The Story of KSP – KSP 0.3

The Story of KSP continues now on version 0.3:

As I mentioned before, after the last update, we were seriously feeling the need to see what was going on with the ship while it was flying, so that was the main goal we set for ourselves on the 0.3 update.

This update then not only added a new UI to the game, but it also added a few sounds (which these screenshots can’t convey very well), some improvements to the spacecraft construction part (we can’t really call it the VAB at this point), and that big screen on the background you see there. It would display short messages while you were building, and also show you a countdown when it was time to launch (nothing kept you from ignoring it completely though).

The screen was pretty buggy, but back then everything we did was done with the very liberating, but also quite lazy assumption that it was ‘placeholder’ and didn’t need to work properly just then. That meant everything was left pretty much half-done. Eventually, the screen was removed when code overhauls made it completely incompatible with the current version, and we had grown tired of its little jokes.

But at this point, we were starting to see the very beginnings of something that would eventually be a game taking shape. It was already possible to put a ship into orbit, and the new game UI was being pretty helpful, even though it was mostly incomplete. The fuel and temperature gauges were 'generic’, and only displayed an average of the temperature and fuel levels, so you didn’t know what was running out of fuel, or what was about to explode. The RCS gauge there was left unused, and the three screens at the top were reserved for the so-far uninvented Kerbals.

Another thing that was removed on this version was the placeholder moon we had added on 0.2. At this point, we started wanting to get the game in a more presentable state, so we started doing away with the ugliest hacks, and even added an instructions screen that popped up when launching:

The controls were quite simple back then. Not many things to keep in mind, and the game was still 2D, so you could only lose control to the left or to the right.

But our main concern after all this, was that the Kerbal planet (it didn’t have a name back then) was still just a big sphere, and even though the terrain around the launchpad was looking better, it was very much a fake, and it ended a short flight’s distance away.

It was time then, to start thinking about how to properly create a planet-sized planet. And that’s what we set out to do on the next update.

Cheers