The development of KSA has only been in full production for a year now, but a long history exists at the studio when it comes to this game. Rocketwerkz was one of the final three original bids to make KSP2, but we were not chosen.  Over the years we’ve considered making a KSP-like game several times, but given the weight of the KSP license, there didn’t seem to be a way for us to break in. Early in KSP’s development I met with Felipe (the creator of KSP) and we bonded over a shared approach to making games. When KSP2 closed down, we met again - and realized many of the frustrations and concerns we had about making and selling games were not only still there, but worse. 

Life has become pretty tough for our studio, with niche games we make, like Stationeers, being received well by customers but simply not making enough money. We needed to find a better way to bring the games we wanted to make to life.

The BRUTAL Framework

A few years ago work started towards the development of the BRUTAL Framework, a technology that would allow us to develop complex games. This name is very deliberate as it eschews usability in favor of performance, stability and quality. Absolute power is given to those developing with it, throwing away as much abstraction as possible.

At its core the framework takes the latest C# and the Vulkan graphics API and makes this available to the team. Heavy focus is given to providing a strong and powerful INTEROP, a technology that allows you to take existing libraries and integrate them. A great example of this in action is our replacement of “system.numerics” (the core maths library of C#) with a custom mathematics library based on double precision - to help give us more room to navigate precision issues.

KSA enters pre-production

A few months before KSP2 development was closed down I had used BRUTAL for the first time. At that time, there wasn’t a proper rendering API, but I had access to draw User Interface elements. I made an initial demo called “orbit”, that contained some basic orbital mechanics. The studio strongly considered making this into a game, but rejected it due to the massive weight the KSP license took up. This work ended up being integrated to power the skybox in our game Stationeers. When KSP2 development closed down we discussed the project with Felipe, members of the KSP2 team, and entered pre-production.

A Years Progress

After a year in production the game has made tremendous progress. The story of the first year of work can be seen in our open development.  All of our commit logs are posted unedited by executives and marketing.  Our developers openly chat with the community and   there are thousands of messages we’ve publicly exchanged with excited players who want to learn and exchange ideas about the game.

The game is still pre-alpha, as all aspects of gameplay must be explicitly planned in BRUTAL. But, we have a game where planets load without hitching.  Orbits can span solar system scales without flickering and changing. Vessels can spin and station keep with thrusters at time warps well over a million. You can swap to vessels, or start editing ones without loading screens and freezes. Atmospheres create blue skies, and orange sunsets, while clouds cast shadows on distant mountains without dropping your framerate into the teens.

We are incredibly excited about whats there now, and what we can do in the future.  We are also excited to let the community finally touch and give feedback on the core features we’ve been working on.  We’re excited to try an alternative distribution and funding method where people can play for free.