Dean Hall sees Kerbal Space Program as one of the most inspiring games ever, and that's not just a personal opinion: It's the inspiration for his latest game, and he says that literal rocket scientists are among those flocking to the project to help.
The DayZ creator and CEO of Icarus developer RocketWerkz is now working on Kitten Space Agency, a space sim that is an unofficial second attempt at making a Kerbal Space Program sequel following KSP2's dramatic failure in 2024.
The game will swap cat-stronauts into the pilot seat over the oblong-headed kerbals as it looks to carry forth the spirit of the brainy space engineering sim, which otherwise faces an uncertain future (KSP was owned by 2K's Private Division label, until being passed on to another publisher in January).
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Kitten Space Agency is proceeding deliberately quietly in a pre-alpha state, still lacking a Steam page to announce itself or any other formal, public presence, as Hall wants to focus on "the really core architectural stuff" and "the biggest technical problems" ahead of making any bold promises.
As I talk with Hall, I'm struck by how much his studio is approaching that technical challenge with its eyes not just on escape velocity calculations and orbital patterns, but the larger purpose and power of games like Kerbal to inspire new ideas and feelings in people.
I super didn't get the point of history in high school until I played Crusader Kings.
Dean Hall
"The educational version, I think one of the things that really attracts me to the project is that," Hall says, partly referencing Kerbal Space Program's KerbalEdu edition, which was discounted for schools.
"I think videogames have a role to play in inspiring people. I super didn't get the point of history in high school until I played Crusader Kings," he says of Paradox Interactive's grand strategy series. "And then my parents visited me in Prague and I'm telling them about the Holy Roman Empire and stuff. And my mom's like, 'Where did you learn this?' And I was like, I was playing Crusader Kings. So I think videogames can be really good at inspiring."
Kitten Space Agency will initially be released for free to help it pursue this goal of getting the game into schools and reaching kids who may be interested in space exploration, and it will also help the game cultivate a grassroots community. But it may already have achieved that. Even in its primordial, pre-alpha state, Kitten Space Agency appears to be inspiring a lot of people.
"Since we announced we didn't even have a logo on our Discord, and now there's like 25,000 people on there, and our recruiting has just gone haywire," says Hall. "So many of those community members are, like, literally rocket scientists, professors and stuff like that."
From that broad base of interest, Rocketwerkz has assembled an impressive lineup of developers for KSA, including Stefan Moluf, who worked at SpaceX for 12 years and served as a senior flight software engineer. Notable KSP modders JPLRepo and Blackrack (who Hall calls "a world expert in atmospheric scattering") have joined the project, as has one of the original creators of Kerbal Space Program, Felipe "HarvesteR" Falanghe.
Hall says it was the only time in the studio's history that when team members heard about a pre-production prototype, he started getting messages on Slack from people asking if they could work on it.
I really loved Carl Sagan's Cosmos, both the audio book as well as the series and yeah, I just think that that awoke an interest in programming.
Dean Hall
Others who started working on KSA were inspired to learn new skills. "We've got one programmer who joined us as, like, a musician and sound effects person who had done basically no programming, and had started programming and stuff like that, became an extremely talented engineer and [he was] heavily inspired by KSP."
Finally, the project is an extension of Hall's own lifelong inspiration for space exploration. A mountaineer who climbed Everest in 2013, two of Hall's favorite games are emergent sci-fi games Space Station 13 and RimWorld.
"I was just always fascinated with space. You know, my nickname ended up being Rocket, and so I was always just fascinated with it," says Hall, who adds that he grew up in a small town that's "left off of maps half the time."
"I really loved Carl Sagan's Cosmos, both the audio book as well as the series and yeah, I just think that that awoke an interest in programming and stuff like that, which then led to me modding and making games. Modding felt like something that someone could do from New Zealand. But you know, when I was young, a lot of these things, at least to me, didn't seem possible."
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