No Man's Sky

No Man's Sky
The logo for No Man's Sky, with the Atlas represented in the center
Developer(s)	Hello Games
Publisher(s)	Hello Games
Director(s)	Sean Murray David Ream
Producer(s)	Suzy Wallace
Designer(s)	Gareth Bourn
Programmer(s)	Harry Denholm Ryan Doyle Hazel McKendrick Sean Murray David Ream
Artist(s)	Grant Duncan Jacob Golding
Composer(s)	65daysofstatic Paul Weir
Platform(s)	Microsoft Windows PlayStation 4
Release date(s)	WW June 2016
Genre(s)	Adventure
Mode(s)	Single-player, multiplayer

No Man's Sky is an upcoming adventure survival video game developed and published by the indie studio Hello Games. Players are free to explore the entirety of a procedurally generated deterministic open universe, which includes over 18 quintillion (1.8×10¹⁹) planets, many with their own set of flora and fauna.^[1] By exploring, players will gain information about the planets that they can submit to The Atlas, a universal database that can be shared with other players of the game. Players also gain materials and blueprints to upgrade their character's equipment and purchase a variety of starships, allowing them to travel deeper into the center of the galaxy, interact in friendly or hostile manners to computer-controlled space-faring factions, or trade with other ships.

Some activities will draw the attention of Sentinels which will attempt to kill the player-character for killing too many lifeforms or draining too many resources from these planets. Players participate in a shared universe, with the ability to exchange planet coordinates with friends, though the game will also be fully playable offline; this is enabled by the procedural generation system that assures players will find the same planet with the same features, lifeforms, and other aspects once given the planet coordinates, requiring no further data to be stored or retrieved from game servers.

No Man's Sky represents a vision of a broad, attention-getting game that Hello Games has had in place since the formation of the company, set aside while they secured their financial wellbeing through other, less risky titles such as the Joe Danger games.^[2] The game's original prototype was worked on by Hello Games' Sean Murray, and then expanded into a small 5-man team prior to its first teaser in December 2013. Since then, more of Hello Games' staff have worked on the game, with about a dozen developers leading up its release. Sony provided promotional and marketing support, but Hello Games refused any additional development support. Sony formally announced the title during their press conference at the Electronic Entertainment Expo 2014, the first independently-developed game to be presented at the Expo's centerpiece events.

At Paris Games Week in October 2015, Sony announced that No Man's Sky would be released for PlayStation 4 in June 2016.^[3][4] Hello Games stated that they plan to release the title simultaneously for Microsoft Windows and PlayStation 4.

Gameplay

No Man's Sky is a first-person, open universe survival game. Players take the role of a planetary explorer in an uncharted galaxy. They are equipped with a survival spacesuit with a jetpack, a "multitool" which can be used to scan, mine, and collect resources as well as to attack or defend oneself from creatures and other entities while on a planet, and a spacecraft that allows them to land and take-off from planets and travel between them and engage in combat with other space-faring vessels.^[5] The player-character is looking to collect information on the planets and the lifeforms and other features of these planets to upload to The Atlas, a galactic database as depicted in the game's cover artwork, which they are paid for with units, the in-game currency.^[6] Units are used to purchase new survival gear, tools, and spacecraft with more powerful abilities and defenses, allowing the player to explore more of the galaxy and survive in more hostile environments.^[7] Such upgrades can work in synergistic effects; the scanning feature of the multitool initially starts as a short-ranged directed beam, but can be upgraded to have much longer range, spanning all directions, and locating minerals and other resources buried in the ground.^[5]

The player's ability to explore planets is only limited by the range of the hyperspace jump engines of their current spacecraft and how much fuel that the craft presently carries.^[6] The player will be able to view a galactic map to plot courses between systems, which will be updated as other players upload their findings to the Atlas.^[6] There will exist numerous features in the space between planets, including ships and fleets belonging to various factions which may be hostile to the player or which the player may wish to engage in space combat.^[8] The player's actions will influence how the faction treats them in future encounters; for example by helping a faction win a space battle against a rival one earlier, they may in turn help protect the players from a different faction later.^[9] There will also be various space bases where the player can engage in trading of resources and goods in a free market system; one such base will exist in every planetary system so that players will always have the ability to buy fuel to make hyperspace jumps to other systems.^[6] The player will be able to use resources they have collected to craft new goods, though they will be required to determine the recipes for these on their own or to purchase from vendors. This can enable players to collect rare elements found in a remote part of the galaxy and craft them to make highly desirable goods that they can sell. Such stations will also sell new equipment to the player with rotating stock.^[10]

Taking resources from a planet or harming the lifeforms on it will cause the player to gain a "wanted level" similar to that of the Grand Theft Auto series, attracting the attention of robot-like Sentinels that patrol the planets. Low wanted levels may cause small drones to appear which may be easily fought off, while giant walking machines can assault the player at higher wanted levels.^[5] The player-character can die in a number of fashions, such as by sustained damage from a toxic or oxygen-less planetary environment, attacks from dangerous lifeforms or Sentinels, or being destroyed in space combat with a number of different computer-controlled space-faring factions that control sectors of the galaxy. If the player-character dies, they will respawn near their spacecraft if they died on the planet surface, or will respawn at a nearby spaceport if they died in space combat; in either situation, they will lose all information that they have not yet uploaded to the Atlas and other resources collected since, but retain all of the gear they have already acquired.^[11]

Procedural generation gameplay

A typical planet in No Man's Sky will include procedurally-generated flora and fauna for the player to discover and observe

