Shadowzone's findings on KSP2 history

[cocoscacao]

16 minutes ago, dave1904 said:

Even the guys at the "bottom" are still responsible for working for a company that was run like because they all knew it. That makes them responsible. I have not once personally attacked anyone. I just said they were incompetent and stand by that point. 

Responsible how? You do what you are told to do. Also, apparently these are all juniors. Don't mix lack of experience with the lack of competence. 

[TLTay]

9 hours ago, ShadowZone said:

Less than 10 people were working on the second game according to my information.

Wow. So they just flat weren't getting anything done in any reasonable amount of time. No wonder T2 finally pulled the plug. Surprised it took them so long.

[Meecrob]

52 minutes ago, cocoscacao said:

Responsible how? You do what you are told to do. Also, apparently these are all juniors. Don't mix lack of experience with the lack of competence. 

You are mixing up experience with being given responsibility. Being  told "what to do" can range from "here is a step-by-step list of micromanaged tasks that need to be completed" to "the end goal is X, I don't care how you get there. In fact, you are new, so as an old duffer, I'd like to see your thought process on solving these issues/completing this task. Maybe you can teach me a thing or two"

Edited May 25 by Meecrob

[Bej Kerman]

1 hour ago, dave1904 said:

To be clear. T2 is to blame for this. It's their IP and they had the say about everything. That doesn't mean that the developers are not responsible for their mistakes. Even the guys at the "bottom" are still responsible for working for a company that was run like because they all knew it. That makes them responsible. I have not once personally attacked anyone. I just said they were incompetent and stand by that point. 

How dare they.......    do something they were paid (fairly poorly) to do.

1 hour ago, dave1904 said:

KSP2 is done mate. I'd let go if I were you.

I'm not the one trying to justify such thought-provoking questions as "who should we lynch".

[cocoscacao]

27 minutes ago, Meecrob said:

In fact, you are new, so as an old duffer, I'd like to see your thought process on solving these issues/completing this task

There weren't old duffers present according to this video. In fact, they were deliberately kept away. If you give me money to build skyscraper, and I employ  only engineers fresh from college, thus failing to complete the project... who's incompetent in that situation?

Edited May 25 by cocoscacao

[Infinite Aerospace]

9 minutes ago, cocoscacao said:

There weren't old duffers present according to this video. In fact, they were deliberately kept away. If you give me money to build skyscraper, and I employ  only engineers fresh from college, thus failing to complete the project... who's incompetent in that situation?

Yeah the root cause of the issue here seems to stem from firstly inexperienced software engineers and secondly the absolutely baffling decision not to consult with the likes of Harvester, and the Squad folks regarding how their code for Kerbal Space Program ended up as the tangled mess it is.

 

To not do the second, is basically dooming your project to revisiting the same inherent mistakes that plagued the first one. The secrecy of this project baffles me, it really does. I mean my work contract has words like 'treason' in it, but it's to be expected. This is just a damned game and they're literally just as strict. It's wild, genuinely wild!

 

I also do not understand why they insisted on essentially repurposing the original game code (at first) and then when that went down the crapper, not just rebuilding the whole damned thing in a better game engine, like Unreal Engine. The blame here has to rest squarely on the shoulders of "upper management", I don't even think Nate is culpable here either, this comes from above him.

[Palshife]

19 hours ago, RayneCloud said:

I question how much of the code he's actually looked at before making that statement in the first place. To make that statement, he'd have to seen the entire code base and I doubt that's a thing that's actually happened considering we don't have the source for starters.

The code bases are not as out of reach as you might think. The game's written in C#. Download dotPeek and you can see every line of IL transliterated back into C# for both games. LGG's will have had to have done this to support so many KSP1 mods. Maybe he didn't take a super close look at KSP2 but even if he only took a quick glance he'd know what to look for, and he's constantly working with other modders, who would also know what to look for. Seeing it in its entirety isn't really necessary.

I just find it odd you'd be so adamantly opposed to the possibility. So many sources seem to be confirming it now, and it's a perfectly reasonable explanation. As a software engineer myself, I can confirm that we're always asked to do things like this even though we communicate the risks and reasons not to, so this account seems entirely plausible to me.

I'll leave it here as I'm guessing we don't see eye to eye on this, unless you want to keep the discussion going.

[KincaidFrankMF]

What baffles me is why they didn't just wait till Breaking Ground was finished and use the same team? They could've used the time to, I don't know, make a plan.

