Kerbal Space Program is drifting in the direction of the PS4, Squad have announced at E3.
“Space is for everyone,” reasoned the developers. “Regardless of how you prefer to play.”
But the studio reassure that this apparent giant leap is in fact just a small step for the game, and won’t throw ongoing PC development off-course.
Want more from Kerbal? Here are the best Kerbal Space Program mods.
Kerbal runs on Unity, and the engine’s “flexibility and ease of use” has made the PS4 port a “no brainer”, the developers said in a forum FAQ. That chimes with what we’ve heard about Unity’s potential for porting from other developers, like Snapshot’s Julian Gollop.
Squad have chosen Flying Tiger Entertainment to head up development – a Californian studio who’ve built a number of engines themselves. They’re allowing Squad to take a relatively hands-off approach.
“They have experience and have shown us time and time again that they were simply the right choice,” said Squad.
“Will this have a negative effect on the development of the PC version? Absolutely not,” they went on. “If anything, working in collaboration with Flying Tiger has helped us speed up processes like the Unity 5 upgrade, but in general the two will remain separate versions of the game, much like the educational version TeacherGaming works on.”
TeacherGaming sell a school-focused version of Kerbal named KerbalEdu, which was developed alongside the main game.
Kerbal recently left Steam Early Access, but Squad plan to continue updating it for free.
In our Kerbal Space Program review, Steve said the sim “beautifully captures the tediously incremental marvel of space exploration”. What do you make of it post-Early Access?