Where is Nate?

[dprostock]

4 hours ago, K^2 said:

There have been problems within IG. As far as I know, the major ones have been addressed. It's hard to say if they were addressed in a timely matter, as all of my information on it is second-hand. It is possible, that there have been systemic failures on the side of the leadership, resulting in what would be fair to call "studio's fault." But this is speculative. We do not have clear evidence of it.

In short, T2/PD failures are evident. IG's are speculation, but plausible.

The problem is who is in charge of the project.  That's why politicians hire specialists.

[Pthigrivi]

1 hour ago, dprostock said:

The problem is who is in charge of the project.  That's why politicians hire specialists.

Brotha. You don’t know the names of the people who decide the budget, timeline, or fate of this project. Those are the people in charge. 

[Devblaze]

Nate's picking up a shift at his local car dealership, he's made a killing doing it. Probably going to be a while before we hear from him!

[Uuky]

 

Edited May 12 by Uuky

[dprostock]

18 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

Brotha. You don’t know the names of the people who decide the budget, timeline, or fate of this project. Those are the people in charge. 

It allows for doubt. If they had really been in charge, they wouldn't have made it to these instances. Unless they're the kind of people Bernard Madoff captured.

[HebaruSan]

Nate finally mastered the ability to phase through normal matter and has been swinging back and forth from one side of Earth's gravity well to the other ever since. He was hoping to de-phase in his office and return to normal life the first time around, but unfortunately the planet had rotated in the meantime.

Edited May 13 by HebaruSan

[Fizzlebop Smith]

45 minutes ago, HebaruSan said:

Nate finally mastered the ability to phase through normal matter and has been swinging back and forth from one side of Earth's gravity well to the other ever since. He was hoping to de-phase in his office and return to normal life the first time around, but unfortunately the planet had rotated in the meantime.

They never could resolve those floating points.. poor Nate.

[KerikBalm]

On 5/11/2024 at 11:13 PM, K^2 said:

Studio's job is to make the best game they can with resources given.

I think they failed here, 7 years, 70 people that's quite a lot compared to KSP2's start

On 5/11/2024 at 11:13 PM, K^2 said:

Publisher's job is to make sure the scope and resources match, either by scaling up the budget or by cutting scope.

I think they gave enough resources for the scope, even if they would have to cut interstellar to something like going for a binary or trinary star system (like alpha, beta, and proxima centauri) - and drop MP

Beyond that, it's scope was KSP1 with popular mods properly integrated, and a graphics overhaul.

On 5/11/2024 at 11:13 PM, K^2 said:

Based on my own experience making games and scheduling work to meet milestones negotiated with the publishers, I think IG did reasonably well with resources they had. 

I guess we'll have to disagree

On 5/11/2024 at 11:13 PM, K^2 said:

It is possible, that there have been systemic failures on the side of the leadership, resulting in what would be fair to call "studio's fault." But this is speculative. We do not have clear evidence of it.

In short, T2/PD failures are evident. IG's are speculation, but plausible.

It's all speculation, but I think there's plenty of blame to go around 

[Scarecrow71]

1 hour ago, KerikBalm said:

I think they gave enough resources for the scope, even if they would have to cut interstellar to something like going for a binary or trinary star system (like alpha, beta, and proxima centauri) - and drop MP

Beyond that, it's scope was KSP1 with popular mods properly integrated, and a graphics overhaul.

Well, what we can gather from the Roadmap is that the scope was:

• A ground-up re-envisioning of the core systems of KSP1
  • Whether or not popular mods were to be added or integrated remains to be seen. We were literally told that DLC from KSP1, such as robotics, weren't going to make it into the game prior to 1.0, so we can probably infer that mods might not have ever made it
• A new science system
  • Which turned out to be the old system just dumbed down a whole lot.  Instead of pressing multiple buttons and getting feedback, you pressed one button and got almost no feedback.
• Colonies
• Interstellar Travel
• Resource Management
  • Which was kind of already in KSP1 with ISRU
  • And which we had a couple of mods for, like Extra-Planetary Launchpads, to deal with converting ore to iron (or something along those lines)
• Multiplayer

