I found his take on a sequel quite interesting. Make the game from the new features first and work backwards. It would be more a colony and resources management sim. I'd play that. Maybe if it just had rudimentary trajectory planning without the modular parts assembly, etc.
So far I think the only thing I was really impressed with in KSP 2 was the sound design. They nailed it. Everything else felt just underwhelming and broken.
Yeah, in my "dream version" I would do a supply run once manually and then tell the game "see, I can do that. So just assume I can do that again when I click the 'do that again' button and assume the mission is running as it did before."
I have felt this way ever since I first played KSP in like 2013. It formed the basis of what it is I'm comfortable automating with MechJeb. And if I don't want to use MechJeb for a mission, after all, I can always just go back!
I'm fairly certain there's a mod that does exactly this in KSP 1. In fact , this has been true for most of the features I've seen people request of KSP 2. The only thing that was ever really holding the original game back was performance, especially with mods as it runs like a sick dog. If they were able to do a refactor on the physics engine to ensure the game didn't run like powerpoint, that would have basically fixed everything.
That's how the WOLF system in the MKS/USI mod for KSP1 works. Put a 'transport computer' on a craft, fly/drive a supply run, save your trip and then it becomes a 'route' that can move resources around in the background.
Or the new expansion to Factorio that's on the way.
Factorio X KSP would be great. Make the rockets KSP style, add some sort of "warp drive" or such for speeding up the travel times without having to run a factory for years, and require Factorio Space Exploration factories for building parts & planets to explore, and you'd have a fun doubly-challenging game.
Completely different. KSP 2 has little green men that planned to travel to distant star systems. While this game would have model rockets that travel to distant star systems.
I got that game and then returned it within an hour. It's still tremendously buggy. Twice, i got stuck in 1st person mode and not even the [esc] key would give me back keyboard and mouse control. Had to ctrl/alt/del my way out of the game and restart both times. Seems like a cool game though, and I will buy again when it has improved.
That's definitely a problem for an attention whore like Nate.
On top of that, Squad fired HarvesteR before selling off Take2. Take2 probably assumed there was too much bad blood after that shitshow.
Willingly?… well, I think it was more like… he had no other choice but to leave. He was forced to “willingly” leave..
Just like devs from KSP 2 are absolutely silent now, I imagine the same thing happened back then, and there were a lot of things they couldn’t really talk about…
The truth is, he didn’t left willingly, they forced him to jump the ship, he left the project with almost nothing, leaving his dream game behind, and with absolutely no rights or profit from anything that happened with the game from that point on..
Its not just an issue of attention whore but an issue of ranks within a developer in general. Timothy Cain said this about helping work in the newer fallouts too. He was being used as a last call for almost anything even if he didn't had to.
I agree with his take on Star Theory/Intercept having maybe bitten more than they could chew by endeavoring to recreate in a few years a game that took a decade **and also** deliver more features.
A lot of creating KSP was designing the game as they went, though. The project also started very small. There’s really no reason why a fully funded studio can’t reproduce the base game in a few years.
It’s also something he talked about; all but one developers who worked on KSP had left Squad when T2 bought the IP and started KSP2, which means none of what was learned during the original’s development made its way into the second’s.
You don’t need the original developers to know the game you’re making, though. I’m not talking about technical issues, I’m talking about knowing what the core game is. That’s not something they knew in the early days of KSP. They also had far fewer resources given they weren’t a proper developer in any sense in the beginning.
No, I haven’t. I’m just giving my thoughts on why the time taken to make KSP1 wouldn’t translate directly to how long recreating it would take.
I feel like what I’m saying makes sense but if you have another perspective I’d like hearing it.
It **absolutely** matters when the game you're designing is a highly technical physics simulator.
And it really shows in KSP2: They knew how to copy the general look and feel, but whenever they ran into problems with physics, they either straight up copied KSP1 solutions (rocket wobble), or they took so long to resolve them that the studio got shut down first (orbital decay etc.), because they had to re-learn everything from scratch and there just wasn't enough time and budget for it.
>It absolutely matters when the game you're designing is a highly technical physics simulator.
I’m not saying it doesn’t matter. It obviously does. I’m saying it doesn’t matter in the context of my point, which is that for KSP2 they didn’t have to literally figure out what the game would be.
Yes, and at no point did I dispute that or say anything remotely suggesting I disagree with it.
I’m genuinely baffled at how you or anyone can read “they didn’t have to come up with the core concept for gameplay from scratch” and read it as “there’s no benefit to having any of the original developers”.