[MechBFP]

Just now, KincaidFrankMF said:

What baffles me is why they didn't just wait till Breaking Ground was finished and use the same team? They could've used the time to, I don't know, make a plan.

Someone forgot that making a plan should be part of the plan. 

[Pulstar]

1 hour ago, KincaidFrankMF said:

What baffles me is why they didn't just wait till Breaking Ground was finished and use the same team? They could've used the time to, I don't know, make a plan.

That would take too long in the corporate AAA world, they bought something, bragged to shareholders how much potential it has, they needed to get a return on the investment.

In any case the team at Squad is such a theseus' ship that IMO there wasn't any guarantee that Squad would succeed with a sequel, regardless of how many bad assumptions or what flawed logic T2 was running under (which apparently were plenty from what I read in a summary of SZ's video) when they made that call. If HarvesteR and a few others were still around my view on Squad not being the obvious choice have been different.

Edited May 25 by Pulstar

[Temporal Wolf]

5 hours ago, ShadowZone said:

I am wondering about the time it takes them to release colonies as well. Apparently "For Science" took already multiple times longer than was expected. One of the issues I was told existed within Intercept Games was a lack of "okay, that's good enough" (and we'll make it prettier later) attitude. If it gets public, it needs to be as shiny and pretty as possible, was the mindset (at least this was how the story was told to me).

In software development you always need to do some kind of tradeoff. Let's take re-entry heating: the mechanics of "part gets hot, part goes boom" with a simple heat gauge or flashing parts or something could have probably been integrated a lot earlier than what we got with "For Science" with all the pretty plasma effects etc. Of course it looks cooler, but with the simple "show me just a gauge of what goes wrong" mechanic you could have tested the math behind it and verify if your assumptions about how which parts will behave under thermal load. The way they did it was that everything had to be "complete" before shipping it. Also kind of misunderstanding what Early Access should be. I don't know who made these calls for re-entry heating. But I believe we could have gotten a stripped down version much sooner, same for science and colonies.

It's also worth noting, especially for a team of junior devs, they probably won't take into consideration the 80/20 rule: 80% of the work will be required for the last 20% of the feature... so even if you're doing everything right, you can get something mostly working and still have a ton of work left to do.

[Lisias]

5 minutes ago, Temporal Wolf said:

It's also worth noting, especially for a team of junior devs, they probably won't take into consideration the 80/20 rule: 80% of the work will be required for the last 20% of the feature... so even if you're doing everything right, you can get something mostly working and still have a ton of work left to do.

This is the optimistic version of the rule.

The one I know says that you use 80% of the scheduled time to carry on 80% of the job, and then more 80% of the scheduled time to work on the remaining 20% of the job. I have Real Life© confirmation of the accuracy of this one.

[KincaidFrankMF]

17 minutes ago, Pulstar said:

That would take too long in the corporate AAA world, they bought something, bragged to shareholders how much potential it has, they needed to get a return on the investment.

Worked out well for them. But yes, that sounds about right.

18 minutes ago, Pulstar said:

In any case the team at Squad is such a theseus' ship that IMO there wasn't any guarantee that Squad would succeed with a sequel, regardless of how many bad assumptions or what flawed logic T2 was running under

Sure, but they were at least familiar with the code. That seems to have been a major factor with the teams that followed. 

[Siska]

Well, 

it smelled bad from the beginning. Saying it out loud, meant you are a negative person, but here it is out loud now

 

[dave1904]

3 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

How dare they.......    do something they were paid (fairly poorly) to do.

I'm not the one trying to justify such thought-provoking questions as "who should we lynch".

Where did I ask that question? 

[Pulstar]

22 minutes ago, KincaidFrankMF said:

Sure, but they were at least familiar with the code. That seems to have been a major factor with the teams that followed. 

I believe the level of familiarity in question was far from what could make a significant difference. There's a difference in complexity between making a better sequel (regardless of exact scope) where fundamentals need to be reworked, as opposed to updating the game to not crash on a newer version of unity and adding features on top of an existing framework. Just because you can build an extra floor in an existing house doesn't mean you can build a whole new house that's a better version of it.

[drhay53]

5 hours ago, Meecrob said:

To be 100% honest, and I know I speak for more than just myself here, For Science! simply was not "good enough"

FS! felt like I bought KSP1 off of Wish.com or something.

Lol, yeah, I felt like I had to wear sunglasses playing the game at times.

Wasn't even enough to make me open the game again

4 hours ago, TLTay said:

Wow. So they just flat weren't getting anything done in any reasonable amount of time. No wonder T2 finally pulled the plug. Surprised it took them so long.

