Kerbal Space Program has been in development for three years, but at Kerbal Kon last week a vision for what the final game will look like finally began to emerge. Developing the game s confirmed multiplayer modes will start next year after the single-player game has reached what Squad is calling scope-complete : not finished, but with no more major features left to add.

PC Gamer attended Kerbal Kon in Mexico City and got a chance to sit in on Squad Con, the team s in-house planning session the day before the global livestream event. The big news is that the game is very close to having all its moving parts installed.

The two most critical things for career mode are contracts and budgets, lead developer Felipe Falange said. We re going to see how much we can squeeze into the first one, then if it doesn t fit, it will go to the next one. It s the very near future, because it s something that needs to happen for scope completion.

Though each part in KSP s craft-building modes theoretically has a cost, that cost has never been a hindrance in the current build of the game. Eventually, though, players will have to keep their rockets within budget in order to move over to the launchpad. If players find themselves short on money, they ll be able to take on contracts.

The thing with contracts is that they re not missions, per se, Falanghe said. They re more like objectives that you subscribe to you can take as many as you want. You take on a risk when you accept a contract because that contract may reward you when you complete them, but failing will harm your reputation Reputation will also serve as a currency, and keeping your promises and bringing Kerbals safely home will open doors for new contracts.

The game s three currencies reputation, cash, and science will each be exchangeable for the others. If you re short on cash, you can sell some science in the form of patents. If an unplanned, spontaneous disassembly has tarnished your reputation, some money in the right hands will help ease your woes. If your agency is well-regarded but cash poor, your reputation can bring in some emergency funding for that one big mission.

Once these remaining systems are in place, Kerbal Space Program will finally be scope-complete, but the developers still have a laundry list of things they hope to add to the game, like air-friction for ships entering the atmosphere, new spaceplane parts and revamped visual effects. After three years of work and an influx of global attention, it seems that the end is finally on the horizon, if not actually coming up soon.

Animator Dan Rosas talks during the Kerbal Kon livestream.

Kerbal Space Program became quite the phenomenon in 2013. After two years of quiet work, landing on Steam for Early Access brought the game to the attention of millions of gamers and launched Squad, a small interactive marketing firm based in Mexico City, toward the halls of indie success stories. The game is routinely near the top of the list of most popular games on Steam, and a new educational initiative is bringing a version of the space sim to classrooms.

At the first annual Kerbal Kon, PC Gamer spoke with lead developer Felipe Falanghe and PR director Bob Holtzman about the game s meteoric (pun intended) rise on Steam, the challenges of a never-ending developer wishlist, and why failure is fun. Snippets from our interview are below, but you can also check out our full coverage of Kerbal Kon, including the surprise announcement of the game s multiplayer mode.

PC Gamer: Was there a moment where you realized that was actually going to work?

Felipe Falange: I think it was a series of small moments that would actually lift the always looming concern of impending failure, up to the point where it built up a sense of accomplishment. But I m still overly cautious of everything. I m scared to call the game a success. Bob is always teasing me.

Bob Holtzman: Yeah, I had in the press release, the popular, award-winning . and he was like, is that right? From the marketing standpoint, the Steam Summer Sale was when everyone was like, OK, we ve got something pretty serious."

Was there a percentage jump?

Holtzman: It was cataclysmic, is what it was.

Falange: If you look at the overall graph, there s one towering peak in July that marks the Summer sale. There was a small jump in March because people got excited about Steam, and then it started to dwindle to normal levels, and there s this peak.

Holtzman: It crushed.

Falange: It s orders of magnitude. Whenever there s a sale, there s this big jump.

Holtzman: I gotta give a lot of credit to Valve for setting up such a tent-pole moment for PC gamers. I m sure we re not the only ones who say this.

Falange: I think Valve is single-handedly keeping PC gaming going; they re a major contributor. If Valve went away suddenly, I don t know what would happen to PC gaming as a whole, but it would affect the entire culture. It s about their culture, their influence that they generate around Steam They ve grown a cult around PC gaming, which is really cool.

Do you have plans to add more solar systems, or even randomly generated solar systems?

Falange: That s something we get a lot, and it s actually something that I m not very particularly about implementing. It s not that can t we could, theoretically. But I think that KSP being a game where you can build your own spacecraft, play the game in your own way, and have essentially a completely different experience from everyone else the only thing tying these experiences together is that the universe is the same. So if we were to add procedurally generated planets outside the current solar system, you would end up with places and destinations that don t exist for anyone else. And then it would fail in terms of you being able to relate to someone else s experience. You wouldn t be able to say, Hey guys, I landed on Duna, this was really cool! And everyone knows what Duna is and what it stands for. Instead, you d get, Hey guys, I found this planet, it looks kinda like this. And people would be like, Oh... I ve got completely different planets on mine.

Holtzman: The game is science fiction, but one of the things that Felipe has really driven is that he wants the science to come first and the fiction to come second. So when you start talking about multiple solar systems, you get further into the realm of fiction.

Falange: Right, because you re talking about interstellar distances, which means time-warp isn't enough anymore, no matter how fast you re going. Now you need some sort of warp drive, and that falls into the realm of sci-fi. And that then requires us to break the laws of physics, which would in fact make everything much trickier.

