Summary: KSP2 Development Timeline (What We Know)

[The Space Peacock]

This is an entire speculative timeline of KSP2 development based on Investigative Journalism done by ShadowZone, extracted from this video. A thank you goes out to @ShadowZone for doing thorough research on KSP2’s development, while remaining neutral and preserving integrity in the reporting of his findings.

Recurring names and important concepts or events are in bold. Abbreviations are noted between brackets in (cursive) next to full names. Problematic events are denoted with !. All markings are applied by me and represent my own personal opinion.

A PDF version of this summary is available at the bottom of this page, for easier reading.

 

Pre-production, 2017 – 2018 (Star Theory)

• Take Two (T2) chooses Uber Entertainment, Later renamed Star Theory (ST), to develop Kerbal Space Program 2 (KSP2)
• T2 allocates 2 years and 10 million $ to ST to develop KSP2
  • This was supposedly seen as doable by the Studio Manager Jeremy Able)and ST Owners Bob Berry & Jonathan Mavor (referred to as ‘ST Management’ from hereon)
• ST Management’s plan at this time was to do a Revision of KSP1, meaning; take the original code, polish it up to modern standards, add new graphics and content and sell it as new version
• The creative direction, Nate Simpson, has a broader vision: a Reimagining rather than the Revision planned by ST management
  • This would have included Interstellar and Colonies.
  • Nate was a long-standing fan of KSP at this point
• Nate Simpson is able to convince T2 to approve his Reimagining
  • ! Despite this, the timeline and budget already allocated by T2 would not be sufficient for the studio to pull of this Reimagining
  • This is regarded as the start of a cascade of problems for KSP2 development
• At this time, the only engineer on the project is Principal Engineer Chuck Noble, an experienced software engineer with a degree in aerospace, aeronautical and astronautical engineering
• ! T2 keeps development of KSP2 highly secretive
  • This forces ST team members to do recruiting and hiring in addition to their normal duties, hindering development
  • ST team members are not allowed to tell potential hires what game or even what type of game they will be working on
  • ! Due to budgetary constraints, only a few junior engineers with little to no experience are hired (senior engineers are brought onboard eventually, but much later on)
  • All but one of these engineers had never played KSP1 before
• ! The junior engineers were considering building KSP2 on Unreal Engine instead of Unity, but were ordered by ST management to stick to the original code and engine (Unity) used by KSP1
  • As a result of this, some early prototype builds of KSP2 were done on KSP1’s user interface and graphics

 

 

Early Production, 2018-2019 (Star Theory)

• Scope Change: Colonies, Interstellar and Multiplayer now considered “must-deliver features”
• ! Spring 2020 release date is communicated to the development team, and is considered Non-Negotiable
  • This causes stress within development team, which possibly contributed to some wrong and hastily made decisions
• ! The decision to cram all these features into KSP1’s code, as ordered by ST management, ends up costing the engineers a lot of time
  • People working on the project during this time estimate this resulted in around one year of wasted development time, compared to if they had been allowed to rewrite the code
  • Multiplayer especially turns out to be incompatible with this framework
• ! Contact with Squad, the developers of KSP1, is prohibited (possibly by Squad upper management)
  • This leads to nobody being available to guide the KSP2 engineers through the KSP1 code they were ordered to work with, forcing them to work in the dark and figure it out themselves
  • The KSP2 engineers at ST would have loved to talk with the engineers at Squad, but they fear for their jobs being terminated by T2 should they do so
  • ! This fear turns out to be warranted: a developer from ST is let go after answering a community question AFTER the game was announced, with T2 claiming it was an “unlawful disclosure” and that “communication to the public was not star Theory's decision, but the Publishers”
•  Ultimately, the two previous points prove insurmountable and the engineers realize a significant Refactor of the code is needed to support Nate’s Reimagining
  • ! This decision does not go down well with ST management, who do not understand the reasons behind it
  • From this point onward, it is assumed new code is being written from scratch
• T2 continues to give ST pass after pass in Milestone meetings, despite people familiar with these meetings believing they should not have passed
  • ! The most likely reason for this is that ST management had convinced T2 that they were sitting on a potential goldmine, claiming they were working on a ‘cultural successor to Minecraft’
  • These claims drive T2 to see Kerbals as their version of ‘Minions’ (A.N. The yellow creatures from the ‘despicable me’ movies), even planning a collaboration with a toy manufacturer
• Nate Simpson tries to appease both T2 and the existing KSP community by aiming to have the game be more accessible to a new audience and expand its player base, while also sticking to the core mechanics of KSP1
• ! ST Management meekly goes along with the secrecy ordered by T2; one of the reasons for this being the aim to keep people familiar with KSP1 away from ‘interfering’ in the sequel
  • They explicitly did not want KSP1 Veteran and well-known Youtuber Scott Manley to have any input in development
  • Another reason for staying silent was that Uber Entertainment (now ST) had a bad reputation for previous games  
  • ! T2’s reasoning for keeping the project silent so long was apparently driven by a desire to avoid conflict with the community until it was too late
• At this point, due to the complete lack of outsider input, Creative Director Nate Simpson is basically the only person making gameplay decisions
  • espite developing his first game at the age of 13, Nate is not an engineer; he instead has a bachelors degree in Arts (people working on the game describe him as a ‘very visual person’)
  • ! This in turn caused a lot of focus to be placed on the visuals of the game, sometimes resulting in fundamental design and gameplay decisions to take the back seat
  • Nate sometimes had a tendency to micromanage (something he admitted to in an interview) single elements of the game; one of which was wobbly rockets.  
    • Even before the Refactoring of the code, it was discovered the original KSP1 code could support significantly reduced wobble while also maintaining the option for joints to break under high stress
    • ! Nate however was convinced that the difficulty from wobble and breaking joints was necessary for a fun game and made executive decision to keep them in the game
  • Despite these flaws, Nate is considered by everyone spoken to by ShadowZone (SZ), be it someone who worked on the project or other content creators who interacted with him, to be a KSP Superfan with nothing but the community’s best interests at heart in his decision-making. The occasional disagreements between him and the engineers are attributed by the latter to Nate’s inexperience with aerospace, not to any form of malice.
    • ! This inexperience, combined with Nate’s desire to expand the audience of the game to new players, somewhat resulted in the  opposite happening; it reduced the capability of the game to serve as a teaching tool for people going into aerospace engineering and spaceflight, and overall reduced the priority of realism during development
• KSP2 is officially announced to very warm reception, with a release date set for the next year (2020)
  • Content creators like Scott Manley, Matt Lowne and SZ are also brought onboard for the first time