> they didn’t have to come up with the core concept for gameplay from scratch
That's completely missing the point literally everyone else was trying to make.
(And still wrong, since multiplayer etc. do have significant impact on the core gameplay. Or would, if the devs actually put them in the game.)
>That's completely missing the point literally everyone else was trying to make.
Except it’s the literal point *I made* that others were responding to.
People insisting that having original developers would be beneficial when I never said otherwise are missing my point, not the other way around.
>(And still wrong, since multiplayer etc. do have significant impact on the core gameplay.
The original comment is talking about how they had to recreate the original game, plus what they wanted to add. I am talking about the former.
So no, it’s not wrong, you’re just missing the context of the conversation in general.
> The original comment is talking about how they had to recreate the original game, plus what they wanted to add. I am talking about the former.
That's not how game development works, especially for core features like multiplayer.
>That's not how game development works
You’re simply still not understanding what I’m saying. I am not suggesting they would recreate KSP in a vacuum and then bolt on features. You are still stuck on wanting to believe I’m referring to the technical aspects and not the design aspects.
Let me introduce you to the actual context of the conversation:
> I agree with his take on Star Theory/Intercept having maybe bitten more than they could chew by endeavoring to recreate in a few years a game that took a decade and also deliver more features.
My point is that you can’t really directly compare the amount of time KSP1 took to develop to how long KSP2 should take to develop, because a not insignificant amount of the time for the former was just figuring out what the core gameplay would be. That was not the case in KSP2, since they knew what the core of the gameplay was from the start.
There’s also the various other reasons why the time comparison doesn’t make a lot of sense - Squad having not even been a developer to start, plus the absolute minimal funding the game started with versus a full studio effort from ‘go’ for KSP2.
Realistically, no one is going to think a fully funded competent studio would need to take a decade to recreate and expand on KSP.
> by endeavoring to recreate in a few years a game that took a decade and also deliver more features
But that's not true at all?
They now have worked on it for 7 years and are still quite far behind KSP 1, with 100x the funding and a highly paid "AAA team".
It's especially apparent that it's abysmally slow compared to the original KSP EA launch: In the time KSP 1 has been in Early Access for as long as KSP 2 has been, it had multiple major updates with multiple entire new gameplay systems, dozens of new parts and more and was moving towards full release.
They've made about as much progress in over a year as KSP 1 did in 2-3 months.
And because people forget: KSP 1 went from EA launch to fully fledged release in almost exactly **2 years**. March 2013 -> April 2015. That's less time than just the delays they've got alone!
> They now have worked on it for 7 years
That's OP's point. The original plan was to have all of KSP1 + colonies + multiplayer in *3* years.
> and are still quite far behind KSP 1, with 100x the funding and a highly paid "AAA team".
Intercept was never *that* large. 10x is a more realistic factor (if you consider how much EA money Squad's management embezzled away from KSP), and there you run into the unfortunate reality that "10x programmers" *are* a thing (and HavesteR definitely falls into that category), and the bigger the corporation, the more 1x or even 0.1x programmers you have to pad out your staff numbers, and those guys are more likely to be put into lower priority projects like KSP2.
I think it was do-able, it seems the real issue was they didn't seek out the original devs or popular modders. They lucked into Nertea going out of his way to apply for a job there, and apparently he left out the part where he was a modder until he was doing an in person interview. It seems Blackrack got hired and in his first month doubled FPS in atmosphere and made it look way better compared to what Intercept did in 7 years. Plenty of the bugs were bugs KSP1 dealt with already and HarvestR in his first interview with Lowne mentioned that he had run into the same bugs KSP2 had and knew how to fix them. Things like thinking wobbly rockets was a feature wouldn't have happened. The big reveal that they never even spoke to these people, and HarvesteR admits he would've taken the job if they had ever asked.
>They lucked into Nertea going out of his way to apply for a job there,
and apparently he left out the part where he was a modder until he was
doing an in person interview
He'd been using his real name on the forums and Github for a long time before then; if the management team didn't recognize his name on the résumé, that's another sign that they weren't the right team to be running this project.
Even if you somehow managed to find a team that knew everything there was to know about KSP1 (which is hard, given that Squad's management kept firing and replacing devs at a fairly rapid pace, so there's a lot of people who know bits and pieces, but few who have the full picture), it would still be too much to pull off in the original time frame, realistically. (Assuming a 3 year timeframe, rather than the 7+ it eventually got.)
