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.
- 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.