RocketWerkz, the studio founded by DayZ creator Dean Hall, has revealed their next game – Kitten Space Agency (working title) – what they’re teasing as a “Kerbal Space Program killer.”

Kitten Space Agency is being developed by the RocketWerkz team under Dean Hall and various developers and modders that have worked on Kerbal Space Program and its sequel Kerbal Space Program 2. The game actually began as a pitch to Private Division for what became Kerbal Space Program 2.

“Our studio actually was in the bidding to make KSP2 and we made it to the top three bids,” Hall said. “The final step was a call (to) Private Division. I put a lot of work into a good design document and opted to keep the focus entirely on this design and the technical aspects of the project – this was a serious problem for two of the people on the call who said we were the only pitch that did not contain art. Obviously our studio wasn’t chosen.”

The game was revealed alongside a demonstration (shown below) that features both orbital simulation, spherical billboard rendering, and floating point precision issues being solved. Kitten Space Agency is being designed and built “from the ground up” with modding, performance, and scalability in mind.

When asked what Kerbal Space Program IP holder Take-Two would say considering the history of Kitten Space Agency’s development and if the similarities to its inspiration could bring a lawsuit, Hall said he welcomes any challenges.

“They are welcome to try!,” Hall said. “Would be some great publicity for us. Also, I’m very bitter as I think they are a terrible company. So bring it on! We have great lawyers.”

Here’s a rundown on the new game:

KSP Team members + RocketWerkz

We have employed some of the original KSP and KSP2 team and a number of modders and expect the team to continue to grow. Here is a video demonstrating a unique approach we have been able to take with rendering, given BRUTAL gives us direct access to everything Vulkan can do.

There is also a key person we are still sorting out the exact details for but I’d love to introduce them once that is done. I think this person is a key individual in our industry as a whole and our studio will be backing them and their future endeavors as well.

The original crew are providing a lot of assistance and we are bringing technology, production, and approach from our own work.

Features

• Achieving Seamless movement – Instead of generating the terrain on the fly, at game load we generate a variety of spherical billboards using XML defined data. This means a modder making RSS can generate spherical billboards that might be necessary to give good terrain for different data sets. As the player gets closer to a planet we choose a different version of these spherical meshes. We can also do a lot of tricks that would be much harder in a traditional game engine, such as leaving the data on the GPU.
• Dealing with Floating Point precision loss – The “size” of the values used for position need to be doubles for precision, but for rendering we realistically have to use floats. in KSP, HarvestR made an amazing solution that works in Unity for this. However in BRUTAL we have so many more options. In the video linked you can see that we don’t have the usual precision issues. The camera is always rendering at 0,0,0 meaning that imprecision is pushed out to infinity.
• Using Solar System Data for now – For testing purposes, we are using Solar System data. This is all fully moddable. The simulation is fully threaded. Are currently working on laying in close physics simulation using Jolt physics API – as we can instance this for each “scene” requiring data.
• Next Steps – I will leave it to individual team members who are welcome to share what they are working on with the project. You can also follow the discord for live changlog and more information or to answer questions. We will be making builds and data systems available to modders as early as possible to get feedback so we can restructure this to best support the project in future.

A release date for Kitten Space Agency wasn’t announced but Hall and his team want to get players a first chance to try it sometime in 2025. For now you can join their official Discord.