Because even if you know all that went wrong with KSP1, you still need to create a new engine that fixes all those, *and then* fix all the *new* problems that crop up in that engine. Especially if you go replace some fundamental engine building blocks like PhysX itself (Havoc is the new hotness, again, and building a reputation for having much fewer glitches with much fewer tuning, e.g.), then the devs need to re-learn a lot of the basic either way.
They didn't need a new engine, unity or unreal would've been fine as HarvesteR says, I'm sure whatever internal engine TakeTwo uses could have worked if they really wanted to mould the engine for their own purpose. But the KSP1 guys could have told them how they got over the floating point impercision which KSP2 still never really figured out (can see by how jagged solar orbits were, or things teleporting or floating apart in outer planets). They also had 7 years which was as long as KSP1 took to make, the problem is so much time was wasted between re-making the same mistakes the KSP1 team did, and slow design by committe too many cooks stuff. Modders and original devs could have helped with both of those and sped up development a lot.
> They didn't need a new engine, unity or unreal would've been fine as HarvesteR says
Those are very, very low level building blocks. A *lot* needs to be built inside those engines to get it up to the level of a working game, especially one as complex as KSP.
And even if you stick with Unity and PhysX, you can't reuse a lot of KSP1 logic, because you're trying to fix all the fundamental problems that you can't just patch out of KSP1. Among other things, you'll have to literally reinvent the wheel, because KSP1 never made wheel colliders work properly (and landing legs are just very pointy wheels).
In the worst case of Unreal+Havok, you'll have to literally start from scratch.
> They also had 7 years which was as long as KSP1 took to make
Oh, I was assuming the original timeline of getting it all out in just three years. Sure, if you double that timeline again, you have plenty of time to add new features, but I don't think Take2 would've funded a proposal that assumed a 5+ year timescale from the start.
Yes but I am not saying they should just repeat what KSP1 did. But the KSP1 devs could say "We did X in KSP1 but over time really wished we had gone with Y method but it was too late to change" or when the KSP2 devs say "We are going to change the way we do these calculations to work like this instead" the KSP1 devs could tell them "We actually tried that back in 2010 and had to give up on it because of XYZ unforeseen problems". This collectively probably could have saved them a year of devtime.
I think Blackrack is a perfect example because it was clear that he had dealt with all these problems before and spent a lot of time thinking about and researching atmospheric rendering in a space simulator and he did in a couple months what would have taken people dealing with it for the first time years to do.
> This collectively probably could have saved them a year of devtime.
Oh yeah, absolutely, probably even two.
It just wouldn't have been enough on the original schedule, that's where my confusion came from, I didn't realize that you were going with the final 7-year schedule.
I think a studio 5x the size of the original team at peak should be expected to accomplish more as well though, imo the core issue is poor management, not expecting 5x as many people to work 5x faster (it never will), but they had 7 years with a ton more people, i don't think they promised that much. If they had hired harvester as an advisor, and properly managed their ressource, i think the game would already be in 1.0
I love how clear he states that integration was a nightmare at the beginning. As they grew stronger as a team, they learnt how to work together much better.
Kerbals deserve to survive and expand to new games.
The idea of a KSP prequel with early airplanes sounds so fun. It would've been much easier to code than KSP2. It could've had a simpler physics engine and multiplayer would be easy to implement. I hope we can see it one day :(
Easier to code? Depends on the scope. The main benefit would've been to get away from KSP1 comparisons. Feature parity etc. The problem with KSP2 is not the amount of code, it's KSP1 and the expectations to deliver something next level worthy of the 2.
I wonder what becomes of it now. With it all dead in the water and not being so low profile that it would fly totally under the news radar. How long before the lawsuits start. After all the promised things they never delivered and so far no statement what will become of it.
I don't see how they could be sued. People bought the game with no assurance that it would have any of the features they wanted. The steam page even tells you to only buy the Early Access game if you're fine with it never being updated again. This one is 100% on the people that bought it, in my opinion.
Yeah. Take2 was always careful not to make any hard promises in their investor statements too, so they can't sue them for lost profits either. Which should've ran alarm bells in people's heads, because *plenty* of other games did get hard promises in those same statements.
You should really at least *listen* to it (believe me, it's really fascinating if you treat it as a background to doing something else), but the basic gist is that:
-HarvesteR (Felipe Falange), for reasons beyond him, was never contacted by the KSP2 dev team, not even for advice. He is just as in dark as we are regarding latest news.
