Today instead of my dev diary, I'm sharing my review of 2024 and our plans for 2025.
I'm excited to share both our achievements and our vision for the future.
Previous year is here: My review of 2023 & Plans and predictions for 2024
Main Events of 2024
2024 marked the beginning of a golden age for both Keen Software House and GoodAI.
After 15 years of development and innovation in the gaming industry, Keen Software House has reached new heights, while GoodAI continues to expand its horizons.
Our teams have cultivated a productive, results-oriented, and friendly yet meritocratic culture, where everyone is dedicated to delivering exceptional value to our players and customers.
Space Engineers 2 Announcement
Space Engineers 2 represents more than just a sequel – it's a complete reimagining of the space engineering experience that takes everything players love about Space Engineers and makes it ten times better.
Building on over a decade of experience with the original Space Engineers, we're creating something truly extraordinary.
Read more about the announcement.
AI People Alpha Release
We successfully launched the alpha version of AI People, featuring AI NPCs that behave like living beings, revolutionizing gaming with truly intelligent artificial characters. Post-release updates have included local LLM integration, Long-Term Memory (LTM), voice input capabilities, new interactions, and additional characters.
While we continue developing proper game loops, objectives, and challenges, we've observed that players who create their own scenarios and characters find particular enjoyment in the experience.
Read more about the alpha release
GoodAI Strategic Evolution
2024 marked a significant transformation in GoodAI's mission. While we began as a fundamental research company focused on AGI development, the maturation of the AI ecosystem - with numerous companies now working on LLMs, foundational models, and AI infrastructure - has enabled us to transition to the second stage of our mission: applying AI to help humanity.
This shift has materialized through two main initiatives: AI People, which creates simulated humans for gaming, and Groundstation, which enhances safety and security applications.
Space Engineers 1 Achievements
We continued updating and developing Space Engineers throughout 2024, and we are committed to supporting it even in 2025. Key highlights include:
- Update 205 (Contact) became the most successful update and DLC in Space Engineers history
- Update 204 (Signal) continued our tradition of meaningful content additions
- Celebrated our 11-year anniversary with the game still going strong at 16,000 concurrent players
GoodAI Groundstation Milestones
- Secured Remote Drone Operations approval in South Africa (December 18, 2024), enabling single-pilot operation of multiple drones from a central control room
- Established successful Community Safety Initiatives in Hout Bay, Cape Town, collaborating with Community Crime Prevention (CCP) for autonomous drone patrols, search and rescue missions, and emergency response operations
- Demonstrated exceptional system accessibility by allowing a 7-year-old to successfully operate a drone, highlighting our interface's intuitive design.
Research Achievement
Our paper on our LTM Benchmark got accepted to NeurIPS 2024
Plans for 2025
Space Engineers 2
- SE2 Early Access Alpha launch on January 27 - read more
- Release a sequence of vertical slices:
- VS 1.1: UGC In-game Workshop
- VS 1.2: Improved Mechanics and Interface Refinements
- VS 1.5: Modding Support, VRAGE HUB, VRAGE Editor, and other tools
- VS 2: Planets and Survival
- VS 3: Water (most likely in 2026)
Space Engineers 1
Continue supporting our established player base with two major updates planned:
- Update 1.206
- Update 1.207
AI People
Our goal for 2025 is to transform AI People from an innovative tech demo into a fully-fledged game that players love.
We will focus on achieving product-market fit by developing an engaging core gameplay loop that keeps players coming back.
A major milestone will be the release of a version with completely local AI models - including LLM, speech-to-text, and text-to-speech capabilities - eliminating the need for subscriptions and making the game more accessible to all players.
Throughout the year, we'll be measuring and improving player engagement and retention metrics to ensure we're creating an experience that truly resonates with our community.
Predictions for 2025
- AI Evolution: A new generation of agentic LLMs will emerge, capable of planning and executing tasks that take hours - maintaining focus, avoiding loops, and self-correcting when needed.