 

 

Hostile Takeover, 2019-2020

• ST finally bring some Senior Engineers onboard. The Refactoring of the code is still only halfway done at this point in time
  • ! By this time is has become clear that the release date of Spring 2020 is not achievable; despite this, ST Management continues to communicate to the team that this deadline and key features like colonies, interstellar and multiplayer are non-negotiable
• Chuck Noble, the only senior engineer who had been with the project since the start, leaves the team
• ST Owners Bob Berry & Jonathan Mavor begin negotiations with T2 to sell the studio to them, which are well underway by late 2019
•  ! Late 2019: Negotiations with Take Two break down and Star Theory loses the project
  • ! ST’s Owners, Bob Berry and Jonathan Mavor, raised their price last-minute betting on T2 being willing to cash them out before finding another studio to work on KSP2, making them multi-millionaires in the process
  • In response, T2 pulled the intellectual property from Star Theory and started a poaching attempt, offering everyone on the team to transition over to continue working on the project
  • ! Partially due to the complete lack of emotional attachment to the KSP franchise on the part of most engineers(they still had not played ksp1 at this point) and partially due to T2’s refusal to budge when senior engineers tried to get better deals and compensation, the poaching attempt mostly failed, with only 4 engineers initially making the transition to the new studio that would become Intercept Games(IG)
  • ! A total of around 20 people ended up making the transition eventually, but most of these were either junior engineers, artists or production people, resulting in a small and inexperienced team once again
  • Star Theory continued to survive for a few more months, but ultimately failed to pitch new projects ideas (supposedly due to Covid cancelling an expo they were planning to attend) to publishers, resulting in their closure not much after.
• Technical Director Paul Furio is brought aboard the newly created IG with the mission of rebuilding the development team and setting processes in place to allow KSP2 to succeed

 

 

 

Bumpy Road To Early Access, 2020-2023 (Intercept Games)

• ! T2 gives IG the stipulation to keep the old, broken code from Star Theory and work with it instead of starting again from scratch
  • Apparently this was done because T2 management felt uneasy about ‘Refactoring’ the code yet again, so the decision was made to keep the existing code
  • There is some debate as to the ‘broken-ness’ of the Star Theory Code;
    • A person working on the project under Intercept Games said “they had 0% chance of releasing anything with that" about Star Theory code.
    • A person working on the project under Star Theory, on the other hand, said with a little more time it would have worked. This person does however agree that it would have been better for IG to start again from scratch, not because of code quality but because of fresh team and still no contact to KSP1 devs.
    • In general, everyone SZ spoke to agrees that not starting from scratch was the wrong move
• Not starting from scratch also meant Multiplayer remained one the biggest challenges to making the game feature-complete
  • In an interview with Nate Simpson, it appeared that KSP2 already had working multiplayer when he said “as we've been testing it internally, I have never heard people laugh so hard”. Apparently, this ‘testing’ was actually done using a multiplayer mod in KSP1. It is however worth pointing out that KSP2 did have some form of rudimentary multiplayer by this time, inherited from ST, but it was incredibly buggy,  unstable and nowhere near shippable.
  • ! At this point, multiplayer remained a secondary objective while the main focus was still very much on art and visuals. This lack of baking multiplayer into the design remained a problem throughout this stage of development.
    • They did however make progress during this period; later builds allowed multiple players to inhabit the same world and launch rockets together
  • A few months after the game released into early access, the entire multiplayer team was let go. The developers claimed they were still designing the game with the thought that multiplayer would one day be a big part of it in the back of their minds, but it essentially was put on the backburner entirely
• Despite the old code hindering development and Covid hitting the globe, progress was finally being made and experts like Dr. Michael Dodd, a physics engineer, and Chris Adderly (also known as Nertea), a prominent KSP1 modder were brought onboard the project.
  • ! It would still be until mid 2021 before KSP1 developers could finally join the KSP2 team. The ban on contact remained in place until then. Upon joining the team, apparently their reaction was “you should have asked us a year ago!” (which the KSP2 devs wanted to, but still weren’t allowed to)
    • This ban may be explained by Squad not wanting KSP1 developers to be distracted from the final KSP1 updates
    • This does not however explain why ex-Squad employees who had left years prior, like KSP1’s original creator Felipe Falange (known as HarvesteR), were never contacted
• ! Problems continue to become apparent as development goes on. Some of these are exacerbated or even caused by producers changing priorities for developers, often forcing them to switch between very different features
  • This was later addressed withing IG when the ‘feature team structure’ (detailed here) was introduced. This structure was something Paul Furio has tried to establish before Early Access, but it was only established after his departure
• Take Two forces a release deadline of February 2023
  • by this time, the project is already over its allocated budget
  • It immediately becomes apparent that all key features would not be ready in time for this deadline. It is believed there was a chance Colonies could have made it, but this was foregone a few months later
• In September 2022 the decision is made to go to Early Access with a stripped down sandbox version of the game
  • ! This causes a massive upheaval of development, as the project was never intended to be released in parts. Product managers started pulling developers from their tasks and assigning them new ones, causing even more problems
    • An example of this is an engineer who was weeks away from finishing a colony builder tool being pulled from the task and assigned to another item that had to be ticked off a project list, as colonies were shelved
• ! Yet another problem presents itself; software engineers, in high demand at the time, could make $200 to $250K a year at large companies like Microsoft or Amazon, but at IG their maximum yearly pay was kept at $150K due to budgetary constraints. Not only does this result in difficulties with recruiting, it also drives several people, such as Dr. Micheal Dodd, to leave the project
  • The biggest blow comes from the departure of Eric De Feliz, a Graphics Specialist working on shaders. Nobody was present to pick up where he left off, resulting in the game being shipped with seriously unoptimized shaders
  •  GPU engineers especially were in high demand around this time, resulting in even worse optimization
• ! Despite being requisitioned multiple times, the IT team is not able to provide the necessary tools to test performance in time, further contributing to poor optimization and a late release of minimum and recommended specifications to the public