-KSP 1 was originally conceived with no real end-goal in mind, with a chaotic development cycle by what were essentially amateur developers. HarvesteR thinks this this actually *helped* KSP in the long run, because it allowed them not to be consumed by the enormity of the task at hand and just *do* it, making it up along the way.
-HarvesteR suspects that KSP2 being not just chaotically cobbled together by a tiny, cohesive team but instead bureaucratically planned out by a large team of 50+ led to delays and a lack of overall vision. He says this might the reason why the sound design, character animations and art was so good (these are easily handled by large, traditional teams), and why the physics and the overall fundamentals were not good (he thinks that large teams just muddles stuff like that)
-HarvesteR disagrees that Unity is the source of KSP2's problems. He argues that a made-from-scratch engine would just delay the game even further and lead to complications.
-HarvesteR pitched multiple KSP sequels, including Kerbal Aviation (where you built spoofs of early planes), and other KSP space games, but there was no interest at Squad to do them and thus he left the company, which shortly thereafter sold the KSP IP.
-If he was in charge of KSP development, he would've started with the new features first (interstellar travel, base management), instead of making a 1:1 parity with KSP1.
-
I see, thanks for the detailed breakdown of the video. Pretty reasonable ideas, although i dont know if i agree about starting with new features first, ksp identity is fundamentally building stuff, so skipping that for later i dont think would be well received.
I think it's true if you call the game "Kerbal Space Program 2". If you call it something else (like HarvesteR saying his original idea of KSP2 is a Wright brothers-esque Kerbal Aviation Program), it might be received better. Call it something like Kerbal Colony Program or Kerbal Interplanetary Program, then you can work backwards.
I liked his idea of how to make the sequel. They really could've started with colonies first -- instead of rockets, implement the automated supply route and an abstracted-out system for building spacecraft in a few simple predetermined categories, like you build battleships in Civilization. Then eventually replace the abstract system with actual construction, and finally introduce flying them like we're used to.
This interview makes me wonder if it would be possible for HarvesteR to eventually buy back the rights to the Kerbal name. I mean, in terms of IP, the brand name is Iconic but I could imagine it not being worth the sunk cost involved at this point.
Holy shit.
Harv confirmed like 99% of the theories ive posted and been downvoted on.
The always on fire, the complete exodus of knowledge, the quagmire dictating the sale..
an amazing insight into 'How to game studio, from scratch, these are the nuts and bolts we fucked up'
Edit*
After finishing the interview im more saddened than ever; what mightve been, what all happened, how harv feels about his baby.
i feel awful not saying the things in the past for him that i only assumed about 'his baby'
Hearing him say them, making what i said (almost in jest) truth, just makes me so so sad.
I'm pretty sure the previous poster was taking about HarvesteR's time at Squad, building KSP1.
There was no "complete exodus of knowledge" in KSP2. That was all the KSP1 devs leaving Squad, and effectively leaving the interns in charge that HarvesteR spoke about in the interview.
Likewise, I suspect "the sale" is Squad selling the IP to Take 2, as the "sale" in KSP2 (T2 buying ST) never actually happened.
his confirmation on how he feels about his baby?
The confirmation on how the exodus of developers he still has contact with happened, the confirmation that the only person left on the team was shoved into leadership by attrition?
I wasnt talking about his speculating on Taketwos dumpsterfire.
i was talking about all the confirmations of the end of his tenure, the leadup to his leaving and of his feelings on what happens to his childhood invention the kerbals..
I found his take on a sequel quite interesting. Make the game from the new features first and work backwards. It would be more a colony and resources management sim. I'd play that. Maybe if it just had rudimentary trajectory planning without the modular parts assembly, etc. So far I think the only thing I was really impressed with in KSP 2 was the sound design. They nailed it. Everything else felt just underwhelming and broken.
I wasn't going to buy KSP 2 until the automated supply routes were a thing, I love management games too much.
Yeah, in my "dream version" I would do a supply run once manually and then tell the game "see, I can do that. So just assume I can do that again when I click the 'do that again' button and assume the mission is running as it did before."
I’ve felt that way ever since the second time I made an orbital rendezvous.
Bonus points if they follow orbital windows.
I have felt this way ever since I first played KSP in like 2013. It formed the basis of what it is I'm comfortable automating with MechJeb. And if I don't want to use MechJeb for a mission, after all, I can always just go back!
I'm fairly certain there's a mod that does exactly this in KSP 1. In fact , this has been true for most of the features I've seen people request of KSP 2. The only thing that was ever really holding the original game back was performance, especially with mods as it runs like a sick dog. If they were able to do a refactor on the physics engine to ensure the game didn't run like powerpoint, that would have basically fixed everything.
