Ask Me Anything with Shana Markham

Hi Kerbonauts!

We sat down with Design Director Shana Markham for another Ask Me Anything on Discord. She's been working at Intercept Games for 3 years! The full AMA can be found here, complete with an audio version. As a reminder, we're in Early Access! Plans can change.

Questions are organized by topic and include who/where the question came from. And we've heard your feedback-the next AMA will be even more varied in source and topic. Be sure to check the Discussion Board for the next AMA callout (date TBD). Thank you to everyone who submitted questions and tuned into the AMA!

[h2]All About Shana![/h2]
What is a design director? (enjoyer, Discord)

• A design director is someone who is responsible for standards, practices, and excellence of a particular discipline. I oversee all of the designers over here at Intercept Games. I also make sure the designers here can learn and grow and become better designers every day.
  

What has been your favorite thing to work on so far? (Epic, Discord)

• The VAB. There's a lot of cool moments that help new players learn how to build and fly. Exploring that design space allows more expert players to learn shortcuts to make things faster. It's a win-win on both sides of players.
  

What planet are you most proud of that we have not seen yet? (ThatOneGuy, Discord)

• Glumo!
  

What is your favorite celestial body in the Kerbolar system? (Little908, KSP Forums)

• Easy - Eve. It's beautiful and haunting. Also once you're there, you're never going back.
  

[h2]Gameplay and Game Design[/h2]
What has been the process of bringing a solid gameplay foundation to player progression in KSP2? (StarHawk, KSP Forums)

• We have to answer 'how does progression give implicit and explicit goals'. If you look at something like Science, that's implicit. No one is directly telling you to go do experiments. Implicit goals are a better space for Kerbal since we're based on exploration. Explicit goals though, are way better for newer players, because it helps them learn what the game is about and what they can do. It also helps some players explore different areas of the game they may not have explored before.
  

How do you and the team learn about and imitate real world rocket and spacecraft systems, to ensure the realism of the game? (LeroyJenkins, KSP Forums)

• There's a lot to this. We have a handful of subject matter experts including professors and other outside sources. Internally, we read whitepapers and dive deep into all different types of topics. When I initially came into the project, I first knew Nate as "that guy who has a whitepaper about metallic hydrogen taped to his wall". With this game, we're not always working just with game designers - we're working with people who are passionate about aerospace which is fantastic.
  

What was the most difficult decision thus far with designing the game? Alternatively, what was the easiest? (bradtaniguichi, Discord)

• Most Difficult: Establishing the roadmap. We started from an endpoint "here's the game as a whole", buy when you go into Early Access, it's not 50% of each feature, it's milestone on milestone - each building on top of each other. It took us months to sort out. There's still moments where we think about moving things around, but trying to take this absolute behemoth of a game and parse it out into a bunch of different phases.
  
• Easiest: Sorting parts by types as a default in the VAB. When we started, we just sorted by size - but it caused difficulty with finding parts. Once we added sorting by types, it made sense to make it the default.
  

How long does it take to design a real-world technology for Kerbal technology and still be realistic? (the_tunnel, KSP Forums)

• Depends! Depends on the part and so many other aspects. For some parts we're working on right now, it's a pretty quick turnaround. But for a lot of the parts, we think about "what's the reality of this part" and then we go through the "what's the gameplay elements that this part could add?". From there we move into "okay, we understand what the user story will be when a player uses this part". We'll then do whiteboxes and think about how the parts will impact other parts in the game. Ultimately it depends.
  

Do new planets scale more scientifically accurate or have you kept the 1/6th size for gameplay reasons? (Spicat, Discord)

• We kept it to 1/6 size for gameplay reasons. There's not more really on this. Basically if we brought the size up, it would directly impact the game negatively when compared to KSP1.
  

At the moment in KSP2 (and KSP1), activating time warp halts all craft rotations. Was there any consideration given to making rotations persist through time warp? Is this something we'll see in a future update? (Colm, Discord)

• Yes, and I totally understand the current implementation makes long distance missions pretty hard to do. I can't say when a change might come, but I can say we're talking about it a lot.
  