 

 

 

Early Access, 2023-2024 (Intercept Games)

• Take Two and Private Division put their marketing into full gear, encouraging the ‘hype train’ even more
• An event is held in the Netherlands where content creators get their first chance to play the game. The first problems start to become apparent to the public as the creators give mixed reviews.
• Meanwhile, tensions are high at IG and PD. Some people are not happy with some of the decisions made, and they are aware the game is not at the level they wanted to deliver. Anxiety about community reception is large. In spite of this, steam sale numbers are put on a big screen in the conference room as they hope to breach 100K sales on day one.
• KSP2 Officially releases into Early Access. The game receives mixed to negative reviews, and it becomes clear the secrecy pushed by T2 has hurt the relation between developer and community
  • A person working on the project later admits not getting community feedback was one of the biggest mistakes. They go on record to say “We wound up shipping the wrong product and not focusing on the right features”
  • T2’s marketing campaign backfires as people start to realize the flaws of the game they bought for (nearly) full price ($50) and negative reviews start pouring in from angry and disappointed customers
  • Sale numbers fall short of the numbers hoped for, only reaching 80K. This number does not account for the many refunds that happened
• ! A few weeks after the early access release, Studio Head Jeremy Ables and Technical Director Paul Furio were let go by higher-up management, which deemed them as the most expensive people in the studio. Furio left immediately while Ables stayed on a few more weeks. Michael Cook, previously Brand Manager at PD, took over the job of Studio Manager. It is also around this time the multiplayer developers were let go.
  • Multiplayer was still janky and buggy at this point, but it was functional in some capacity. Despite this, there was a silent understanding that the layoff of the multiplayer team might have meant the feature was now shelved indefinitely.
• Focus shifts to bug fixing and working towards the first milestone update, later dubbed ‘For Science!’ (FS!)
  • FS! came out in December 2023 to generally positive reviews, 10 months after the game entered early access. This was a significant delay from the internal estimate of 3 months, brought on by the shift in focus after community backlash about the state of the game.
  • It is during this period that Furio’s cross functional feature team structure is finally implemented

 

 

 

Studio Closure, 2024 (Intercept Games)

• In late April 2024, a WARN notice appeared indicating T2’s Seattle office, where Intercept Games is located, was being closed with 70 people (about the size of KSP2’s full dev team) being laid off starting June 28^th. The studio went into near-complete radio silence, with the only statement made on @KerbalSpaceP’s X account “We’re still hard at work on KSP2. We’ll talk more when we can.”. Take Two Interactive later released a statement saying they were “streamlining the pipeline” and implementing “cost-saving measures across the company”.
• Despite statements from Take Two’s CEO, Strauss Zelnick, saying Intercept Games would not be shuttered, all employees were laid off on June 28th 2024. What followed was a period of radio silence, broken only by two emails from Alan Lewis in July, Take Two’s Vice President of Corporate Communications and Public Affairs, which stated the following: “We are currently working on a plan for the future of Kerbal Space Program 2, which will continue its development; however, we have nothing further to say publicly at this time.” In a later email in October, the modding community was given permission to use existing game files in mods in an email from T2s Legal Department.
• On November 6th 2024, media reported Private Division and all of its live and unreleased titles, including KSP and KSP2, were sold to an undisclosed buyer. 
  Take Two also officially admitted Intercept Games had been closed for the first time.

This is a developing situation, and the impact of this on the future of the game is still unknown at this time.