Felipe Falange poses with a model of an in-game ship, made by a fan and posted to reddit.

Some players are interested in a delta-V indicator . What do you think?

Falange: I wanted it sometimes, and I un-wanted it other times. In the end, it takes away a gameplay element because it takes some of the guesswork and some of the trial and error and figuring out for yourself what the delta-V is. It might take some of the magic away. One of the great things about KSP is doing just what Chad was doing just now . That ridiculous contraption he was doing, just trying to see if he could make it to the water, just shooting it on a rocket. If you make it too technical, it s certainly possible to calculate it. But it s like giving the answer to a puzzle sometimes, and I don t know if we want that. The same applies to showing how much burn time you have remaining. I think there s always this element of tension of trying to calculate in your head how much fuel you have left and if you re going to make it. It s like filling out the crossword puzzle for you.

Has it been difficult to have so many members of the dev team all over the world, and would you prefer it if they lived in one place?

Falange: Given my own commute it s been very natural. I was working remotely before we started hiring people from outside. The whole Skype workflow was already in place. Mexico City is such a large city that a couple of developers who no longer work with us also worked remotely, just because they lived so far away, that it was pretty much the same as being in another city. I actually like it very much that we are able to work remotely this effectively.

3D-printed Kerbals scattered around the Squad offices.

Do you have any favorite mods?

Falange: I haven t played with mods in a while, I admit. I have a few of those that I would like to get around to playing with.

Holtzman: Maybe favorite is the wrong word. Maybe it should be the ones that intrigue you.

Falange: Yeah, I want to check out the Kerbal Attachment System, which gives you winches and everyone says it s really cool. I never got around to playing it because I can t have a modded install... I d like to play with mods more than I do now. I ve always been really big on modding other games, any game I get I always see if there s a modding community involved, and it always makes it better.

Last week s big announcement of a multiplayer mode for Kerbal Space Program gave a preview of what 2014 will hold for the indie space simulator. But in the meantime, the single-player experience is getting closer and closer to feature-complete. Update .23, free for players starting on December 17, adds some much-needed groundwork for Career Mode's final new features.

Tuesday's update doesn't have quite the splash that .22 did that update added career mode, after all but refinements to core game mechanics point to what the game will look like when it is finally completed. Players goofing around in sandbox mode will find a lot to love in the new Tweakables menus and overhauled vehicle construction screens, while career mode aficionados will be presented with a challenging new set of rules for science and exploration.

Career mode will eventually feature contracts to fulfill and budgets to crunch under. The driving force for all of that, however, is scientific data, which unlocks new parts and systems that allow Kerbals to fly further and discover more things. Introduced in update .22, the Science system was very good at rewarding new exploration, but failed to incentivize long-term research. The result, for me at least, was that I couldn t set up Coconut Monkey Space Station as a science station with decades of planned productivity. Instead, I sent Jeb rampaging through the solar system, planting flags like a greedy sibling licking all of the dinner rolls.



Scientific expeditions to new planets used to work like this: once landed, experiments run and broadcast the data home. A percentage penalty is applied for transmitting data instead of physically bringing the ship home, but afterward the experiment can be reset and performed repeatedly. As long as the solar panels worked, all of the useful science can be gathered in one mission. With the job done, it s time to send a mission on to the next place.

In update .23, the new rule is simple: data can be transmitted exactly once. The same percentage penalty is still applied for not bringing the experiment all the way home, but then the equipment is finished until it gets reset somehow.

Enter: the Science Lab. This new module is heavy, large, and sucks through power to support its equipment and two required crew members. For all of that effort, though, scientific experiments can be reset and data processed for a full allotment of science points. Bases with a lab can fully explore and analyze their corner of the solar system by serving as a home base for exploring rovers, and orbiting science bases can reset experiments for probes shuttling back and forth to the surface.

One of my favorite new changes, the Science Archives, helps organize all of these experiments back on Kerbin. Housed inside the R&D building, the archives show all known biomes and locations for science, as well as a progress bar that shows how thoroughly a region has been explored. Players who previously focused on the outer planets will be surprised by how much there is to learn about Kerbin s many biomes closer to home.



Things have changed more dramatically inside the Vehicle Assembly Building and its wing-based cousin, the Space Plane Hangar. The team has revamped the vehicle parts interface, and each part comes with an easy-to-read detail list. It s obvious at a glance which engines generate electricity while running, for example, and easy to compare weights when a hundred-ton monstrosity isn t an option.

During assembly, the new tweakables system opens context menus for any part to tinker with settings. On space planes, control surfaces can be tweaked to only respond to input along certain axes, resulting in more granular control and more stable flight. Engines can be installed with their gimbals turned off or restricted to a certain percentage of their total thrust. This thrust limiting is particularly handy for launching large, unbalanced loads such as space stations or philosophical tea pots. This lets you adjust the power of multiple engines across a large structure, perfectly balancing the center of thrust and avoiding catastrophic cartwheels.

