Making games like Kerbal Space Program

I play Kerbal Space Program once in a while, especially when I had A LOT of free time (so not this year). It's a game with simple enough graphics for low-end laptops like mine, but a lot of possibilities: exploration, organization, sci-fi what-ifs, or just big explosions.

There is even a sequel (which fulfills kinda the opposite of the previous sentence), but I didn't buy it, nor the necessary new PC. Since it flopped, I think that was the right decision. I think a lot of things you can buy fall in this category.

This gives me game ideas™

In an interview, HarvesteR (creator of KSP) talked about his idea of a second game: a prequel in the early days of aviation. Instead of building rocket contraptions that go to space or explode, you would build aeroplane contraptions that take off into the sky... or explode.

He also said that KSP 2 was too ambitious. And I don't think this applies to my games (which are made by a team of one), but still, when this guy says it's too ambitious, and when you look at the first game with almost a thousand bespoke parts in the base game and so many systems, you think about it.

So what would be a correctly scoped Kerbal Wrong Brothers? (the name for this prequel)

Let's dive into this thought experiment.

Kerbal Wrong Brothers

Let's say I'm a team of one, and I must make a commercial game in one week about green dudes making planes and crashing. And I have no experience in (making) sandbox games. How would I do it?

First, planes have wheels. I made a basic 2D wheel in Godot, it took a few minutes. I added beams and live-updating parameters for the assembly building, it took around an hour.

Next is the terrain. I guess one big polygon is good enough, but without deep optimization, the planet will be like 1 kilometer wide. That's fine, just put big hills around the gameplay area. That'll work until your planes will (they WILL) be powerful enough to overcome them and get lost in the big void. I tried this for Gordon Kart 2D, a side-view version of my PSX mascot driving game.

I didn't try to loop the terrain but it'd be an interesting thing to implement. Hope you don't have dynamic rigid bodies in there, cause they'll glitch out!

And finally parts. I have absolutely no experience in making building games, so here be dragons. Let's just choose among 3 different planes for the prototype, that's good enough. If you want some background behind this development strategy, I recommend the blog Making Fun. I used some of its techniques for my latest projects. They still failed, but for different reasons. Hooray!

Wait so you didn't implement it.
Isn't this article a complete waste of time then?

Yes! Quit reading blogs and go play outside. Plant a flag or something.

On that, see ya in the next one!