 

 

Conclusion (ShadowZone’s Opinions)

• KSP2 development has been plagued by a multitude of issues from the very beginning, ranging from diverging vision to corporate takeovers to mundane issues like tools not being ready in time
• The project was based on the wrong parameters from the start
• Technical decisions were made by people that had no business making them
• The developers were not paid accordingly
• There were a lot of assumptions about gameplay and mechanics that the community might have wanted that were not verified until it was basically too late
• The lack of open communication and extreme secrecy did severely harm to the trust of the already existing fanbase, especially after the game went into early access
• Speculative: the total cost of the project so far is assumed to be around 40 to 60 million dollars so far, compared to an estimated revenue from Steam of Only 30 to 40 million
   

Notes (from ShadowZone, LinuxGuruGamer, Matt Lowne and Scott Manley)

• Nate Simpson should not take the blame; this was a passion project from him, and he genuinely appeared to want to deliver a great fun game for the existing KSP community, but he might have bit off more then he could chew, and made mistakes such as wobble. A big part of why he might not always have been able to deliver what he promised (despite wanting to do so) are technical and business constraints (example: modding API)
• Opinion from LinuxGuruGamer, Matt Lowne and Scott Manley: KSP2 can not reach completion under Take Two. The best way forward might be to focus on the modding API in the remaining time, but; mods have their limitations and they will not suffice to ‘save the game’

 

 

 

**PDF VERSION**

KSP2 Development Timeline.pdf

Edited November 8 by The Space Peacock

[Stephensan]

ok let me be honest it is totally, og fr, now HERE ME OUT, its on god, for real for REAL this time on god, its nate fault.. (this is satire)

 

also thank you for posting this much better than what i did and actually makes sense.

[Minmus Taster]

TLDR:

I honestly feel bad for Nate and the other lead developers, never at any point during this project did I truly feel there were bad intentions behind their choices,. Their sincerity about their struggles during the few moments they were able to speak were probably the reason this community held onto hope as long as we did. I hope all of the affected developers are doing well and that they'll learn and go on to better things.

Stay at your stations crew, we will continue to establish contact with the spacecraft but based on the last telemetry sent it seems that the mission has come to an end.

[razark]

So, how many times do we have to do the autopsy before we conclude that this time isn't going to be the one to bring the patient back?

[Tony Tony Chopper]

5 hours ago, razark said:

So, how many times do we have to do the autopsy before we conclude that this time isn't going to be the one to bring the patient back?

End of June anyway. Nobody asks for help killing the rest of hope beforehand.

[Antiglow]

Pretty much sums up why you can’t have business, marketing, and artist people making engineering decisions. Also you have to get people passionate about the project to do the project for the best results. This mistake happens over and over and over in this industry yet they never learn. 
 

Hopefully the original developers can get their IP back. 

[dprostock]

Every time I read about Nate Simpson I imagine him like this: 

"From the ass of the world" 

[MechBFP]

26 minutes ago, Antiglow said:

Pretty much sums up why you can’t have business, marketing, and artist people making engineering decisions. Also you have to get people passionate about the project to do the project for the best results. This mistake happens over and over and over in this industry yet they never learn. 
 

Hopefully the original developers can get their IP back. 

The original developer team is LONG gone and scattered to the winds.

[hendrack]

It's dead Jim, let go.

Also:  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_stages_of_grief

[Tony Tony Chopper]

10 minutes ago, hendrack said:

It's dead Jim, let go.

Also:  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_stages_of_grief

That theory is 55 years old by now. Psychology changed over the decades, you know.

[Stephensan]

4 hours ago, hendrack said:

It's dead Jim, let go.

Also:  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_stages_of_grief

 

sorry we got our own :3

[Johnster_Space_Program]

On 5/24/2024 at 9:23 PM, The Space Peacock said:

This is an entire speculative timeline of KSP2 development based on Investigative Journalism done by ShadowZone, extracted from this video. A thank you goes out to @ShadowZone for doing thorough research on KSP2’s development, while remaining neutral and preserving integrity in the reporting of his finding.

Recurring names and important concepts or events are in bold. Abbreviations are noted between brackets in (cursive) next to full names. Problematic events are denoted with !. All markings are applied by me and represent my own personal opinion.

A PDF version of this summary is available at the bottom of this page, for easier reading.

 

Pre-production, 2017 – 2018 (Star Theory)

• Take Two (T2) chooses Uber Entertainment, Later renamed Star Theory (ST), to develop Kerbal Space Program 2 (KSP2)
• T2 allocates 2 years and 10 million $ to ST to develop KSP2
  • This was supposedly seen as doable by the Studio Manager Jeremy Able)and ST Owners Bob Berry & Jonathan Mavor (referred to as ‘ST Management’ from hereon)
• ST Management’s plan at this time was to do a Revision of KSP1, meaning; take the original code, polish it up to modern standards, add new graphics and content and sell it as new version
• The creative direction, Nate Simpson, has a broader vision: a Reimagining rather than the Revision planned by ST management
  • This would have included Interstellar and Colonies.
  • Nate was a long-standing fan of KSP at this point
• Nate Simpson is able to convince T2 to approve his Reimagining
  • ! Despite this, the timeline and budget already allocated by T2 would not be sufficient for the studio to pull of this Reimagining
  • This is regarded as the start of a cascade of problems for KSP2 development
• At this time, the only engineer on the project is Principal Engineer Chuck Noble, an experienced software engineer with a degree in aerospace, aeronautical and astronautical engineering
• ! T2 keeps development of KSP2 highly secretive
  • This forces ST team members to do recruiting and hiring in addition to their normal duties, hindering development
  • ST team members are not allowed to tell potential hires what game or even what type of game they will be working on
  • ! Due to budgetary constraints, only a few junior engineers with little to no experience are hired (senior engineers are brought onboard eventually, but much later on)
  • All but one of these engineers had never played KSP1 before
• ! The junior engineers were considering building KSP2 on Unreal Engine instead of Unity, but were ordered by ST management to stick to the original code and engine (Unity) used by KSP1
  • As a result of this, some early prototype builds of KSP2 were done on KSP1’s user interface and graphics