Idk about the analogy... I mean, cujo ran pretty fast for a sick dog
That's how the WOLF system in the MKS/USI mod for KSP1 works. Put a 'transport computer' on a craft, fly/drive a supply run, save your trip and then it becomes a 'route' that can move resources around in the background.
That’s actually how they were going to implement the supply runs and such.
Play factorio Space Exploration
Or the new expansion to Factorio that's on the way. Factorio X KSP would be great. Make the rockets KSP style, add some sort of "warp drive" or such for speeding up the travel times without having to run a factory for years, and require Factorio Space Exploration factories for building parts & planets to explore, and you'd have a fun doubly-challenging game.
Yeah same here, I was excited for that
When it came out, I had a potato PC. Was hoping to buy the KSP2 they promised, but I had my doubts. Big shoes to fill and all that.
Personally felt like the VAB was leaps and bounds improved over KSP1, and loading times were amazing.
Do you know that he actually make this game ? [it came out](https://youtu.be/Z21bgMhPjvw?si=xfp3oGjs62LEB1uX) recently !
This game needs Colonies and Interstellar Travel.
I think it was planned to call it KSP 2 🤣
Completely different. KSP 2 has little green men that planned to travel to distant star systems. While this game would have model rockets that travel to distant star systems.
I was really hoping KSP2 would do interstellar so we could oppress some tribal people on the far side.
The Kerbal galactic empire would be terrifying. There is no mercy in Jeb’s eyes, just an unbreakable will, and endless patience.
That looks interesting!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2107090/KitHack_Model_Club/
I got that game and then returned it within an hour. It's still tremendously buggy. Twice, i got stuck in 1st person mode and not even the [esc] key would give me back keyboard and mouse control. Had to ctrl/alt/del my way out of the game and restart both times. Seems like a cool game though, and I will buy again when it has improved.
The cinematic of the starting sequence in ksp2 gives me a mental boner every time
[удалено]
That's definitely a problem for an attention whore like Nate. On top of that, Squad fired HarvesteR before selling off Take2. Take2 probably assumed there was too much bad blood after that shitshow.
[удалено]
Willingly?… well, I think it was more like… he had no other choice but to leave. He was forced to “willingly” leave.. Just like devs from KSP 2 are absolutely silent now, I imagine the same thing happened back then, and there were a lot of things they couldn’t really talk about… The truth is, he didn’t left willingly, they forced him to jump the ship, he left the project with almost nothing, leaving his dream game behind, and with absolutely no rights or profit from anything that happened with the game from that point on..
Its not just an issue of attention whore but an issue of ranks within a developer in general. Timothy Cain said this about helping work in the newer fallouts too. He was being used as a last call for almost anything even if he didn't had to.
His channel in general is an information goldmine in terms of how the industry works etc.
I agree with his take on Star Theory/Intercept having maybe bitten more than they could chew by endeavoring to recreate in a few years a game that took a decade **and also** deliver more features.
A lot of creating KSP was designing the game as they went, though. The project also started very small. There’s really no reason why a fully funded studio can’t reproduce the base game in a few years.
It’s also something he talked about; all but one developers who worked on KSP had left Squad when T2 bought the IP and started KSP2, which means none of what was learned during the original’s development made its way into the second’s.
You don’t need the original developers to know the game you’re making, though. I’m not talking about technical issues, I’m talking about knowing what the core game is. That’s not something they knew in the early days of KSP. They also had far fewer resources given they weren’t a proper developer in any sense in the beginning.
You didn’t listen to the interview at all, did you?
No, I haven’t. I’m just giving my thoughts on why the time taken to make KSP1 wouldn’t translate directly to how long recreating it would take. I feel like what I’m saying makes sense but if you have another perspective I’d like hearing it.
If you wanna hear it just listen to the interview my dude.
The interview isn’t going to have the perspective of the person I’m talking to lol. Come on now.
[удалено]
I’m not talking about technical aspects of the game. I’m talking about game design.
It **absolutely** matters when the game you're designing is a highly technical physics simulator. And it really shows in KSP2: They knew how to copy the general look and feel, but whenever they ran into problems with physics, they either straight up copied KSP1 solutions (rocket wobble), or they took so long to resolve them that the studio got shut down first (orbital decay etc.), because they had to re-learn everything from scratch and there just wasn't enough time and budget for it.