This was for the other, unannounced game that was being worked on. Not for KSP2.

[Skorj]

14 hours ago, WatchClarkBand said:

Yes, in the States, we managers call it the "fully burdened cost", and it tends to run from 33% to 50% over whatever an employees base salary is. Health insurance, unemployment insurance (paid to the state to cover support payment should the employee be terminated), taxes, the overhead of hardware (as you called out), all factor into this. At Amazon, I believe we used an internal number of $300k/year average for the FBC of any "professional" (non Fulfillment Center) employee, as the median total compensation (salary plus bonuses plus stock) for all employees below VP level was probably $225k/year (I could give breakdowns by role/experience level, but it's easy to Google or check on Glassdoor). Game engineers (and PMs, and UX folks) tend to be paid about 60-70% of the market rate for the same role in a non-entertainment company, based on my 25 years in software development in and out of games (that is to say, if I were to survey all the game studios at which I'd worked, people made, on average 1/3rd less than they could have made at a non-game company in the same role).  In case someone wants to nitpick, at the time Amazon also had a salary cap of $160k/year, but salary was a small percentage of total compensation for anyone approaching that cap, as stocks and bonuses could equal multiples of base salary at the Senior or Principal Engineer or Engineering Manager level. So it's definitely not an apples to apples comparison.

For obvious reasons, I will only speak about compensation at other companies based on my experience working for them.

To add to this, the "gets paid 1/3rd less" seems to apply to anything with nerd-appeal.  Work on anything space-related, for example, seems to have the same 1/3rd exploitation as games.  BTW, Amazon's salary cap was region-specific, but yeah those are the Seattle numbers.  The only way to make more base salary in Amazon Seattle was to get the $20k boost for Top Secret clearance, AFAIK, but salary was just a part of compensation.

2 hours ago, Lisias said:

This is the optimistic version of the rule.

The one I know says that you use 80% of the scheduled time to carry on 80% of the job, and then more 80% of the scheduled time to work on the remaining 20% of the job. I have Real Life© confirmation of the accuracy of this one.

In a previous century, you had the first 90% of the project, and then the second 90% of the project.  But that was mostly due to really bad dev practices, which sadly still pop up from time to time even in companies that should know better.

5 hours ago, cocoscacao said:

There weren't old duffers present according to this video. In fact, they were deliberately kept away. If you give me money to build skyscraper, and I employ  only engineers fresh from college, thus failing to complete the project... who's incompetent in that situation?

At least this is only a game!  There have sadly been real-world disasters due to over-reliance on engineers fresh from college.

Edited May 25 by Skorj

[WatchClarkBand]

28 minutes ago, Skorj said:

To add to this, the "gets paid 1/3rd less" seems to apply to anything with nerd-appeal.  Work on anything space-related, for example, seems to have the same 1/3rd exploitation as games. 

This is the "fun penalty", for sure. You see it in anything "fun". Why do most musicians get screwed by labels? There's a line out the door of other musicians willing to "make it". For any position where people are begging to work there, the employee is going to sacrifice for the "honor" of being there. The ONLY exception I saw for this was at MSFT and AMZN: Engineers, UX people, etc. all made the same total comp for their level whether they were working on Games, AWS, XBox, Windows, Office, whatever.

[Skorj]

@WatchClarkBand Seems we've worked at the same places.  Small world.  I don't mean to come across as insulting, but from the outside it seems the coding side was lacking even basic dev best-pratices, e.g. there were high-impact bugs in the main branch ever, let alone making it to release.  Can you say anything about that, or is that all NDA stuff?  And the game seemingly not prioritizing accessibility (despite the other kind of accessibility being a stated goal)?  It all seems to very strange in the modern word, I'd love to hear how it came to be, if you're able.

[herbal space program]

Well that video certainly paints a bleak, maddening picture of one dumb management decision after another by PD and then TT. Trying to work with the old code vs. starting over is a legitimately tough decision, but forcing the new developers to work with the old code without the benefit of any input whatsoever from those who wrote it, due to craniorectally inverted secrecy concerns, has to be up there with Napoleon's decision to invade Russia in the annals of bad strategic decision making. And then firing one person after another who actually understood what the game is about because they cost too much. Words fail me in describing the depth of this idiocy. Clearly, the people who should have been fired are those in the highest levels of decision making for their parent companies, and they probably got raises and bonuses instead. Ack Ptui!!!

2 hours ago, Skorj said:

To add to this, the "gets paid 1/3rd less" seems to apply to anything with nerd-appeal.  Work on anything space-related, for example, seems to have the same 1/3rd exploitation as games. 