 

 

Early Production, 2018-2019 (Star Theory)

• Scope Change: Colonies, Interstellar and Multiplayer now considered “must-deliver features”
• ! Spring 2020 release date is communicated to the development team, and is considered Non-Negotiable
  • This causes stress within development team, which possibly contributed to some wrong and hastily made decisions
• ! The decision to cram all these features into KSP1’s code, as ordered by ST management, ends up costing the engineers a lot of time
  • People working on the project during this time estimate this resulted in around one year of wasted development time, compared to if they had been allowed to rewrite the code
  • Multiplayer especially turns out to be incompatible with this framework
• ! Contact with Squad, the developers of KSP1, is prohibited (possibly by Squad upper management)
  • This leads to nobody being available to guide the KSP2 engineers through the KSP1 code they were ordered to work with, forcing them to work in the dark and figure it out themselves
  • The KSP2 engineers at ST would have loved to talk with the engineers at Squad, but they fear for their jobs being terminated by T2 should they do so
  • ! This fear turns out to be warranted: a developer from ST is let go after answering a community question AFTER the game was announced, with T2 claiming it was an “unlawful disclosure” and that “communication to the public was not star Theory's decision, but the Publishers”
•  Ultimately, the two previous points prove insurmountable and the engineers realize a significant Refactor of the code is needed to support Nate’s Reimagining
  • ! This decision does not go down well with ST management, who do not understand the reasons behind it
  • From this point onward, it is assumed new code is being written from scratch
• T2 continues to give ST pass after pass in Milestone meetings, despite people familiar with these meetings believing they should not have passed
  • ! The most likely reason for this is that ST management had convinced T2 that they were sitting on a potential goldmine, claiming they were working on a ‘cultural successor to Minecraft’
  • These claims drive T2 to see Kerbals as their version of ‘Minions’ (A.N. The yellow creatures from the ‘despicable me’ movies), even planning a collaboration with a toy manufacturer
• Nate Simpson tries to appease both T2 and the existing KSP community by aiming to have the game be more accessible to a new audience and expand its player base, while also sticking to the core mechanics of KSP1
• ! ST Management meekly goes along with the secrecy ordered by T2; one of the reasons for this being the aim to keep people familiar with KSP1 away from ‘interfering’ in the sequel
  • They explicitly did not want KSP1 Veteran and well-known Youtuber Scott Manley to have any input in development
  • Another reason for staying silent was that Uber Entertainment (now ST) had a bad reputation for previous games  
  • ! T2’s reasoning for keeping the project silent so long was apparently driven by a desire to avoid conflict with the community until it was too late
• At this point, due to the complete lack of outsider input, Creative Director Nate Simpson is basically the only person making gameplay decisions
  • espite developing his first game at the age of 13, Nate is not an engineer; he instead has a bachelors degree in Arts (people working on the game describe him as a ‘very visual person’)
  • ! This in turn caused a lot of focus to be placed on the visuals of the game, sometimes resulting in fundamental design and gameplay decisions to take the back seat
  • Nate sometimes had a tendency to micromanage (something he admitted to in an interview) single elements of the game; one of which was wobbly rockets.  
    • Even before the Refactoring of the code, it was discovered the original KSP1 code could support significantly reduced wobble while also maintaining the option for joints to break under high stress
    • ! Nate however was convinced that the difficulty from wobble and breaking joints was necessary for a fun game and made executive decision to keep them in the game
  • Despite these flaws, Nate is considered by everyone spoken to by ShadowZone (SZ), be it someone who worked on the project or other content creators who interacted with him, to be a KSP Superfan with nothing but the community’s best interests at heart in his decision-making. The occasional disagreements between him and the engineers are attributed by the latter to Nate’s inexperience with aerospace, not to any form of malice.
    • ! This inexperience, combined with Nate’s desire to expand the audience of the game to new players, somewhat resulted in the  opposite happening; it reduced the capability of the game to serve as a teaching tool for people going into aerospace engineering and spaceflight, and overall reduced the priority of realism during development
• KSP2 is officially announced to very warm reception, with a release date set for the next year (2020)
  • Content creators like Scott Manley, Matt Lowne and SZ are also brought onboard for the first time

 

 