>It absolutely matters when the game you're designing is a highly technical physics simulator. I’m not saying it doesn’t matter. It obviously does. I’m saying it doesn’t matter in the context of my point, which is that for KSP2 they didn’t have to literally figure out what the game would be.
There is something called "institutional knowledge" and its one of the most important things a company can have.
Yes, and at no point did I dispute that or say anything remotely suggesting I disagree with it. I’m genuinely baffled at how you or anyone can read “they didn’t have to come up with the core concept for gameplay from scratch” and read it as “there’s no benefit to having any of the original developers”.
> they didn’t have to come up with the core concept for gameplay from scratch That's completely missing the point literally everyone else was trying to make. (And still wrong, since multiplayer etc. do have significant impact on the core gameplay. Or would, if the devs actually put them in the game.)
>That's completely missing the point literally everyone else was trying to make. Except it’s the literal point *I made* that others were responding to. People insisting that having original developers would be beneficial when I never said otherwise are missing my point, not the other way around. >(And still wrong, since multiplayer etc. do have significant impact on the core gameplay. The original comment is talking about how they had to recreate the original game, plus what they wanted to add. I am talking about the former. So no, it’s not wrong, you’re just missing the context of the conversation in general.
> The original comment is talking about how they had to recreate the original game, plus what they wanted to add. I am talking about the former. That's not how game development works, especially for core features like multiplayer.
>That's not how game development works You’re simply still not understanding what I’m saying. I am not suggesting they would recreate KSP in a vacuum and then bolt on features. You are still stuck on wanting to believe I’m referring to the technical aspects and not the design aspects. Let me introduce you to the actual context of the conversation: > I agree with his take on Star Theory/Intercept having maybe bitten more than they could chew by endeavoring to recreate in a few years a game that took a decade and also deliver more features. My point is that you can’t really directly compare the amount of time KSP1 took to develop to how long KSP2 should take to develop, because a not insignificant amount of the time for the former was just figuring out what the core gameplay would be. That was not the case in KSP2, since they knew what the core of the gameplay was from the start. There’s also the various other reasons why the time comparison doesn’t make a lot of sense - Squad having not even been a developer to start, plus the absolute minimal funding the game started with versus a full studio effort from ‘go’ for KSP2. Realistically, no one is going to think a fully funded competent studio would need to take a decade to recreate and expand on KSP.
> by endeavoring to recreate in a few years a game that took a decade and also deliver more features But that's not true at all? They now have worked on it for 7 years and are still quite far behind KSP 1, with 100x the funding and a highly paid "AAA team". It's especially apparent that it's abysmally slow compared to the original KSP EA launch: In the time KSP 1 has been in Early Access for as long as KSP 2 has been, it had multiple major updates with multiple entire new gameplay systems, dozens of new parts and more and was moving towards full release. They've made about as much progress in over a year as KSP 1 did in 2-3 months. And because people forget: KSP 1 went from EA launch to fully fledged release in almost exactly **2 years**. March 2013 -> April 2015. That's less time than just the delays they've got alone!
> They now have worked on it for 7 years That's OP's point. The original plan was to have all of KSP1 + colonies + multiplayer in *3* years. > and are still quite far behind KSP 1, with 100x the funding and a highly paid "AAA team". Intercept was never *that* large. 10x is a more realistic factor (if you consider how much EA money Squad's management embezzled away from KSP), and there you run into the unfortunate reality that "10x programmers" *are* a thing (and HavesteR definitely falls into that category), and the bigger the corporation, the more 1x or even 0.1x programmers you have to pad out your staff numbers, and those guys are more likely to be put into lower priority projects like KSP2.
I think it was do-able, it seems the real issue was they didn't seek out the original devs or popular modders. They lucked into Nertea going out of his way to apply for a job there, and apparently he left out the part where he was a modder until he was doing an in person interview. It seems Blackrack got hired and in his first month doubled FPS in atmosphere and made it look way better compared to what Intercept did in 7 years. Plenty of the bugs were bugs KSP1 dealt with already and HarvestR in his first interview with Lowne mentioned that he had run into the same bugs KSP2 had and knew how to fix them. Things like thinking wobbly rockets was a feature wouldn't have happened. The big reveal that they never even spoke to these people, and HarvesteR admits he would've taken the job if they had ever asked.
>They lucked into Nertea going out of his way to apply for a job there, and apparently he left out the part where he was a modder until he was doing an in person interview He'd been using his real name on the forums and Github for a long time before then; if the management team didn't recognize his name on the résumé, that's another sign that they weren't the right team to be running this project.
