I didn’t leave myself a lot of notes for this month’s update, but plenty of cool stuff went down to talk about. First off, I’m happy to say the KSA is already operating through to the new year – current operational date is 1/4/15. I had hoped to extend my lead out to a full 4 months but still getting to 3.5 is pretty good. I’m wary of the fact that at some point as things become more complicated I could drop close to a 1:1 ratio in terms of real days versus in-game days as the amount of tasks I need to perform per in-game day increases. Thankfully when needed I can introduce plots to momentarily slow things down to make it easier for me to catch up on in-game time. I have also slowed down operations in general – meaning that now after launching a new satellite into space while in the game it takes me a few minutes to deploy everything and stuff, I make it take a day or two. The time it takes to build rockets has also been gradually increased, which I feel is realistic given the increasingly complex tech being employed.
Category Archive: Behind the Scenes
Aug 14 2014
Six Month Update
Half a year?!? Holy crap.
A couple hours early for this monthly update but tomorrow is going to be busy so might as well get this done now. My parents are selling the house we’ve lived in for the last 30 years, so I’m spending a lot of time getting ready to move to my own place while they head down south to retire. This means my lead time has dropped a tad from almost 3.5 months down to just over 3 – but I’m holding pretty steady there. It doesn’t help that as operations for the KSA grow more complex, I spend more time planning than I do playing. But the more experienced I become at planning the faster I will be able to do it, so things will balance out again eventually.
Jul 15 2014
Five Month Update
Another month! With amazing progress as well. The KSA is currently operating on Oct 26th, so I have almost 3.5 months of lead time built up, and increasing slowly. The twitter account is up past 250 followers – it’s 261 at the time of this writing but the number does fluctuate but +/- 5 follower every week or so. I think I’m solidly past 250 now however. I’m still working on ways to boost follower count but it’s a secondary goal so I’m not really dedicating too much attention to it, after all I want to play the game!
Jun 15 2014
Four Month Update
May 16 2014
Three Month Update
Things are still rolling. I continue to have a blast playing KSP and thus the story goes on. Currently things are scheduled as far out as the second full week of August, which is awesome because now I can really take my time to craft up some cool things for the story. For instance, later developments have led me to go back and re-rewrite some earlier tweets to make an event in late May better tie in to an event in early July. I can also put lots of time into various composite picture experiments, some of which you can see here (note these are not images that are in any way related to the KSA story, just experiments). The follower count for @KSA_MissionCtrl continues to slowly rise and is almost past 200. I’ve lost a few but the overall trend is upwards. I haven’t managed to have the same success on Reddit as my initial post featuring the loss of Cmdr Jeb, but posting mission reports there via Imgur does trickle in a few followers and one redditor said he follows me exclusively on there.
Apr 16 2014
Two Month Update
The KSA is chugging right along. I’ve been at this for two months and the story has already grown out past 4 months, nearing the end of June at the time of this writing. There are two main reasons for the lead time. The most important of course is the fact that life can always get in the way at unwanted times, and having to put aside KSP when needed and still have events rolling on is a good thing. Second, this is very much a game still under development. When things break, sometimes you need a lot of time to fix them. If I decided to upgrade to a new release, I might need some time to get everything working again to continue the story. So yea, I’m trying to maintain at least a two-month lead time.
Mar 25 2014
One Month Update
I’m happy to report the project is off to a good start. I’ve managed to accrue over 100 followers already, largely thanks to the support of the official KSP twitter – they obliged me with a retweet request and that brought in like 80 followers. A few more joined on their own and then I got to meet Scott Manley at the community meetup during GDC and he retweeted one of my tweets to him to help push me over 100. But the followers of @KSA_MissionCtrl have also been busy promoting the account with retweets and favorites – in fact there is one guy who favorites practically every single tweet I make. I don’t know why really but I’ll just assume he’s a die-hard fan!
Feb 19 2014
Introducing the Kerbal Space Agency
I’ve had a lot of fun using twitter as a fictive writing platform for my Sims gaming experience and wanted to do it for my career bid in KSP as well. I can read my Sim’s story almost like a book from when he first moved into town to learning new skills to buying his new house to chasing after females to settling down in a relationship to travels abroad… I can pick up playing right where I left off after months of spending time with other games because I can easily get back into the head of my character – what he was doing and working for when I last left off. I wanted to be able to do the same for my time spent with (and away from) KSP and look back at some of my more memorable launches and missions and have them play out on a timeline. Plus, it’s a lot easier for other people to follow along when the story is delivered to them bite-sized via a twitter feed rather than having to read a whole blog entry.