’t read anything much into it - certainly not much use.

4. Yup, game development sees a lot of turnover.  That’s kind of a given, and I’m not sure why it’s worth mentioning.  It’s nice to hear that IG is doing better in that respect, and we know there were some layoffs a while back, but again, unless somebody in IG’s HR talks, we don’t know how much better, and it’s not much use in figuring out what’s going on barring info on productivity impacts.  Which, of course, we’re unlikely to get.

5. As I noted above, blameshifting to TT is kind of pointless, and Nate’s statement is vague and not worth a lot.  Anybody can come up with any number of reasons why that statement might be as misleading as it is vague.  And ultimately, I care a lot more about the game’s progress than I do speculating about what happened.

Essentially, the For Science! videos are encouraging in many respects - a lot of things in earlier videos have made it into the EA.  And we have a timeline for the first roadmap item.  And lately IG’s been close enough to their timelines for hand grenades, if not horseshoes.  So overall the trends are positive.  But I don’t think they give us any hard evidence for the speculative blame shifting exercise, and while I’m vaguely interested in what happened, until we get some hard evidence the exercise is just speculative groupthink.

Edited October 30, 2023 by Wheehaw Kerman

[Vanamonde]

Just out of curiosity: the game was delayed, but what would anyone gain from knowing the specific reasons?