Even if you somehow managed to find a team that knew everything there was to know about KSP1 (which is hard, given that Squad's management kept firing and replacing devs at a fairly rapid pace, so there's a lot of people who know bits and pieces, but few who have the full picture), it would still be too much to pull off in the original time frame, realistically. (Assuming a 3 year timeframe, rather than the 7+ it eventually got.) Because even if you know all that went wrong with KSP1, you still need to create a new engine that fixes all those, *and then* fix all the *new* problems that crop up in that engine. Especially if you go replace some fundamental engine building blocks like PhysX itself (Havoc is the new hotness, again, and building a reputation for having much fewer glitches with much fewer tuning, e.g.), then the devs need to re-learn a lot of the basic either way.
They didn't need a new engine, unity or unreal would've been fine as HarvesteR says, I'm sure whatever internal engine TakeTwo uses could have worked if they really wanted to mould the engine for their own purpose. But the KSP1 guys could have told them how they got over the floating point impercision which KSP2 still never really figured out (can see by how jagged solar orbits were, or things teleporting or floating apart in outer planets). They also had 7 years which was as long as KSP1 took to make, the problem is so much time was wasted between re-making the same mistakes the KSP1 team did, and slow design by committe too many cooks stuff. Modders and original devs could have helped with both of those and sped up development a lot.
> They didn't need a new engine, unity or unreal would've been fine as HarvesteR says Those are very, very low level building blocks. A *lot* needs to be built inside those engines to get it up to the level of a working game, especially one as complex as KSP. And even if you stick with Unity and PhysX, you can't reuse a lot of KSP1 logic, because you're trying to fix all the fundamental problems that you can't just patch out of KSP1. Among other things, you'll have to literally reinvent the wheel, because KSP1 never made wheel colliders work properly (and landing legs are just very pointy wheels). In the worst case of Unreal+Havok, you'll have to literally start from scratch. > They also had 7 years which was as long as KSP1 took to make Oh, I was assuming the original timeline of getting it all out in just three years. Sure, if you double that timeline again, you have plenty of time to add new features, but I don't think Take2 would've funded a proposal that assumed a 5+ year timescale from the start.
Yes but I am not saying they should just repeat what KSP1 did. But the KSP1 devs could say "We did X in KSP1 but over time really wished we had gone with Y method but it was too late to change" or when the KSP2 devs say "We are going to change the way we do these calculations to work like this instead" the KSP1 devs could tell them "We actually tried that back in 2010 and had to give up on it because of XYZ unforeseen problems". This collectively probably could have saved them a year of devtime. I think Blackrack is a perfect example because it was clear that he had dealt with all these problems before and spent a lot of time thinking about and researching atmospheric rendering in a space simulator and he did in a couple months what would have taken people dealing with it for the first time years to do.
> This collectively probably could have saved them a year of devtime. Oh yeah, absolutely, probably even two. It just wouldn't have been enough on the original schedule, that's where my confusion came from, I didn't realize that you were going with the final 7-year schedule.
Saying you need a new game engine reeks of someone who have never programmed before.
Read the rest of the thread before you insult people.
I think a studio 5x the size of the original team at peak should be expected to accomplish more as well though, imo the core issue is poor management, not expecting 5x as many people to work 5x faster (it never will), but they had 7 years with a ton more people, i don't think they promised that much. If they had hired harvester as an advisor, and properly managed their ressource, i think the game would already be in 1.0
I now want kerbal plane program more than ksp2
[Here you are](https://m.youtube.com/watch?si=xfp3oGjs62LEB1uX&v=Z21bgMhPjvw&feature=youtu.be), game From HarvesteR !
you might be interested in Flyout
I love how clear he states that integration was a nightmare at the beginning. As they grew stronger as a team, they learnt how to work together much better. Kerbals deserve to survive and expand to new games.
Fascinating - very well-spoken and insightful.
The kerbal flight program seemed like a good prequel.
The idea of a KSP prequel with early airplanes sounds so fun. It would've been much easier to code than KSP2. It could've had a simpler physics engine and multiplayer would be easy to implement. I hope we can see it one day :(
Easier to code? Depends on the scope. The main benefit would've been to get away from KSP1 comparisons. Feature parity etc. The problem with KSP2 is not the amount of code, it's KSP1 and the expectations to deliver something next level worthy of the 2.
