After the marketing company Squad, creators of Kerbal Space Program game, hyped the release of the Asteroid Redirect Mission patch in collaboration with NASA, they were bitten by the notorious Space Kraken. A game breaking bug was discovered that pushed the release into "sometime in April," displeasing a large number of their fans who were looking forward to the new content. Squad publicly admitted to the P.R. error and asked for understanding in the matter. Overall their transparency in the issue placated the majority of their user base.
The extremely fast fix (followed hours later by a hotfix for a gamesave bug that cropped up) puts them in the unusual spotlight of 'Company that made a P.R. gaffe and chose honesty instead of spin, and then apparently worked major overtime to correct the problem and subsequent problems.'
Considering how many AAA companies react under similar situations, this utter transparency at a time of high promotion for the indie developer is indeed a welcome sight. The game is still in Alpha development, and does have a long way to go, but is already rich with content and has a large modding community. If you have any interest in physics-based space games, this one is genuinely a step up from anything else, even Orbiter.
KSP's front page is here, and bring your best computer, you'll need it. The game is not optimized yet and tends to lag, especially on older systems due to Unity not yet supporting multithreaded physics or 64 bit (except on Linux). I suggest reading some of the forums if you're on the fence. Asteroids was never this much fun, or as difficult!
[Submitter's Note] Cross submitted to Pipedot
(Score: 1) by karmawhore on Thursday April 03 2014, @01:54PM
Popcorn time...
=kw= lurkin' to please
(Score: 1) by pk on Thursday April 03 2014, @02:20PM
Probably not a game for those with a short attention span though.
(Score: 2) by bucc5062 on Thursday April 03 2014, @02:31PM
Funny thing, normally I have a good attention span (though as i think maybe only in reading). Anyway, I remember downloading either the demo or some early version and never getting past building a rocket. There was no connection in how to make it work and I soon tired of trying. The premise I love, the execution (at the time) was maybe not so good(?)
It may be worth trying again for it does look like fun. Not that I have any time to play computer games any more (sigh).
The more things change, the more they look the same
(Score: 2) by tynin on Thursday April 03 2014, @02:27PM
I'm extremely happy to hear they've made significant improvements in joint stability and not needing to spam out struts and hope they'll hold it all together. We should start seeing some real mammoths getting launched into orbit that would have ripped apart on the launchpad in the past.
And with "The Claw" getting added, I should be able to go back and retrieve previously failed missions that stay in some nearby orbit. They were always a constant reminder that I had dozens of dead Kerbals out there that were never coming home. Hopefully this won't led me to losing even more of them on recovery missions.