That's a pretty large scope.  Just go through that and type out a simple problem statement and its resultant potential high-level solution for each one of those bullets, and you're already over 1 page in length.  That's a hell of a scope for any game.  As HarvesteR pointed out in his interview, that's too much.  You have to start small and build from there.  I think they should have started with bullets 1, 2, and 4 (ground-up re-envisioning, a new science system, and resource management), and added on from there.  Particularly:

• There are multiple systems in KSP1 that are considered to be core functionality that could have used an update to eliminate some bugs.  Heat management, orbits, trajectories, maneuver nodes...all of these FAILED in KSP2
• Science really needed to be upgraded.  I floated the same idea that Juno has - tech points that are given based on what you've done, not how many buttons you can press in a given biome.
• Resource management was already in KSP1, but it was only there for fuel.  Even if it was just left at fuel types, it could have been expanded to include all the fuel types in the game (methane, methalox, hydrogen).  You could then expand for materials management for things like new solar panels, iron/steel/building materials, and maybe even new fuel types that aren't there yet.  This goes a long way towards both Colonies and Interstellar.

These are all just my ideas floating around out there.  I'm no game developer, there is no way I could do most of the above without going back to school for game development.  I'm just hoping to point out that I don't think we know what the scope is and/or was in its entirety, so we have no way of knowing if the amount of resources thrown at the project was sufficient or not.

[K^2]

1 hour ago, KerikBalm said:

Beyond that, it's scope was KSP1 with popular mods properly integrated, and a graphics overhaul.

I don't know where to even star with how far off you are. Data-driven KSC, vehicles as part of the overall world data hierarchy, deeper hierarchy on vehicles and spaces allowing for more data-driven components, procedural support for basically everything, with several procedural parts in the game, just absolutely everything about the celestial bodies, but especially the procedural generation and how the environments are authored. And your throwaway "graphics overhaul" includes scattering, atmospherics, weather, entirely new materials system, etc. The "graphics overhaul" alone is a huge scope expansion requiring a team of artists and tech artists.

This is just stuff delivered at the start of EA. Not even discussing all the things that were still being worked on, but just stuff that was in the game at EA, which is only three years after Intercept started working on it, hiring up to full strength only, what, a year, year-and-a-half into it?

1 hour ago, KerikBalm said:

7 years, 70 people

Oh, yeah, right. You think Intercept has been working on KSP2 for 7 years, having been founded 4 years ago. 

1 hour ago, KerikBalm said:

I guess we'll have to disagree

 - "I have experience actually doing this. This is wrong."
 - "I guess we'll have to disagree."

Look, you are absolutely free to listen to an expert on a topic give you a deconstruction of something, and then say, "I disagree." You just have to understand that instead of, "I have reasons to believe this to be incorrect," what you're really saying is, "I don't like what you're saying, so I'm going to throw a tantrum." If that's how you want to communicate with people, be my guest. Just don't expect anyone to take much stock in anything you agree or disagree with when that comes off as fickle and arbitrary as a coin toss.

"I disagree" has meaning when it comes with an argument, experience, citation of evidence, or absolutely anything that actually addresses points being made. Otherwise, it's not even a good disengagement tactic.

[Scarecrow71]

1 minute ago, K^2 said:

Oh, yeah, right. You think Intercept has been working on KSP2 for 7 years, having been founded 4 years ago. 

I could be way off on this, but I think the prevailing thought is that the 7 years thing is based on when Take Two started dealing with it.  And by dealing with it, I mean when it was announced, and the whole transition from Squad to IG and such.  Nobody believes that they started actual development back in 2017, but rather that it's been 7 years since the idea of KSP2 was floated out there.

[K^2]

6 minutes ago, Scarecrow71 said:

I could be way off on this, but I think the prevailing thought is that the 7 years thing is based on when Take Two started dealing with it.  And by dealing with it, I mean when it was announced, and the whole transition from Squad to IG and such.  Nobody believes that they started actual development back in 2017, but rather that it's been 7 years since the idea of KSP2 was floated out there.