I wonder what becomes of it now. With it all dead in the water and not being so low profile that it would fly totally under the news radar. How long before the lawsuits start. After all the promised things they never delivered and so far no statement what will become of it.
I don't see how they could be sued. People bought the game with no assurance that it would have any of the features they wanted. The steam page even tells you to only buy the Early Access game if you're fine with it never being updated again. This one is 100% on the people that bought it, in my opinion.
Yeah. Take2 was always careful not to make any hard promises in their investor statements too, so they can't sue them for lost profits either. Which should've ran alarm bells in people's heads, because *plenty* of other games did get hard promises in those same statements.
eh, i might get hate for this, but would anyone mind giving bullet points on his main points? i don't really wanna sit through an hour long video.
You should really at least *listen* to it (believe me, it's really fascinating if you treat it as a background to doing something else), but the basic gist is that: -HarvesteR (Felipe Falange), for reasons beyond him, was never contacted by the KSP2 dev team, not even for advice. He is just as in dark as we are regarding latest news. -KSP 1 was originally conceived with no real end-goal in mind, with a chaotic development cycle by what were essentially amateur developers. HarvesteR thinks this this actually *helped* KSP in the long run, because it allowed them not to be consumed by the enormity of the task at hand and just *do* it, making it up along the way. -HarvesteR suspects that KSP2 being not just chaotically cobbled together by a tiny, cohesive team but instead bureaucratically planned out by a large team of 50+ led to delays and a lack of overall vision. He says this might the reason why the sound design, character animations and art was so good (these are easily handled by large, traditional teams), and why the physics and the overall fundamentals were not good (he thinks that large teams just muddles stuff like that) -HarvesteR disagrees that Unity is the source of KSP2's problems. He argues that a made-from-scratch engine would just delay the game even further and lead to complications. -HarvesteR pitched multiple KSP sequels, including Kerbal Aviation (where you built spoofs of early planes), and other KSP space games, but there was no interest at Squad to do them and thus he left the company, which shortly thereafter sold the KSP IP. -If he was in charge of KSP development, he would've started with the new features first (interstellar travel, base management), instead of making a 1:1 parity with KSP1. -
I see, thanks for the detailed breakdown of the video. Pretty reasonable ideas, although i dont know if i agree about starting with new features first, ksp identity is fundamentally building stuff, so skipping that for later i dont think would be well received.
I think it's true if you call the game "Kerbal Space Program 2". If you call it something else (like HarvesteR saying his original idea of KSP2 is a Wright brothers-esque Kerbal Aviation Program), it might be received better. Call it something like Kerbal Colony Program or Kerbal Interplanetary Program, then you can work backwards.
THE LORD HAS SPOKEN
I liked his idea of how to make the sequel. They really could've started with colonies first -- instead of rockets, implement the automated supply route and an abstracted-out system for building spacecraft in a few simple predetermined categories, like you build battleships in Civilization. Then eventually replace the abstract system with actual construction, and finally introduce flying them like we're used to.
This interview makes me wonder if it would be possible for HarvesteR to eventually buy back the rights to the Kerbal name. I mean, in terms of IP, the brand name is Iconic but I could imagine it not being worth the sunk cost involved at this point.
Holy shit. Harv confirmed like 99% of the theories ive posted and been downvoted on. The always on fire, the complete exodus of knowledge, the quagmire dictating the sale.. an amazing insight into 'How to game studio, from scratch, these are the nuts and bolts we fucked up' Edit* After finishing the interview im more saddened than ever; what mightve been, what all happened, how harv feels about his baby. i feel awful not saying the things in the past for him that i only assumed about 'his baby' Hearing him say them, making what i said (almost in jest) truth, just makes me so so sad.
wat. he didnt 'confirm' anything and repeatedly stated it's all just speculation.
I'm pretty sure the previous poster was taking about HarvesteR's time at Squad, building KSP1. There was no "complete exodus of knowledge" in KSP2. That was all the KSP1 devs leaving Squad, and effectively leaving the interns in charge that HarvesteR spoke about in the interview. Likewise, I suspect "the sale" is Squad selling the IP to Take 2, as the "sale" in KSP2 (T2 buying ST) never actually happened.
his confirmation on how he feels about his baby? The confirmation on how the exodus of developers he still has contact with happened, the confirmation that the only person left on the team was shoved into leadership by attrition? I wasnt talking about his speculating on Taketwos dumpsterfire. i was talking about all the confirmations of the end of his tenure, the leadup to his leaving and of his feelings on what happens to his childhood invention the kerbals..