Hostile Takeover, 2019-2020

• ST finally bring some Senior Engineers onboard. The Refactoring of the code is still only halfway done at this point in time
  • ! By this time is has become clear that the release date of Spring 2020 is not achievable; despite this, ST Management continues to communicate to the team that this deadline and key features like colonies, interstellar and multiplayer are non-negotiable
• Chuck Noble, the only senior engineer who had been with the project since the start, leaves the team
• ST Owners Bob Berry & Jonathan Mavor begin negotiations with T2 to sell the studio to them, which are well underway by late 2019
•  ! Late 2019: Negotiations with Take Two break down and Star Theory loses the project
  • ! ST’s Owners, Bob Berry and Jonathan Mavor, raised their price last-minute betting on T2 being willing to cash them out before finding another studio to work on KSP2, making them multi-millionaires in the process
  • In response, T2 pulled the intellectual property from Star Theory and started a poaching attempt, offering everyone on the team to transition over to continue working on the project
  • ! Partially due to the complete lack of emotional attachment to the KSP franchise on the part of most engineers(they still had not played ksp1 at this point) and partially due to T2’s refusal to budge when senior engineers tried to get better deals and compensation, the poaching attempt mostly failed, with only 4 engineers initially making the transition to the new studio that would become Intercept Games(IG)
  • ! A total of around 20 people ended up making the transition eventually, but most of these were either junior engineers, artists or production people, resulting in a small and inexperienced team once again
  • Star Theory continued to survive for a few more months, but ultimately failed to pitch new projects ideas (supposedly due to Covid cancelling an expo they were planning to attend) to publishers, resulting in their closure not much after.
• Technical Director Paul Furio is brought aboard the newly created IG with the mission of rebuilding the development team and setting processes in place to allow KSP2 to succeed

 

 

 

Bumpy Road To Early Access, 2020-2023 (Intercept Games)

• ! T2 gives IG the stipulation to keep the old, broken code from Star Theory and work with it instead of starting again from scratch
  • Apparently this was done because T2 management felt uneasy about ‘Refactoring’ the code yet again, so the decision was made to keep the existing code
  • There is some debate as to the ‘broken-ness’ of the Star Theory Code;
    • A person working on the project under Intercept Games said “they had 0% chance of releasing anything with that" about Star Theory code.
    • A person working on the project under Star Theory, on the other hand, said with a little more time it would have worked. This person does however agree that it would have been better for IG to start again from scratch, not because of code quality but because of fresh team and still no contact to KSP1 devs.
    • In general, everyone SZ spoke to agrees that not starting from scratch was the wrong move
• Not starting from scratch also meant Multiplayer remained one the biggest challenges to making the game feature-complete
  • In an interview with Nate Simpson, it appeared that KSP2 already had working multiplayer when he said “as we've been testing it internally, I have never heard people laugh so hard”. Apparently, this ‘testing’ was actually done using a multiplayer mod in KSP1. It is however worth pointing out that KSP2 did have some form of rudimentary multiplayer by this time, inherited from ST, but it was incredibly buggy,  unstable and nowhere near shippable.
  • ! At this point, multiplayer remained a secondary objective while the main focus was still very much on art and visuals. This lack of baking multiplayer into the design remained a problem throughout this stage of development.
    • They did however make progress during this period; later builds allowed multiple players to inhabit the same world and launch rockets together
  • A few months after the game released into early access, the entire multiplayer team was let go. The developers claimed they were still designing the game with the thought that multiplayer would one day be a big part of it in the back of their minds, but it essentially was put on the backburner entirely
• Despite the old code hindering development and Covid hitting the globe, progress was finally being made and experts like Dr. Michael Dodd, a physics engineer, and Chris Adderly (also known as Nertea), a prominent KSP1 modder were brought onboard the project.
  • ! It would still be until mid 2021 before KSP1 developers could finally join the KSP2 team. The ban on contact remained in place until then. Upon joining the team, apparently their reaction was “you should have asked us a year ago!” (which the KSP2 devs wanted to, but still weren’t allowed to)
    • This ban may be explained by Squad not wanting KSP1 developers to be distracted from the final KSP1 updates
    • This does not however explain why ex-Squad employees who had left years prior, like KSP1’s original creator Felipe Falange (known as HarvesteR), were never contacted
• ! Problems continue to become apparent as development goes on. Some of these are exacerbated or even caused by producers changing priorities for developers, often forcing them to switch between very different features
  • This was later addressed withing IG when the ‘feature team structure’ (detailed here) was introduced. This structure was something Paul Furio has tried to establish before Early Access, but it was only established after his departure
• Take Two forces a release deadline of February 2023
  • by this time, the project is already over its allocated budget
  • It immediately becomes apparent that all key features would not be ready in time for this deadline. It is believed there was a chance Colonies could have made it, but this was foregone a few months later
• In September 2022 the decision is made to go to Early Access with a stripped down sandbox version of the game
  • ! This causes a massive upheaval of development, as the project was never intended to be released in parts. Product managers started pulling developers from their tasks and assigning them new ones, causing even more problems
    • An example of this is an engineer who was weeks away from finishing a colony builder tool being pulled from the task and assigned to another item that had to be ticked off a project list, as colonies were shelved
• ! Yet another problem presents itself; software engineers, in high demand at the time, could make $200 to $250K a year at large companies like Microsoft or Amazon, but at IG their maximum yearly pay was kept at $150K due to budgetary constraints. Not only does this result in difficulties with recruiting, it also drives several people, such as Dr. Micheal Dodd, to leave the project
  • The biggest blow comes from the departure of Eric De Feliz, a Graphics Specialist working on shaders. Nobody was present to pick up where he left off, resulting in the game being shipped with seriously unoptimized shaders
  •  GPU engineers especially were in high demand around this time, resulting in even worse optimization
• ! Despite being requisitioned multiple times, the IT team is not able to provide the necessary tools to test performance in time, further contributing to poor optimization and a late release of minimum and recommended specifications to the public

