Get the KSP IP to HarvesterR

[Lisias]

13 minutes ago, almagnus1 said:

What it needs aren't coders with comp sci degrees... but coders with aerospace engineering degrees (or the coders that have played a ton of KSP1).

IMHO, this game needs both.

[K^2]

26 minutes ago, almagnus1 said:

What it needs aren't coders with comp sci degrees... but coders with aerospace engineering degrees

Honestly, both. As in, both of these kinds of coders.

[Skorj]

HarvesteR was a great"startup developer".  When you're doing something really new under intense time pressure, you get a coupon for "1 free bad code base".  It's on senior management once the product is a success to grow the team from the "go fast and break things" devs to new "slow down and fix things" teams.  That clearly didn't happen.

[razark]

If Harvester wanted to be involved, perhaps he wouldn't have traded his involvement for cash and walked away?

[K^2]

51 minutes ago, razark said:

If Harvester wanted to be involved, perhaps he wouldn't have traded his involvement for cash and walked away?

I don't think he had options. As far as I understand it, HarvesteR's work on KSP1 was work-for-higher, or whatever equivalent they have under Brazilian laws, and so all rights belonged to Squad. His options were to continue working on KSP1 as a salaried employee, or go do something else.

[razark]

5 minutes ago, K^2 said:

His options were to continue working on KSP1 as a salaried employee, or go do something else.

Or

6 minutes ago, K^2 said:

I don't think he had options.

He had options, but didn't have options?

Glad the he made the choice he didn't make, then.

 

By the way, why don't we see Orville and Wilbur's opinions on the current Boeing situation?  Why don't I see Robert Goddard's thoughts on SpaceX?  Their ideas should matter, right?

[Skorj]

13 hours ago, razark said:

If Harvester wanted to be involved, perhaps he wouldn't have traded his involvement for cash and walked away?

Felipe wanted to make something other than KSP, to grow his career as a game developer rather than being stuck on one project forever.  Squad wasn't interested, so he left to make what is now KitHack.  I don't think he ever made much off of KSP. 

We know now that the KSP2 team was forbidden to talk to anyone on the KSP1 team, so yeah, your points are entirely irrelephant. 

12 hours ago, razark said:

By the way, why don't we see Orville and Wilbur's opinions on the current Boeing situation?

And yet new planes are still designed using many of the basic engineering principles the Wrights worked out.  Wind tunnel testing to confirm engineering assumptions. Independent 3-axis controls.  Lift/drag ratio, and optimizing wing shape for it.  Their work still matters.  And Kerbals are still central to KSP2.  Felipe's childhood personification of little bits of tinfoil as Kerbals remains the reason the franchise works.  He knows a thing or two about the ever-elusive "fun" part of games.  I'm sure the team would have reached out to him had the Take2 corpos not lost their damn minds.

[razark]

2 minutes ago, Skorj said:

Felipe wanted to make something other than KSP...

Exactly.  That's kind of my point.  He wasn't interested enough to continue being involved.

 

3 minutes ago, Skorj said:

Their work still matters.

Yep.  Their work matters.  They don't.

[K^2]

2 hours ago, razark said:

He wasn't interested enough to continue being involved.

That's not what you said, though. What you said was,

16 hours ago, razark said:

perhaps he wouldn't have traded his involvement for cash and walked away?

And that was never an option. (Yes, I said the "no options" thing in a completely broken way.)

Taking money for IP and walking away was never an option. It wasn't his IP anymore. He wasn't taking money to walk away. He walked away because he wanted to work on something that's his.

The options you are presenting were never options. The abandonment you're imagining never took place.

[Lisias]

4 hours ago, razark said:

Yep.  Their work matters.  They don't.

You need to see more movies.

Quote

Steel isn't strong, boy. Flesh is stronger.

What's steel compared to the hand that yields it?

Thulsa Doom - Conan, The Barbarian

Couldn't link a video, blood and violence depicted. Google for "Best Scene - "Steel isn't strong boy" - Conan the Barbarian (1982) (HD-720p)" if you want to see the scene.

You can't split the work from the person that did it. This is not an Assembly Line, with people screwing bolts on premanufactured components.

Spoiler

This one I can post!

You can't switch engineers as they would be Assembly Line workers, as currently certain USA's industry are clearly demonstrating after trying exactly that in the last years (Boeing, I'm looking at you).

[K^2]

4 hours ago, Lisias said:

You can't switch engineers as they would be Assembly Line workers

In game dev, that doesn't work with any developers, not just engineers. Severity varies with department and seniority, but even junior QA pick up game-specific know-how that make them far more efficient than whoever you'll find as a replacement.

Generally speaking, losing senior engineers and tech-art hurts the most, but I've been on a project where the QA lead was onboarding engineers, because he's been on the project the longest, knew where all the skeletons are buried, and had a better grasp of the back end API than anyone in the engineering.\

It is very unfortunate that the people-first studios end up the most vulnerable when the industry is going through some cutbacks, because they consistently make some of the best games.

[almagnus1]

On 5/25/2024 at 1:09 AM, razark said:

If Harvester wanted to be involved, perhaps he wouldn't have traded his involvement for cash and walked away?

Squad (the company that he worked at initially) had outright told the entire staff that KSP was a one-of thing and they were not going to release another game again.

If you want to be a game dev in that situation, you have only one choice, and that's what HarvesteR did, and if given enough time to build up the studio and raise capital, HarvesteR may have raised enough capital to get the license from Squad but Squad wanted out of the video game industry so...  that's how we're in the mess we're in.

Edited May 26 by almagnus1

[almagnus1]

21 hours ago, razark said:

Exactly.  That's kind of my point.  He wasn't interested enough to continue being involved.

Sometimes (creatively) you absolutely need a break and need to do something else for a bit cause you need a fresh perspective, or alternatively, if you're completely burned out you need to get away from the source of the burnout for a bit so you're ready to keep going.

Wanting to do something different for a bit can be attributed to either of those.

In the case of HarvesteR, it was a mix of burnout, and wanting to actually be a game developer and not stuck on a single project for all eternity.  In the case of a studio like Blizzard, what made it successful wasn't the sequels, but it was the ability for developers to be able to start simple tech demos and find the fun, which is how we ended up with almost all of the Blizzard games... before Kotick razed the studio.

[rjbvre]

I admit I don't know KSP1's dev history super well, but I get the sense that Harvester is to KSP what George Lucas was to Star Wars. You can't get KSP or SW without them, but at the same time they are completely incapable of making it on their own, and you need other people to steer things in the right direction and keep them from ruining it.

[dave1904]

4 hours ago, rjbvre said:

I admit I don't know KSP1's dev history super well, but I get the sense that Harvester is to KSP what George Lucas was to Star Wars. You can't get KSP or SW without them, but at the same time they are completely incapable of making it on their own, and you need other people to steer things in the right direction and keep them from ruining it.

Agree! Disney should take the helm! 

[rjbvre]

2 hours ago, dave1904 said:

Agree! Disney should take the helm! 

If they made a movie I'd go see it haha

[dprostock]

Disney? 

 

[almagnus1]

22 hours ago, dave1904 said:

Agree! Disney should take the helm! 

So how many Kerbal property failures do you want to see?