The quote was specifically "7 years, 70 people," which implies that they had 70 people working on the game for 7 years. In reality, we know that ST would only start work in late 2017 or early 2018, and were off the project by late 2019. Intercept was still hiring people and figuring out how to WFH on KSP2 in early 2020, and the EA released in early 2023. So Intercept had less than 3 years to scale up the team, redesign the project, sort through stuff ST built to see what they're cleaning up and what they're throwing away, and building KSP2 almost from scratch to release Early Access.

That's a lot. I don't think people who never made a game realize how much was really done and how little time there really was for actual work or how little of ST's progress would transfer over to the new team with the new scope.

It does help that a chunk of the team at Intercept came out from ST, so they were at least onboarded and could hit the ground running, but then we also had the pandemic which would have pretty much nullified that advantage.

 

For some context, I was working at a AAA studio in early 2020. We had a CTO who saw the writing on the wall with the pandemic back in January and started preparing for it. We had 1/3rd of the studio running a WFH trial a week before state lockdown order came in. We weren't as ready as we wanted to be, but far better prepared than most other studios. Engineers, designers, and most of the artists already had a console hooked up to their work PC set up to stream across the network (and over VPN). And our game was releasing for Stadia, so we got Google to provide access to everyone at the studio, so that our QA could run using the Stadia build.

We still lost equivalent of a few weeks of work as we figured out how to adjust our work processes, sorting out some of the access problems, finding ways to deal with latency, expanding our VPN bandwidth, etc. Studios that didn't prepare in advance? Most of them lost a month of work with a large chunk of the studio being unable to work at all. It was a very chaotic time.

Factoring all of this in, if we were to compare this to KSP2 project being started at an established studio, the equivalent KSP2 start date would be around early summer of 2020. So from then to February of 2023 is how long Intercept had to work on Early Access. A little over 2.5 years.

[Mutex]

15 hours ago, K^2 said:

The quote was specifically "7 years, 70 people," which implies that they had 70 people working on the game for 7 years. In reality, we know that ST would only start work in late 2017 or early 2018, and were off the project by late 2019. Intercept was still hiring people and figuring out how to WFH on KSP2 in early 2020, and the EA released in early 2023. So Intercept had less than 3 years to scale up the team, redesign the project, sort through stuff ST built to see what they're cleaning up and what they're throwing away, and building KSP2 almost from scratch to release Early Access.

I've always wondered if any of the code actually made it across from ST to IG. There was no official transfer of the project from what I understand, PD just told ST they're not doing the project anymore and started head-hunting their staff while ST went bankrupt. Would PD have legally owned the work that was done? I'm guessing the contract would almost certainly have specified they did. But at that point PD basically tore up the contract. Is there any chance the work just got deleted by ST rather than handed over to the very people screwing them over?

[The Aziz]

Why all of a sudden people started implying that ST and IG around 2020/21 were different people?

Reportedly, the whole shadyness of that move was that people got a message from the overseers at T2, you move to new studio or we're terminating the contract. A a chunk of people did move because, wow, work is better than no work.

Just check the old feature videos, most of the faces present there remained the same for a long time since 2019. Of course that was only a handful of people but I bet lead devs who remained wouldn't want to get their work thrown away.

Edited May 14 by The Aziz

[Mutex]

2 minutes ago, The Aziz said:

Why all of a sudden people started implying that ST and IG around 2020/21 were different people?

Reportedly, the whole shadyness of that move was that people got a message from the overseers at T2, you move to new studio or we're terminating the contract. A a chunk of people did move because, wow, work is better than no work.

Just check the old feature videos, most of the faces present there remained the same for a long time since 2019. Of course that was only a handful of people but I bet lead devs who remained wouldn't want to get their work thrown away.

Yes IG were initially a subset of the people who worked at ST, doesn't mean the code actually got transferred from ST to IG, which were different companies.

[J.Random]

Any notion of all code and assets being deleted instead of transferred is idiotic. Destroying the result of a job you were paid to do is, to put it mildly, unwise.

