We have now moved from a closed pre-alpha to a public one. The build is now available for download. It is important to manage expectations, with the current build being certainly much more than a tech demo, but less than a game. This is expected as we have focused on establishing solid core fundamentals that will provide a safe scaffold to build all that we want to on top of this. It is this that you should see in the build.

What to expect from the build

A lot of work has been put into the core, driven heavily based on the experiences and advice from key Kerbal Space Program developers such as the creator, Felipe Falanghe. This has involved a great deal of technical innovation using a brand new game development technology called the BRUTAL Framework. This allows the team to use the latest C# and render using Vulkan, and efficiently utilize external libraries as needed.

The game allows you to move preconstructed vehicles around a sketch of the real-world solar system, but only a few planets have textures. We have begun work authoring our custom solar system, which will dramatically change the scales, textures, and other elements. What is there now will give you a good indication of where the project is at. 

Only Sol is simulated currently, and you can never leave its SOI - this means if you do get further out than Sol's SOI, you will see precision issues. A sample kitten in EVA is included. While basic modding is supported (and mods already exist!) the data structures are heavily in development so will change a lot, especially things like vehicles. All our internal debug tools are generally embedded in the game and are there for you to use (at your own risk) as well, such as part editing and such.

A huge milestone

This public release of our first build represents the culmination of over a decades worth of work here at RocketWerkz. Many on the KSA Team have worked on both KSP and KSP2, so their contributions go back decades as well.

Known Issues

This is an early pre-alpha on new technology. A lot of the textures and work we have is placeholder, so GPUs that do not have a lot of VRAM may struggle and experience crashes. This will improve over time, and we will also get a better idea of what minimum requirements will be once we have more content in the game.

Updates to the game

The game, by default, will check for updates and prompt you to download. For now, this is a manual process. We are looking to utilize what we can in future to make this better, such as using a torrent system. For now what we have is simple and resilient. You will download the installer, and it will install over top of the previous game. You can disable notifications if you would like.

We need you

Like many game studios we have struggled with traditional game development over the last few years, especially for relatively niche titles. Revenues and exposure on Steam is becoming similar to what some of us experienced in mobile as the app stores changed. This project represents our hope that we can reject some of our old ways of selling and marketing games, and move to a new way that best reflects our mission goal.

Everyone, everywhere in the world, no matter who they are or how much money they have - will be able to play this game. We firmly believe that games like this play an important role in fostering trust and interest in science, which has never been as important as it is now. Please consider supporting us as we try to make this project successful.

Known Issues

There are multiple known issues with AMD GPUs of series 5000 and 6000:

  • Loading times can be many minutes.

  • There can be artifacts with atmospheres behind a rendered object.

  • The Earth is a giant white orb in space. Turning off the oceans in your graphics settings can alleviate the Earth rendering problems.