Kerbal Space Program turns ten – Talking to the developers

Exactly ten years ago, gamers first became acquainted with the pleasant, somewhat harmless green beans called Kerbals, because on June 24, 2011, the Mexican game studio Squad released the first version of Kerbal Space Program. Ten years later, thousands of people are still playing the space simulation game and the successor is also planned: Kerbal Space Program 2. In those ten years, the team responsible for the development of Squad and publisher Private Division have not been idle. Internal struggles at the studios plagued the game’s development: Kerbal Space Program was bought by major publisher Take-Two Interactive, and the second part was made by a completely different group of developers than the first. Felipe Phalange, the creator of the Kerbals, is alsono longer involved in development . To look back on ten years of the Kerbal Space Program, we spoke with lead designer Paul Boyle and head of production Nestor Gomez.

Gomez has been involved in the development of KSP since 2015. He first led several teams at developer Squad as a game producer , but since 2018 he has been head of production. Boyle joined the Squad team in 2018 as lead designer, having previously been a game developer at Ubisoft and Obsidian, and designer and software developer of The Sims at EA and Maxis. Both were already big fans of the game when they started working on it. Boyle even made mods for Kerbal Space Program before joining as lead designer.

First of all, congratulations on ten years of Kerbal. Can you talk a little bit about what developing the same game for ten years looks like?

Gomez: “Thank you. Yes, it’s been quite a journey. The development of Kerbal started with a small team in Mexico City. When version 1.0 came out, that team grew very quickly. We actually went through all the stages of development, from a small indie studio that mainly wanted to make a fun game, to a professional large studio that tried to maintain a game with regular updates.

Basically the game revolves around two things: the space travel simulation and the Kerbals. How did the developers even come up with the idea ten years ago to send those little beans called Kerbals into space in rockets? Why aren’t the astronauts more realistic?

Gomez: “That idea comes from the brain of creator Felipe ‘HarvesteR’ Falanghe. He already had that idea as a child.” Boyle: “It’s hard to put words in HarvesteR’s mouth, but the story goes that as a kid he built model rockets into which he put little beans he called Kerbals. And that idea has stuck. Working with the Kerbals feels natural For players, you want something they can relate to so they’re motivated to keep playing. You want to get those little Kerbals to Mun. At the same time, you shouldn’t feel guilty if they crash. If we humanized them it would be terrifying. And without characters, the game would feel too distant.”

Oh yes, because crashing is really a bit of the point of Kerbal right?

Boyle: “Haha, yes, that’s right. The learning aspect of failure gives the game depth. There are more games about failure, learning and repeating. In that respect, Kerbal fits in the line of Souls-like and Roguelike games. That’s what people like it, especially in a sandbox game like Kerbal: that there’s always a new challenge that you can only overcome by failing and learning from it and getting better. You can’t master the whole game at once; learns by trial and error.”

Gomez: “Kerbal introduces a lot of new mechanics that players aren’t familiar with. Things like astrodynamics and aerodynamics, gravity. By testing all kinds of things, failing and trying again, you eventually learn the mechanics of flying a rocket. Step step by step you will understand better.”

The first version of Kerbal Space Program, 0.7.3, was released on June 24, 2011, but almost two years later, on March 20, 2013, the game appeared on Steam. From then on, the popularity of the game took off. As a result, the game was noticed not only by gamers, but also by professional rocket scientists. In April 2014, KSP began its first collaboration with the US space agency NASA, for the Asteroid Redirect Mission . In it, players were instructed to recreate the real mission that NASA was developing at the time in Kerbal or find a completely different solution to reach an asteroid. It was the first collaboration, but not the last. For example, the game developed a partnership with the ESAon five official ESA missions, there is a collaboration with the Japanese space agency JAXA and Elon Musk of SpaceX is a big fan of the game .

How did you actually get the knowledge to make a realistic space travel simulator with what you say: astrodynamics, rocket technology? Do you talk to NASA or something about that?