The same markdown or worse applies to doing interesting academic scientific research vs. the boring corporate type.

8 hours ago, TLTay said:

Wow. So they just flat weren't getting anything done in any reasonable amount of time. No wonder T2 finally pulled the plug. Surprised it took them so long.

C'mon! If there is one clear message from what @ShadowZone said in that video, it is that all the developers involved did the best they could, but both parent companies made terrible strategic decisions that either hamstrung them or put them way out of their depth.

Edited May 25 by herbal space program

[Westinghouse]

Sorry, I simply just don't buy the idea that not paying the software developers $200-250k was an issue. 

The original game and other successful indie games are proof that great games can be created by driven, self motivated people working on something they're passionate about. 

I think it was a mistake to hire lots of people from places like Amazon and Microsoft. These folks probably thought working on a game would be a fun jape for a while until it dawned on them how tough the task would be. They were also placing a lot of trust in people for whom the project was more of a 9-5 job.

Nertea strikes me as an example of the kind of person they should have been hiring right from the start - someone with the necessary skills who was a fan of the original and was invested in creating a worthy sequel.

They've often cited Covid in the past as being an issue, but the pandemic did show how effectively people could work remotely, especially in software/game development. When Star Theory started crewing up in 2018, it seems they wrongly assumed they had to recruit people exclusively from the Seattle area who could work locally in the studio. That's a very small pool of people to select from if you assume they have to A) have played the original game, B) understand how simulation games work and C) are actually good at their jobs. This probably led to them hiring a lot of people who weren’t familiar with KSP as @ShadowZone alludes to. It appears they later rectified the problem, learning to bring on board people like David Tregoning who I believe lives in Australia.

I won't lie, I remember listening to the lead designer’s interview and wondering if she even played the very game she was being paid to work on. Too many of the team were just not the right fit for KSP. 

Edited May 25 by Westinghouse
Formatting

[Bej Kerman]

4 hours ago, Siska said:

Well, 

it smelled bad from the beginning. Saying it out loud, meant you are a negative person, but here it is out loud now

There was no evidence of any of this before ST was poached. If you wanted the game to fail before then, well you just wanted the game to fail and you weren't exactly working off of evidence.

[AtomicTech]

On 5/24/2024 at 8:49 AM, Vexillar said:

@ShadowZone - thanks. This seems to answer a lot of questions.

 

Yes, this was an awesome piece @ShadowZone! Very well done!

[Temporal Wolf]

39 minutes ago, Westinghouse said:

Sorry, I simply just don't buy the idea that not paying the software developers $200-250k was an issue. 

The original game and other successful indie games are proof that great games can be created by driven, self motivated people working on something they're passionate about. 

I think it was a mistake to hire lots of people from places like Amazon and Microsoft. These folks probably thought working on a game would be a fun jape for a while until it dawned on them how tough the task would be. They were also placing a lot of trust in people for whom the project was more of a 9-5 job.

Nertea strikes me as an example of the kind of person they should have been hiring right from the start - someone with the necessary skills who was a fan of the original and was invested in creating a worthy sequel.

They've often cited Covid in the past as being an issue, but the pandemic did show how effectively people could work remotely, especially in software/game development. When Star Theory started crewing up in 2018, it seems they wrongly assumed they had to recruit people exclusively from the Seattle area who could work locally in the studio. That's a very small pool of people to select from if you assume they have to A) have played the original game, B) understand how simulation games work and C) are actually good at their jobs. This probably led to them hiring a lot of people who weren’t familiar with KSP as @ShadowZone alludes to. It appears they later rectified the problem, learning to bring on board people like David Tregoning who I believe lives in Australia.

I won't lie, I remember listening to the lead designer’s interview and wondering if she even played the very game she was being paid to work on. Too many of the team were just not the right fit for KSP. 

Between a ton of unsupported conjecture and a healthy dose of factually incorrect bits, I find this difficult to even take seriously.

They were hiring college grads, not poaching FAANG devs. I do like the subtle dig that FAANG devs wouldn't know what hard work was though.

"They should have just hired driven, self-motivated people..." and those high performing people can be paid easily double working for FAANG. You're advocating for a very anti-worker "well they should just accept being exploited because they care so dang much about the IP..." instead of "if you want market rate work, pay them market rate... if you want more, pay more." With a $150k cap you're fishing in the bottom quartile of senior engineers in Seattle.

Speed, Quality, Price. If you're careful you can pick two, but you definitely can't pick all three.