- AI Integration: More and more tasks will transition from humans to AI agents, with real-time AI assistants integrating with your computer screen - not just answering questions, but watching your work like a skilled colleague and proactively offering guidance before you even ask.
- Technical Advancement: Inference speeds will continue to increase while costs decrease, making AI systems more accessible and efficient.
- European Development: The changing global political landscape may catalyze stronger European strategic autonomy and a renewed recognition of Europe's foundational role in shaping the modern world. I would love to see a more unified and stronger Europe acting as one entity - economically, culturally, and in terms of defense and military capabilities. This unified approach would lead to increased pan-European cooperation in technology, culture, and human progress, allowing Europe to more effectively shape the future of civilization while drawing strength from both its rich heritage and continued leadership in innovation.
Thank you for following our journey through 2024. I want to express my deepest gratitude to our amazing teams at both Keen Software House and GoodAI. It's truly enjoyable working with such dedicated professionals who continue to grow both individually and collectively. What makes me particularly proud is how well-aligned everyone is with our mission and goals, and how seamlessly we collaborate across all projects. The level of dedication, mutual support, and innovative thinking I witness daily is extraordinary. I'm genuinely excited about what we'll achieve together in 2025.
Best regards,
Marek Rosa
CEO & Game Director, Keen Software House
CEO GoodAI
Very glad to see continued support for SE 1! Looking forward to what SE 2 has on offer soon!
ReplyDeleteI am very happy to see that a small company is achieving great success.
ReplyDeleteAdd Steam workshop support.
ReplyDeleteGood news: Space Engineers 2 will use Steam Workshop for user-generated content.
DeleteAfter hearing your feedback, especially from our content creators, we're adapting our plans to better serve our community.
More details: https://blog.marekrosa.org/2025/01/space-engineers-2-steam-workshop-support.html
Would be really cool if we could AI people integrated in Space Engineers 2 in some way.
ReplyDeletehell no
Deletehope we get steam workshop :( SE1 and its community was built around steam would suck to not have that going forward
ReplyDeleteThis is the stupidest shit i have ever read, VS dev is so wrong in so many ways! This is all about greed!
ReplyDeleteShut up
DeleteSomeones sore they aren’t getting water immediately :/
Deletehey so can you like add steam workshop support thanks
ReplyDeleteWe just announced it - SE2 will get Steam Workshop support, in the first update after the launch.
DeleteIs there any plans on introducing steeper slopes to SE2 or even SE1? I know it would be difficult just because of how much new blocks would be needed to adapt to other types, and they might introduce even more types of blocks missing that the community would complain about, idk, just a thought. (It seems surreal describing SE1 as… well, SE1)
ReplyDeleteI'm definitely looking forward to SE2. I'm glad to hear that you're going to continue to keep the steam workshop integration for the game. It's an excellent tool for players to share ship designs and one of the nicer features of the original Space Engineers. The fact that you plan to add NPC's to SE2 this time around is going to make the game feel a lot more alive.
ReplyDeleteHopefully, given your development of AI people, some of that will make it's way into SE2, so we can have slightly more intelligently designed NPC's with the ability to give them job/task assignments. While, at the same time, their own set of survival priorities, which if ignored, they will resolve on their own. No food? They'll build a hydroponics bay or gather/prepare it. No O2? They'll build an O2 generator or take off and go mine ice or collect water. No access to shelter? They'll build a room with a bed, shower, and bathroom. Without your permission. You lock em out of a storage crate that has the food or otherwise abuse them? Cool, they'll remember this, and grind their way in or leave and start their own base or ship, leave you, and lock you out of their stuff. Or maybe go hostile and kick you out.
Thank you! Yes, moving our AI People technology to SE2 would be amazing. I am playing with that idea, although I can't promise. First we need to prototype it and prove in AI People.
DeleteHey Respect for all work and thanks of thousands of ours of gameplay, Will you add vectored trust to vanilla, building engine for each Angle is messing up all mass/ trust Ratios, good luck in publish
ReplyDelete