What new fuel types will be available throughout Early Access; and will different biomes on planets yield different fuel types? (PleySU, Discord)

• One of the first big propulsion fuels that will come in is nuclear-based. As it comes to resources and biomes, Kerbin isn't a hotbed for uranium - so for all of you who choose to play Exploration, that will be the first time you need to look past Kerbin for things you need.
  

[h2]Accessibility and Tutorials[/h2]
What was the most important change in design of KSP2 from KSP1 that you feel is overlooked by the community? (viccie211, Discord)

• Approachability. All of the little things that lead to more people coming to the game and moving away from opaqueness. Moving away from "hope you remembered this!!". We want players to come in, learn, try, fail, and want to try again. That doesn't happen if the game doesn't provide players the information and guidance needed to make those decisions. Which is complicated when you're dealing with a game that includes rocketry and orbital mechanics. We can't simplify that stuff, so we have to guide players carefully.
  

Most players don't know how reentry works and how to land precisely. How will you teach players to land precisely near colonies to deliver resources there, or will we get instruments to predict landing site for delivery paths? (Vortygont, Discord)

• The tutorial suite currently in the game is the beginning. For every milestone, we ask ourselves "what else can we add?". So yes, more tutorials to teach more advanced topics! Certainly when colonies comes out, advanced landings will be extremely useful. One of our writers did a knowledge-share internally about precision landings, and that taught us a lot about how in-depth that topic can be - and we have to figure out how to distill that down to make it approachable for new players.
  

Will there be slightly more advanced tutorials, like going to other planets? Because I'm pretty new, and so far, the tutorials for KSP2 are the easiest to understand. (NoKerbalSky08, KSP Forums)

• Glad to hear the tutorials are helping you get up and flying. We definitely want to do that. Some things we're working on: landing, interplanetary travel, basic troubleshooting, planes, and docking. We want each tutorial to build on top of the previous one.
  

[h2]Resources[/h2]
How will resources be distributed across so many planets to give the player a reason to explore every world? If resources aren't the catalyst for exploration, how else do you plan on motivating exploration? (Astr0Guy5, KSP Forums)

• We could put a different resource on each planet, but it gates players into "you must do X or you will not proceed". We don't want to force players to go to every single place if they don't want to. Also that's not really true to reality either. Instead, we want to look at the various resources on a planet and how it plays into your space program. Especially with colonies and exploration, you may want to build a mining colony - but perhaps it's really far away and it's annoying to get to. So instead you go somewhere else and build an additional orbital colony to build resource pathways.
  

With resource management, are the resources we gather raw materials that we need to convert into useable resources? Will we need to build a refinery system? (CVUSMO, Discord)

• Yes, you will gather raw resources and then refine them into what you need. Chris Adderly had a lot of fun building a production chain graph which I hope we one day get to release since it's really helpful to understand how it all flows together.
  

When it comes to resource systems, how many resources did you eventually decide to settle on (or are still working on settling on)? Should we expect something like one unique resource per celestial body? (Tyco, Discord)

• To give a specific number, I think we're looking at 14-15 specific resources throughout the universe. Focused on what you need for propulsion. Same resource may be present in multiple locations, but prevalence/proximity to existing infrastructure are factors we're thinking about as well.
  

[h2]Parts[/h2]
As KSP has many parts that aren't exact recreations of real rocket parts, or are future technologies that don't exist yet, determining what stats like thrust and specific impulse sounds more involved than looking it up. Could you give an overview of the process the team uses to determine the stats for, say, a metallic hydrogen engine? (pschlik, Discord)

• Whenever we look at introducing new parts, we group parts into certain stories and goals. That helps us understand certain behaviors and gameplay elements. For example, we command parts. All of the individual types of parts have stories that help players reach particular goals. Once you understand that, you figure out what the variable is that we can tweak. Like "okay maybe command pods have a better heat tolerance than landers". You derive formulas from the guidelines and then compare the parts together and look into the real life data, and ultimately we see how the parts build on top of each other. It's a crazy number of variables.
  

