The biggest WTF is the total lack of input from anyone who had worked on KSP1. The second biggest is the ultra secret hiring process that failed to select for people who had even played KSP1 before, let alone had specialist experience relevant to it.
And the team ratio of mostly creatives and a small number of junior devs is pretty baffling.
Oh and the final estimated price tag, of $60m?! Wow.
I wanted to post, as it had interesting details for people working on software generally:
- Trying to employ mostly junior engineers
- Not allowing the new team to talk to the KSP 1 developers
- Not paying enough to keep senior engineers
- Re-using old codebase and coding themselves in the corner and couldn't fix bugs that old game had
Re-using old codebase wouldn't necessarily be bad if they were familiar with it, but from what I understood nobody was. They weren't able to move fast with it.
The list probably goes on, and I didn't take notes, but I found it interesting.
Secrecy. The video mentions how a dev got fired because they answered a community question after the trailer was released, about a feature that was already in the game.
They also hired people without telling them what game they'd be working on, and only got juniors who didn't play the original. Then when the studio imploded and the publisher offered to transfer hire the old engineers, only 4 people accepted. Because they didn't actually care about the project.
It strikes me that the game industry gets away with so much because the developers are heavily emotionally invested in their own project, and the publishers are so used to this, they take it for granted. In this case, that wasn't actually true.
Absolutely insane combination of ideas. But I've seen "new team decoupled from the old team" before; we weren't exactly forbidden to talk to them, but it was made very clear that they did not want any input from us.
I left a while later, after it was clear that all was not well but before the alleged launch. The product was never publicised, so presumably never shipped. They don't even appear to have had another go at it.
I truly adore KSP - one of the few games where I'd get so excited about doing something that I'd drag my wife over to marvel at my accomplishment (and subject her to long explanation of why this particular cluster of pixels on a screen should represent an accomplishment).
So I was naturally extremely excited for KSP2, but all-along I had a strong feeling this would happen. What's sad to see is that it's not just a second-system effect of being too ambitious, which was what I was assuming would cause issues, but an even more pathetic failure than that.
The joy I get from games has a really wide variance, and barely any relationship to the actual amount of money I spend on the game. I'd pay $1000 for a truly good KSP2, yet all the games that would actually _let_ me spend $1000 are shallow skins over gambling.
And the team ratio of mostly creatives and a small number of junior devs is pretty baffling.
Oh and the final estimated price tag, of $60m?! Wow.