[Bej Kerman]

54 minutes ago, J.Random said:

Any notion of all code and assets being deleted instead of transferred is idiotic. Destroying the result of a job you were paid to do is, to put it mildly, unwise.

Who said they were willing to destroy it?

Edited May 14 by Bej Kerman
Typo

[Flush Foot]

1 minute ago, Bej Kerman said:

Who said they were willing to destroy it?

Who said they were authorized to 'relocate' it? Might it not have been the legal property of ST and thus, despite the KSP2 contract moving from ST to IG along with many of the employees, the code maybe could not move over as easily?

[Mutex]

I mean, I can easily imagine a standard contract in this situation stating ST were obliged to hand over the work they'd done or get sued into oblivion, but I don't work in the industry so I'm asking people who actually know.

[K^2]

27 minutes ago, Flush Foot said:

Who said they were authorized to 'relocate' it?

It was work-for-hire, making all assets property of T2 the moment they were created.

The issue was never with anything ST made being lost/destroyed. The issue was that the game got heavily rescoped, sending dev cycle back to pre-production, and very little ususally survives that. Code would have been restructured, art pipelines changed... A lot of the ST assets would basically only be good as placeholders.

I think what we saw was consistent with that. UI and audio work carried over. Some 3D models from ST pre-alpha footage have resurfaced in some of the early teasers. But most of the ships we were shown upclose got a visuals uplift, materials changed, and planets were completely redone. I can only speculate about the code, but it sounds like ST was sticking close to KSP1 code, and what went out with KSP2 EA was drastically different.

So yeah, I am pretty sure that all work was transferred over, and relatively little of it could be used.

[Bej Kerman]

37 minutes ago, Flush Foot said:

Who said they were authorized to 'relocate' it? Might it not have been the legal property of ST and thus, despite the KSP2 contract moving from ST to IG along with many of the employees, the code maybe could not move over as easily?

Yeah, that's what I suspect, though I'm not a lawyer so I don't know. It would be a bit like what happened to No Man's Sky, the project being wiped and the studio being forced to release a half-baked redo of the initial game so the publisher can see a return. Makes sense seeing as the EA release doesn't feel like 5-8 years of work, even if some quality shines through in the maneuver mechanics and improved VAB controls. Difference is T2 clearly isn't willing to wait and see if Intercept could approach their goals with enough time like Hello Games did, and the silence has me suspecting that it's possible they're looking to keep KSP 2 on life support with a skeleton crew.

[Scarecrow71]

36 minutes ago, K^2 said:

It was work-for-hire, making all assets property of T2 the moment they were created.

This.  All day, every day, twice or more on Sundays.

Typical employment, regardless of sector, genre, industry, whatever, is at-will or work-for-hire, and most, if not all, companies have provisions in contracts or employee guidebooks that state anything you create while using company resources becomes the intellectual property of that company.  In the case of ST and/or IG, being contracted by PD/TT, anything those studios created would become the property of PD/TT.  This would include art, code, and any other assets related to KSP2.

[Skorj]

On 5/13/2024 at 2:11 PM, K^2 said:

The quote was specifically "7 years, 70 people," which implies that they had 70 people working on the game for 7 years. In reality, we know that ST would only start work in late 2017 or early 2018, and were off the project by late 2019. Intercept was still hiring people and figuring out how to WFH on KSP2 in early 2020, and the EA released in early 2023. So Intercept had less than 3 years to scale up the team, redesign the project, sort through stuff ST built to see what they're cleaning up and what they're throwing away, and building KSP2 almost from scratch to release Early Access.

That's a lot. I don't think people who never made a game realize how much was really done and how little time there really was for actual work or how little of ST's progress would transfer over to the new team with the new scope.

It does help that a chunk of the team at Intercept came out from ST, so they were at least onboarded and could hit the ground running, but then we also had the pandemic which would have pretty much nullified that advantage.