Are variants of engines and tanks like in KSP1 planned? (Spicat, Discord)

• We've moved some variants out as their own parts. Certainly a topic, but also would likely not appear in the same form as KSP1.
  

Will we get part size categories larger than the 5M parts, like 7.5M? And will the 1.875M parts from the Making History DLC make a return? (Combatpigeon96, Reddit)

• Not fully sure on the 1.875M parts, but for the larger part categories you'll see this come with Interstellar because those engines are gigantic!
  

Will there be scaling, like the wings now, for other parts? (o0King_Martin0o, Discord)

• Yes, we call these procedural parts. I believe the next one will be radiators which will come when heat returns. We add procedural parts when we feel like "wow there's a lot of parts that are samey". Wings 100% were a priority for us in Early Access and now we want to build on top of that.
  

Alternate atmospheric engines. Referring back to Eve, will we have engines that can run on other atmospheric gasses without a need for oxygen? Will we be able to collect gasses from an atmosphere as part of the resource harvesting system? (jclovis3, Discord)

• Not using oxygen is something we want to put through its paces for authenticity and gameplay values, maybe it's something we could do but also what do we and the player get out of this? Does it open it up too much? That's the beginning part of the conversation. There's a lot of good things in the atmosphere, so expect in the future that the Kerbals will start to give them more attention.
  

Is there a possibility we will see the PAW (part action windows) returning? (CheetahGamer587, Discord)

• Sure. Folks are familiar with the PAW from KSP1 (individual windows). In KSP2, we unified this to the PAM, the list of parts. The heart of that decision was based in accessibility - it can be really hard for some players to click on specific parts. This is a frequent conversation for our UI/UX group.
  

Will there be dedicated parts for building boats and submarines? Underwater bases? (KCreate, Discord)

• Underwater bases definitely scare me a little, but we 100% want to support boats. KSP1 has some awesome boat content and we want to continue to allow that. But also.....there are some celestial bodies that might have some challenges you might need a boat for...
  

[h2]Science Mode[/h2]
Will previous science parts from KSP be in KSP2? (Krzysztof, Discord)

• Parts will be different between the two games. In this case, the design team really wants to hit on their own building and flying usage challenges. You'll see less "let me put a thermometer on my command pod" and more "I've got this weird bulbous thing that performs an experiment and I need to build a rocket around it".
  

Will there be an equivalent to the Mobile Processing Unit in Science Mode? (Master_of_Rodentia, Reddit)

• No, we want to focus on the core experience of Science before considering adding parts that break game flow.
  

[h2]Colonies[/h2]
Will colonies feature automation gameplay (within the colony, so not the delivery route system)? It can look something like this: resource extractor building mines a raw source, resource refinery building makes a useable material out of it, assembly. (Acid_Burn9, Discord)

• There's a colony dev blog that I did a long time ago, which still has things to keep in mind like "KSP is a game about designing cool rockets". Like if a player wants to launch the game and fly a mission to Duna, we don't want the player to have to do 30 minutes of colony overhead to start working towards that goal. We want to make sure automation is implemented to make sure the part of the game that is really important to us, rockets, continues to stay the main gameplay loop.
  

Will adding to orbital colonies be similar to how we already make space stations, etc., or how will that work differently? (SamBretro, Discord)

• Orbital colonies would follow a similar flow to terrestrial colonies and have the same toolset.
  

[h2]Interstellar[/h2] With interstellar technologies and travel on the roadmap, is relatively a thing in KSP2? Will KSP2 handle time dilation effects when traveling at high velocities to the target star system? (Angelo Kerman, KSP Forums)

• Nate talks about this...and it's terrifying. No other comment...
  

If you read all of this (or scrolled to the bottom hehe)...snacks for you! 🍬