People who savour the sweet reek of Saturn V exhaust, rejoice. People who love cats, tremble. Felipe Falanghe, original developer of gurning spaceflight simulator Kerbal Space Program, has teamed up with Dean Hall, original creator of zombie MMO DayZ, to make a spiritual Kerbal successor – Kitten Space Agency.
As the name may suggest, it trades the little green men of KSP for a bunch of feline astronauts – a meme-ish setup that apparently has nothing to do with real-life space experiments on animals, and which goes hand-in-paw with a new in-house software engine. Also, Hall and Falanghe have hired a former SpaceX staffer to work on the physics.
Initially soft-announced on Reddit a few months ago – “soft-announced” being a euphemism here for “Hall challenged Kerbal publishers Take-Two to sue him” – the game is being made at RocketWerkz, the studio behind Stationeer and Icarus. They’ve been developing it for around a year now, and are about to release a pre-alpha build for informal playtesting.
The eyebrow-raising twist is that RocketWerkz are making and releasing Kitten Space Agency via new distribution and community-funding platform Ahwoo, which as of writing consists of a holding page. According to the press release, Ahwoo “allows players to download the latest version of the game for free and contribute directly to its ongoing development, something not possible through traditional digital storefronts”, a claim that is possibly true in some awkwardly technical sense they’ve yet to explain.
Kitten Space Agency aims to rely heavily on community funding and creative input. “Contributions fund continued work, future features, and the infrastructure needed to keep development open,” Hall comments in the press release. “But people aren’t just supporting this project financially. They’re testing, refining, and improving it. It’s a shared mission in every sense.”
Harumph. I am suspicious of videogame projects that try to enlist players as explicit collaborators and co-financiers from the outset. We’ve been burned before. There’s a thin line between “shared mission” and asking people to donate their labour, and what happens if the community decline to chip in moneybucks sufficient for the game’s development? I will ask for more details. In the meantime: spaceships!
Earlier this week, and prior to learning about AhWoo, I had a virtual sit-down with Stefan Moluf, the aforesaid SpaceX software engineer, who spent his approximately 11 years at the company tinkering with the brains of the Falcon 9 and Dragon spacecraft. He gave me a sense of how the new game will and won’t differ from Kerbal. Broadly, it sounds like it won’t.
This is an engineering sim with deceptively moe characters in which you build rockets out of capsules, engines, fuel tanks and so forth, then attempt to blast your kitbashed deathtrap into orbit. Assuming you successfully slip the surly bonds of your own ineptitude, you’ll then set off to explore other planets and moons. Completing objectives such as landing on these distant worlds will earn you new spaceship parts. Failing to complete objectives will presumably earn you lots of Reddit-worthy gifs of detonating kittens.
As for how KSA will deviate from KSP’s trajectory, “a lot of the things that we’re looking to change are just things that that game wasn’t able to achieve, given the circumstances of its development,” Moluf told me. This begins with a new in-house game engine, BRUTAL, which is better equipped to handle a solar system’s worth of physics-enabled bodies than the original game’s Unity.
“We’re doing a significant proportion and maybe eventually all of the physics programming ourselves,” Moluf explained. “Right now, that’s just been me. And we’re doing that because traditional game engines, traditional physics systems, really want you to be in a confined play area – you know, approximately human scale. And the solar system is just way too big for that to work in many different dimensions – both in terms of the number of objects that can interact with each other from very distant places, to just the sheer scale of the space causing problems for computers, something called floating point error.
“This very big, expansive game was sort of shoehorned into an old game engine, and it caused huge problems for what Kerbal Space Program ultimately became,” he went on. “So there’s been a lot of rethinking of the game from first principles, so that it can thrive as a game of its own on the scale that we know it’s going to be.”
Given this sturdier framework, RocketWerkz hope to “push the game part a lot further than Kerbal Space Program”, though again, the two projects will be very similar. I asked Moluf for some more specific planned differences, inviting him to call upon his decade-and-change of experience programming actual rockets.
“KSP was pretty remarkable in capturing most of the basics,” he reflected. “If you took ‘intro to Aerospace engineering 101’, you’d get a lot of what Kerbal Space Program was doing. And I do think that kind of ‘Introduction to Rockets++’ is the right spot for the game to land in, you know, authenticity-wise. There’s definitely a lot of details that I, as someone who’s worked on this professionally, can look at KSP and say ‘that’s not quite right – it should be like this’. There are interesting implications for doing it a little bit better.”
Again talking up the new in-house engine, Moluf gave the example of how the original KSP restricted the full physics implementation to the craft in hand. “Physics sort of only existed when you were looking at a vehicle. So while you were in control of your rocket, things seemed to work as you might expect. You’d fire thrusters and move around and it could spin and rotate. As soon as you went to control another vehicle, the first one got put on something they called on-rails. It would actually stop rotation immediately. It couldn’t fire thrusters or manoeuvre in any way. It was just frozen in a box.”
In KSA, by contrast, the physics will apply “seamlessly” across your fleet, and your ships will be able to do things in your absence. You’ll also be able to switch between them without loading breaks. “So one of your rockets, you can say, I want you to point at the sun and charge your solar panels, then go control another one for a while and when you come back the first one’s been charging its batteries,” Moluf told me.
The new supporting technology also means that objects in space can “point at each other persistently, which is important for communication satellites,” he added. It’s not all Big Simulation Stuff, mind. The new game’s smaller flourishes include manoeuvring thruster plumes that genuinely resemble the emissions you see in footage of craft docking with the International Space Station. Apparently other space games have been getting them wrong. Moluf has worked through videos with one of the team’s artists to recreate them properly.
Again, the basic aim remains to do Kerbal again, but better and less rickety. Space industry alumni aside, RocketWerkz have enlisted prominent Kerbal Space Program modders JPLRepo, Blackrack, Linx and Daishi to guide the vessel home.
I suspect all this will be quite enough for many returning Kerbal players, in light of the second game’s abysmal fortunes. Early access reviewer Steve Hogarty deemed Kerbal Space Program 2 “a catastrophic re-entry” back in February 2023, reserving his largest spoonful of scorn for the game’s technical issues. “There’s no sense of achievement when the odds you’re up against aren’t to do with mastering the complex physics of interplanetary space flight, but the game’s own half-finished code,” he wrote.
The game’s early access build still exists on Steam, but it’s unlikely to make it to Planet 1.0 – Take-Two belatedly confirmed the closure of developers Intercept Games in November 2024, alongside the sale of Private Division. Moluf didn’t mention Kerbal Space Program 2 in our chat, beyond saying that he considered applying for a job on the team after leaving SpaceX in 2020, and is glad he didn’t.
I’ve never played much Kerbal, myself, but I’m partial to astral whirligigs like Outer Wilds, so I’m up for launching a few cats at the Moon. I just hope that the untested new community development platform doesn’t prove to be the equivalent of a dashboard Post-it reading “IOU 1 life support system”. As evidence for the prosecution, consider that RPS were not mad keen on either Stationeers or Icarus, though both appear popular today among Steam user reviewers. We Shall See. In the meantime, expect more from my interview with Moluf in the coming week or so.
