After more than five years on the job, Kerbal Space Program Lead Developer Felipe Falanghe is moving on. In a farewell message posted on the KSP subreddit, Falanghe praised and thanked the development team and KSP supporters, but said, “I desperately need to have something new, to create more than one game in my life.”
“KSP has become far more than the game I imagined half a decade ago. When we first set out to take on this project, I could not have expected anything even remotely close to what it ended up becoming,” he wrote. “To say KSP surpassed my every expectation would be, at best, a colossal understatement.”
Kerbal Space Program is now “conceptually complete,” Falanghe explained, but its development is not. A long-term plan for the future is in place, with “enough ideas to keep us all going for years,” and he emphasized that his departure won't have an impact on any of it.
“I need to make one thing perfectly clear: development on KSP will continue as always. No features, upgrades, bugfixes or anything of the sort are being discontinued because of my leaving,” he wrote. “This I say with absolute confidence, because I have complete trust in every member of the KSP team, and I know they are fully capable of handling anything that comes their way.”
Falanghe, who showed us his rig in 2014, gave no indication of what he'll get up to next, although clearly he's not looking to get out of the game-making business. So while it's sad to see him leave, the prospect of Kerbal Space Program carrying on as usual, while the guy who came up with it goes off to do something new, does have a real appeal to it. And in case there was any question as to exactly how people feel about Falanghe and his game, another redditor created a word cloud of all the comments in the thread up to that point. It's pretty great.