Boyle: “We do indeed talk to external sources. For example, we have a partnership with the ESA and through that collaboration we quite often speak with rocket scientists and other scientists there. But everyone who works on Kerbal is also a space geek. There is a lot online about how space travel works, so we also do a lot of our own research, then we make choices about which elements end up in the game, we don’t like all the mechanics of space travel, like that rocket engines can’t re-ignite when they’re off. make the challenge too great.

Gomez: “Although there are of course plenty of mods that add those elements to make the experience as realistic as possible; that is something that Paul is also a big fan of. I think that is also part of Kerbal’s success, that mods allow for different experiences.”

Is that what makes KSP so popular after ten years: mods? Is the modding Kerbal’s secret?

Gomez: “Mods are a big part of that yes, and the community of KSP.”

Boyle: “It’s two things. On the one hand, just that, because of mods there’s an endless amount of things you can do in Kerbal. It doesn’t end with getting into orbit or reaching Mun. I’m still playing myself Kerbal because of the mods it’s the first game I worked on that I’m still playing actually you keep playing it because of the sheer amount of mods you’ve got great graphics mods assist mods new systems parts packs there’s a player who manages a hundred mods and keeps improving them. And there’s even someone who made Flappy Bird in KSP .”

To put the numbers into perspective, Kerbal has about 71,000 mods in the Steam Workshop, 408,000 ships and 3,200 mods in KerbalX, and 14,500 add-ons on the KSP forum.

Boyle: “On the other hand, there’s the creative element to why I think players keep coming back. I myself have recently become obsessed with building cranes. I never thought that was possible before, but then I saw someone doing it and now its we here.”

Gomez: “You also have to remember that the game has been in development for ten years by a team of talented developers. That’s something I’m really proud of. The game from seven years ago is very different from the game today. are people who come back and discover completely new things. Also, our community is very important for the popularity of Kerbal. We talk to our players; we have an active group of streamers and modders. They keep the game alive.”

Version 1.0 of Kerbal Space Program was released on April 27, 2015 and in 2016 the game was released for the first consoles: the PS4 and Xbox One. The Enhanced Edition followed in 2018. After ten years, there are still an average of 4,000 simultaneous, monthly players of KSP on Steam, and 450,000 players play KSP according to the latest figures as of June 2020. The community is not standing still either. The KSP subreddit has 1.4 million subscribers and 208,000 players follow the game on the KSP forum.

Developing a game for ten years, I can imagine it’s not easy to build on a ten-year-old game with a ten-year-old game engine?

Gomez: “Yes, that presents some technical challenges. I can’t even count how many times we’ve had to update the engine. Sometimes there are more problems than solutions. And you’re building on ten-year-old code, a bit like building an old Windows API needs maintenance. There’s still 10-year-old code in KSP that everyone hates and nobody actually knows who wrote it, or whoever wrote the code is long gone.”

Boyle: “If you think about the fact that Filipe had just started game development when he started KSP, it’s amazing how well the game has held up all this time. At the same time, it has really improved over the years. I recently spoke to an old colleague who suddenly said: ‘By the way, I found a solution for a piece of old code that I made that no longer works.’ It turns out that he is still making mods for the game and ran into his own old code. engine is really unique; that makes it challenging at times, but we make it work.”

What do you run into when you work with code that is ten years old?

Gomez: “Some systems were written so long ago that they are difficult to maintain. Either they have grown larger than originally intended, documentation is lacking or the architecture chosen at the time is outdated. Examples of this are the code for the systems for staging and docking. In both cases, it has proved extremely difficult to push the functionality to newer systems that have been added over the years without completely breaking it.”

Boyle: “You have those systems that are easy to add to the game in an ideal world, but in reality they aren’t. That’s why I think it’s extra special that everything still hangs together so well, especially given the small development teams that have been working on KSP especially in the early s. Unlike many other games, KSP keeps adding major new gameplay systems wrapped up in a decade old game. A good example is the EVA build. Add all the mods to that who work well together and expand KSP, so it’s almost unreal to think that KSP once started as an amateur project.