 

For some context, I was working at a AAA studio in early 2020. We had a CTO who saw the writing on the wall with the pandemic back in January and started preparing for it. We had 1/3rd of the studio running a WFH trial a week before state lockdown order came in. We weren't as ready as we wanted to be, but far better prepared than most other studios. Engineers, designers, and most of the artists already had a console hooked up to their work PC set up to stream across the network (and over VPN). And our game was releasing for Stadia, so we got Google to provide access to everyone at the studio, so that our QA could run using the Stadia build.

We still lost equivalent of a few weeks of work as we figured out how to adjust our work processes, sorting out some of the access problems, finding ways to deal with latency, expanding our VPN bandwidth, etc. Studios that didn't prepare in advance? Most of them lost a month of work with a large chunk of the studio being unable to work at all. It was a very chaotic time.

Factoring all of this in, if we were to compare this to KSP2 project being started at an established studio, the equivalent KSP2 start date would be around early summer of 2020. So from then to February of 2023 is how long Intercept had to work on Early Access. A little over 2.5 years.

IG had continuity in people from ST.  I doubt it was 70 right away, but they started with a sizable team.  We don't know if any of the code from ST was available IG.  But for sure a large team was working on KSP2 from 2017 on.  The fact that half the team and perhaps all the code was lost in 2019 is just one more screw-up on the pile.

One month of lost work due to Covid is totally reasonable.  6 months is either some serious slacking, or the kind of screw-up that it takes multiple MBAs to arrange.  I've seen people claim they weren't able to work for 18 months, which is going too far to make excuses. 

So we don't know all the details, but it seems reasonable to assume they had at least half that 70  on average working for 7 years.  That's 200-250 dev-years.  Far, far beyond what KSP2 EA should have taken.  You make a good point about the procedural graphical work being substantial, but IMO that's "a handful of dev-years" substantial.  Plus the overly-clever stuff they tried to replace sections of terrain to insert anomalies (and presumably colonies), which was a cool idea but presumably is the root of the "fall through the world" bugs.   As you point out, there's a lot to a game like this beyond what the player controls in-game.  But it's off by an order of magnitude IMO.  Of course, if their code base is as bad as the bugs suggest, that would seriously slow development time, but still.

Either there were some serious shenanigans as ST/IG, or the rumors are true that before EA they did a lot of work on colonies, and a lot of work on interstellar support, and a lot of work on multiplayer support, and who knows what throw-away work.  I figure it's a little of both: something wacky had to have happened with ST, something out of line with the usual publisher / late studio relations.  I can't see that amount of dev work for what we got without bad dev practices and trying to do everything at once and ST management shenanigans and Covid and T2 being unable to hire replacements for senior roles  all taking a chunk out of productivity.

Edited May 15 by Skorj

[Mutex]

55 minutes ago, Skorj said:

So we don't know all the details, but it seems reasonable to assume they had at least half that 70  on average working for 7 years.  That's 200-250 dev-years.

From what I heard in interviews, they had about 50 people in the whole of IG. Not developers, people. Including admin, HR, accounts, etc. The number of developers was possibly less than 20, from what Nate said to ShadowZone in an interview in 2023.

[K^2]

2 hours ago, Skorj said:

So we don't know all the details, but it seems reasonable to assume they had at least half that 70  on average working for 7 years.

Not at all reasonable. You're making assumptions without looking at the numbers. Per @Mutex post above, ST was not large, and only fraction of developers transferred over. And there are a whole bunch of other factors you are ignoring, including differences between pre-production and production work, as well as how much work actually carries over when you re-start from pre-production.

There are estimates for studio sizes and significant number of devs had Linkedin pages, so you can get a pretty good idea of how many people were working on what at what points in time. The studio strength of 70 people is valid for approximately the most recent two years, and a lot of these people aren't directly involved in the making of the game, again, just like the above post mentions. I also recommend you take a look at the KSP2 credits. Keep in mind that Intercept did end up listing everyone who worked on the game, so not all of these people have been involved concurrently. What you'll find in the credits, which is also just over 70 people, is everyone who ever worked on KSP2 under the umbrella of Intercept. And you can find hire and departure dates for a lot of these people.

The last couple of years under Intercept, KSP2 started approaching a mid-size development. It's been a tiny indy-sized development for most of its life.

Edited May 15 by K^2