 

 

 

Early Access, 2023-2024 (Intercept Games)

• Take Two and Private Division put their marketing into full gear, encouraging the ‘hype train’ even more
• An event is held in the Netherlands where content creators get their first chance to play the game. The first problems start to become apparent to the public as the creators give mixed reviews.
• Meanwhile, tensions are high at IG and PD. Some people are not happy with some of the decisions made, and they are aware the game is not at the level they wanted to deliver. Anxiety about community reception is large. In spite of this, steam sale numbers are put on a big screen in the conference room as they hope to breach 100K sales on day one.
• KSP2 Officially releases into Early Access. The game receives mixed to negative reviews, and it becomes clear the secrecy pushed by T2 has hurt the relation between developer and community
  • A person working on the project later admits not getting community feedback was one of the biggest mistakes. They go on record to say “We wound up shipping the wrong product and not focusing on the right features”
  • T2’s marketing campaign backfires as people start to realize the flaws of the game they bought for (nearly) full price ($50) and negative reviews start pouring in from angry and disappointed customers
  • Sale numbers fall short of the numbers hoped for, only reaching 80K. This number does not account for the many refunds that happened
• ! A few weeks after the early access release, Studio Head Jeremy Ables and Technical Director Paul Furio were let go by higher-up management, which deemed them as the most expensive people in the studio. Furio left immediately while Ables stayed on a few more weeks. Michael Cook, previously Brand Manager at PD, took over the job of Studio Manager. It is also around this time the multiplayer developers were let go.
  • Multiplayer was still janky and buggy at this point, but it was functional in some capacity. Despite this, there was a silent understanding that the layoff of the multiplayer team might have meant the feature was now shelved indefinitely.
• Focus shifts to bug fixing and working towards the first milestone update, later dubbed ‘For Science!’ (FS!)
  • FS! came out in December 2023 to generally positive reviews, 10 months after the game entered early access. This was a significant delay from the internal estimate of 3 months, brought on by the shift in focus after community backlash about the state of the game.
  • It is during this period that Furio’s cross functional feature team structure is finally implemented

 

 

 

Studio Closure, 2024 (Intercept Games)

• In late April 2024, a WARN notice appeared indicating T2’s Seattle office, where Intercept Games is located, is being closed with 70 people (about the size of KSP2’s full dev team) being laid off starting June 28^th. The studio went into near-complete radio silence, with the only statement made on @KerbalSpaceP’s X account “We’re still hard at work on KSP2. We’ll talk more when we can.”.

This is a developing situation, and the impact of this on the future of the game is still unknown at this time.

 

 

Conclusion (ShadowZone’s Opinions)

• KSP2 development has been plagued by a multitude of issues from the very beginning, ranging from diverging vision to corporate takeovers to mundane issues like tools not being ready in time
• The project was based on the wrong parameters from the start
• Technical decisions were made by people that had no business making them
• The developers were not paid accordingly
• There were a lot of assumptions about gameplay and mechanics that the community might have wanted that were not verified until it was basically too late
• The lack of open communication and extreme secrecy did severely harm to the trust of the already existing fanbase, especially after the game went into early access
• Speculative: the total cost of the project so far is assumed to be around 40 to 60 million dollars so far, compared to an estimated revenue from Steam of Only 30 to 40 million
   

Notes (from ShadowZone, LinuxGuruGamer, Matt Lowne and Scott Manley)

• Nate Simpson should not take the blame; this was a passion project from him, and he genuinely appeared to want to deliver a great fun game for the existing KSP community, but he might have bit off more then he could chew, and made mistakes such as wobble. A big part of why he might not always have been able to deliver what he promised (despite wanting to do so) are technical and business constraints (example: modding API)
• Opinion from LinuxGuruGamer, Matt Lowne and Scott Manley: KSP2 can not reach completion under Take Two. The best way forward might be to focus on the modding API in the remaining time, but; mods have their limitations and they will not suffice to ‘save the game’

 

 

 

**PDF VERSION**

KSP2 Development Timeline.pdf 275 kB · 5 downloads

Thanks so much for posting this summary of what @ShadowZone talked about in the video! Since it came out, I've watched it several times because I think it's great that we finally know a lot more about KSP 2's development history than we did before.

For anyone who hasn't seen it yet and is interested, I've included a link to it below.

Also, something interesting I found while watching the video was that SZ talked about seeing working builds of the game, and after hearing that, I decided to reach out to him to see if he could share screenshots of those builds or not, and this was his response.

While I hope he will be able to find a workaround at some point in the future, I understand his concerns. I also asked him about when the multiplayer video he talked about in the video might come out.

So yeah, I'm looking forward (and hopefully you as well) to when his video that goes more in-depth about the KSP 2 multiplayer comes out, and thanks again @The Space Peacock for creating a PDF of the timeline and also this forum post!

Edited May 26 by Johnster_Space_Program
Fixed a spelling error.

[Yaivenov]

It would seem like one of the motivations for secrecy was to conceal the fact KSP2 was a straight rip of KSP1 rather than a ground up rebuild; something the entire community of KSP1 knew needed to happen for any real advancement/expansion of the game mechanics.