If you ve been holding off on trying Kerbal Space Program until it's more complete, update .23 a great time to jump in. Snag it on Steam or at the Kerbal website, and don t forget to add some mods.

 

To celebrate the third year of Kerbal Space Program, developer Squad announced that the game will be on sale for 40% off until the end of Kerbal Kon on Friday, purchasable from Steam or the KSP website. The company will also be making a donation to Love Life Hope, a children s orphanage based in Tapachula, Mexico.

Adrian Goya and Ezequiel Ayarza, co-owners of Squad, spoke during the opening ceremonies of Kerbal Kon, Kerbal Space Station s third anniversary celebration. We never expected to be here, Ayarza said, acknowledging the game s growing fanbase and welcoming the 2,000 viewers of the livestream.

Squad will be making a donation of $5,000 to Love Life Hope, which describes itself as a loving, secure home for children of all ages who have been abused, neglected, orphaned or abandoned. The number of children in our care changes constantly, but on average we care for between 40 and 50 children on a permanent basis.

PC Gamer will continue to bring you Kerbal Space Program news from Kerbal Kon in Mexico City throughout today and tomorrow.

The finished release of Kerbal Space Program will include official multiplayer modes, according to developer Squad. How exactly a multiplayer mode will work mechanically is undecided, but Squad says it's committed to building beyond the current singleplayer model.

Multiplayer is something we had planned to do after it was all said and done, but it s time for us to start looking at it now, developer Felipe Falanghe said at a team meeting in Mexico City today. Squad envisions four discrete game modes: the classic sandbox, the newly launched career mode, and multiplayer versions of both sandbox and career mode.

As Squad continues to work toward a scope-complete build of Kerbal Space Program, it will also begin placing the basic requirements for a multiplayer server architecture. A multiplayer mod built by the KSP community recently entered an early alpha build, and Squad credits modders with providing a solid proof-of-concept.

Shaun has proven that multiplayer can be done, so Squad is committed to making multiplayer a part of the final release, Squad PR manager Bob Holtzman said.

The big technical hurdle preventing multiplayer from being added to KSP is the problem of multiple timelines. Because space travel in the game sometimes takes days or months, a fast-forward function has been an essential mechanic since very early in the development process. With multiple players, a player fast-forwarding to travel to the moon would enter an alternate timeline several days ahead of other players.

To solve this issue, the multiplayer mod allows players in the past to catch up with players in the future. Syncing timelines will also be a solution that Squad will look for in their multiplayer modes. Developers will have access to more powerful tools than modders, however, so the solution will not be based on code from the mod. It would be entirely our own implementation, Falanghe confirmed.

The plan, for now, is that Squad will begin developing the multiplayer mode sometime next year. The modes will be officially announced during the closing hours of the Kerbal Kon livestream on Friday.

KerbalEdu, a cooperative, school-friendly version of space exploration sim Kerbal Space Program, will officially launch next Wednesday, December 18. The new program was created and will be managed by TeacherGaming, which previously saw success with Minecraft variant MinecraftEdu. KerbalEdu already has a small number of schools working toward setting up a program, and over 2,000 schools are in TeacherGaming s established network.

One of the main changes to the game made with young users in mind is a craft analyzer tool that figures out problems with a ship. If a rocket is dead on the launchpad, a student will be able to turn on the analyzer and discover that their ship is too heavy, lacks sufficient lift or has been built with the wrong type of fuel tanks. The core of what we are trying to do is make the game more transparent and show how kids can use problem solving, TeacherGaming co-owner Santeri Koivisto said today during a conference in Mexico City. frees up the teacher to give very exact tips to individual students.

Members of the KSP development team have been helping to set up the KerbalEdu website, but eventually the network will be managed by TeacherGaming. A school in the United States is the first to start their own program, which got underway this week.

KerbalEdu release on Wednesday is considered a "soft" launch, and the team expects its MinecraftEdu network to help the educational variant grow quickly. Interested teachers and schools can head to the KerbalEdu website to get more information.

Kerbal Space Program has announced the full schedule for Kerbal Kon, the birthday celebration for the in-development exploration game, which starts tomorrow. In addition to showing details for changes to the game s science and career modes, developer Squad will also host streams from some of KSP s most popular YouTube personalities and former NASA astronaut Ed Lu. The action will start tomorrow at 10:00 a.m. central time, and the .23 update will come down to players next week.

New features coming to .23 will include a major revamp to the science research system that will make long-term research installations more rewarding. Under the current system, sending a single mission to each planet and planting a flag allowed players to gather all of the data they needed by repeating experiments over and over. The new system will prevent endless repetition of experiments and encourage the building of long-term science stations.

Astronaut Ed Lu is most widely known for his work with the B612 Foundation, a non-profit working toward a comprehensive defense system against planetary impact by rogue asteroids. They re interested in getting their message out to a likeminded fanbase, said Squad developer Anthony Guzzardo of working with Lu. Our community and the people that they ve been trying to aim for go hand in hand, so it s a natural fit.

Check out Kerbal Space Program s Twitch channel tomorrow morning for a full rundown on the coming update and Squad s plans for KSP in the coming year.