Any communication between subject matter experts like HarvestR, LGG, Scott Manley, et alii would have immediately revealed this fact and communication of such to the community would likely result in reduced sales of KSP2.  

[The Space Peacock]

4 hours ago, Johnster_Space_Program said:

So yeah, I'm looking forward (and hopefully you as well) to when his video that goes more in-depth about the KSP 2 multiplayer comes out, and thanks again @The Space Peacock for creating a PDF of the timeline and also this forum post!

thanks for reaching out to ShadowZone and getting some more info! That video on multiplayer will be interesting, for sure..

[KincaidFrankMF]

36 minutes ago, Yaivenov said:

It would seem like one of the motivations for secrecy was to conceal the fact KSP2 was a straight rip of KSP1 rather than a ground up rebuild; something the entire community of KSP1 knew needed to happen for any real advancement/expansion of the game mechanics.

Agreed, especially for the price. You can't sell a tweaked version of an indie game for $50 without, you know, everyone feeling totally ripped off.

I wonder if that also contributed to the feature-sparse nature of the EA release. I totally bought into the notion that they must have at least started by trying to build from scratch, simply because so much of the first game was completely missing. I wonder if the dev team felt utterly embarrassed by what they were being asked to do (i.e., rip us all off) and essentially tore out everything that would have given that fact away. And/or, they tried the messy compromise of trying to create a new game within the shell of the old one. Having ripped out the engine, the seats and the upholstery, they weren't able to replace them in a timely fashion, because they weren't able to hire & retain the necessary technical expertise.

[Yaivenov]

2 minutes ago, KincaidFrankMF said:

Agreed, especially for the price. You can't sell a tweaked version of an indie game for $50 without, you know, everyone feeling totally ripped off.

I wonder if that also contributed to the feature-sparse nature of the EA release. I totally bought into the notion that they must have at least started by trying to build from scratch, simply because so much of the first game was completely missing. I wonder if the dev team felt utterly embarrassed by what they were being asked to do (i.e., rip us all off) and essentially tore out everything that would have given that fact away. And/or, they tried the messy compromise of trying to create a new game within the shell of the old one. Having ripped out the engine, the seats and the upholstery, they weren't able to replace them in a timely fashion, because they weren't able to hire & retain the necessary technical expertise.

I'd be interesting in knowing how many players would have never purchased KSP2 if they had known it was a rip and not a rebuild.  

 

I certainly would not have.

[KincaidFrankMF]

1 minute ago, Yaivenov said:

I'd be interesting in knowing how many players would have never purchased KSP2 if they had known it was a rip and not a rebuild.  

Probably not, if only for the principle of the thing. But I logged something like 700 hours in the game, so I can't reeeaaaaally complain about VFM for myself. It's just dishonest.

[theJesuit]

12 minutes ago, Yaivenov said:

I'd be interesting in knowing how many players would have never purchased KSP2 if they had known it was a rip and not a rebuild.  

 

I certainly would not have.

It depends.  If it was better, yes I would have anyway.  The changes if implemented would go beyond the capabilities of the original as it was going to be cleaned up.  However, it wasn't realised and the capabilities were not there.  in hindsight i would not have.

[MARL_Mk1]

Amazing post.

[shelshok]

15 hours ago, Yaivenov said:

I'd be interesting in knowing how many players would have never purchased KSP2 if they had known it was a rip and not a rebuild. 

If it were a years-long cleanup of code, updates to graphics, and integration of a few mods, I would absolutely have paid for that.

[Observe]

I see that senior design manager Quinn Duffy has posted to LinkedIn (10 hours ago) confirming that the Intercept team will be laid off as of 28th June.

[EngineeringWaffle]

The sad thing IMO is that I would have totally paid $50 for KSP1, but it has multiplayer, upgraded textures, and it's semi-stable. Cuz the KSP1 multiplayer mod is a huge pain in the ass to get working, and having a better starting point for textures and models is always nice.

 

At this point, I think the best bet is hoping Paradox will pull a City Skylines and release "Nerdal Space Project" that is legally distinct form KSP, while doing everything KSP does better in a modern game engine. Other than that, it's been a hell of a ride boys. Wish all of you the best in your future space adventures. And for the love of god do not back any "revive KSP2" kickstarters.

[hendrack]

4 hours ago, EngineeringWaffle said:

At this point, I think the best bet is hoping Paradox will pull a City Skylines and release "Nerdal Space Project" that is legally distinct form KSP, while doing everything KSP does better in a modern game engine.

Paradox? No, just no please. This company is a blight in the gaming business.

[Vexillar]

7 hours ago, Observe said:

I see that senior design manager Quinn Duffy has posted to LinkedIn (10 hours ago) confirming that the Intercept team will be laid off as of 28th June.

As Quinn only joined the team in January, it might be inferred that he was hired to "turn things round in six months", or some such mission impossible brief.

[Meecrob]

4 hours ago, EngineeringWaffle said:

"Nerdal Space Project" that is legally distinct form KSP

I thought we narrowed the name down to either "Kay Ess Pee" or "Labrek Space Program"

 

4 hours ago, EngineeringWaffle said:

Paradox will pull a City Skylines

Paradox is run by someone who might as well be Strauss Zelnick's brother. Check out the whole issue of Cities II being released prematurely to fill a hole on their quarterly earnings report, then when it flopped, they cut their losses because it would cost too much to make the game work. Sounds really similar to KSP2 to me, lol.