Core to No Man's Sky is that its virtual galaxy, including the stars, planets, lifeforms, ecosystems, and the behavior of the space-bound factions are all created through random procedural generation using deterministic algorithms. A single seed number is used to create these features via mathematical computation thus eliminating the need to create each of these features by hand. This enables the game to have a massively open nature: Hello Games has estimated that with their 64-bit seed number, their virtual galaxy will include over 18 quintillion planets.^[12] Any player will be able to visit a specific planet once they know its galactic coordinates, given their spacecraft has the capability to do so, and find the same features as any other player, as these coordinates serve as the seed for the planet's topography, environment, and flora and fauna. This also enables the game to be played locally offline in addition to online, as there is no server-side storage of the galaxy, with all details being generated on-the-fly as the user plays the game.^[8] However, players will need to be online to register their finds to the Atlas.^[6] Though the player may temporarily alter aspects of the planet, such as by mining resources, these changes are only tracked while the player is on the planet; once they leave, or when visited by others, the changes will disappear.^[8] Internal game time will also play a factor, as creatures on planets will evolve, and effects of erosion will occur as the game progresses.^[13]

This generation system can create a variety of planet ecosystems, including behavioral cycles for the creatures.^[14][15][8] The amount of life on planets will be factored based on their distance from their local sun, with planets far outside the habitable zone typically being barren of life.^[8] Not all stars will have habitable planets, but will still offer potential opportunities for resources to the player.^[9] The developers aimed for a 90-10 rule: about 90% of the planets will be uninhabitable, and of the 10% that do support life, 90% of those will only be mundane lifeforms, making the planets that thrive with a vivid ecosystem rare within the virtual galaxy.^[16]

When the player first starts No Man's Sky, they will be placed at a planet at the edge of the galaxy, from which point they are free to do whatever they want. The game does not have an explicit goal but does encourage players to attempt to reach the center of the galaxy through its lore:^[8][17] planets located closer to the galactic center will have more exotic and hostile environments with more valuable resources and means to improve one's gear, urging exploration of these inner galactic regions.^[18][1] Hello Games' Sean Murray states the one might spend about forty hours of gametime to reach the center of the galaxy if they did not perform any side activities, but he also fully anticipates that players will play the game in a manner that suits them, such as having those that might try to catalog all the flora and fauna in the galaxy, while others may attempt to set up trade routes between planets.^[19]

Through the Atlas, players are credited by name for being the first to discover a planet and other types of information. Players must seek out beacons on planets to access the Atlas and upload their discoveries to be credited for them.^[20][11] The player can name their discoveries, and include notes about their discoveries, such as noting a planet having a toxic or radioactive environment.^[13] Players will be able to visit other planets that have been discovered and uploaded to the Atlas, presuming their spacecraft has sufficient fuel and range to reach those planets.^[7] On these already-explored planets, players will still be credited with in-game currency for documenting the planet and its features to the Atlas, they will not be able to rename the details that the discovering player had been able to do.^[5]

Development

Hello Games' founders Sean Murray (left) and Grant Duncan

The onset of development for No Man's Sky arose from Hello Games' co-founder Sean Murray sometime during the development of Joe Danger 2, which he compared to a mid-life crisis for himself.^[21] Murray, a former developer at Criterion Games for the Burnout series, worried the studio would be falling into a rut of producing sequel after sequel as was the case at Criterion. When Hello Games had problems with an American publisher, Murray realized they had an opportunity to create a completely new title based on a concept he had since he was a child, when he had aspirations of being an astronaut.^[2] Murray was also inspired by science fiction including works by Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Robert Heinlein, as well as the covers of these works published during the 1970s and 1980s, which typically were done by freelance artists and bore little connection to the story within but made for visually alluring scenes.^[22] Murray considered his own experience playing Elite, a similar open-world space exploration game, as part of No Man's Sky's inspiration.^[23]

The game was a concept that the studio had since inception. Murray described that in bringing on board Dave Ream, the team's creative director, that Murray described how there are skyscrapers in the world that are well visible but built on standard designs, and then there are smaller, minimalistic architectural designs, which is the direction that Murray wanted to take the studio. Ream agreed, but insisted that the studio at some point would make the game equivalent of a skyscraper, a game they could develop without any limitations. This proverbial game, "Project Skyscraper" was kept in mind as the studio began to expand and acquire the necessary finances to pursue other titles besides Joe Danger.^[2]

With the success of Joe Danger and its sequels, Murray was able to spend a few days each week for about a year to develop the core engine of No Man's Sky in secret from the rest of the team. Once the engine was completed, Murray brought in a small four-person team to work on the game directly, while Joe Danger 2 was being developed by the rest of the company. They worked in a spare room, lining the walls with science fiction imagery to help inspire them. Their work was kept in secrecy from the rest of the development team, leading to some tension within the offices, though Murray had done this specifically after seeing how small exploratory groups did not work well at Criterion Games. Further, Murray was concerned about describing the game too much, and fears that even teasing about the title would lead to misconceptions about the scope and nature of the game. Ultimately, Murray was given the opportunity to premiere the title at the 2013 VGX awards, and in preparation, created the short teaser which they shared with the rest of studio days before the awards show. As development continued, more of the team was brought on board to help complete the game, with the final team being composed of thirteen members.^[2][8] This VGX teaser brought much attention to the title from the gaming press.^{[24][25][26][27]} A flood wiped out most of their Guildford office and equipment on Christmas Eve 2013 but they were able to recover work they had done already and resumed development shortly thereafter.^[28]

Just prior to the VGX showing, Murray had shown the title around to various publishers, and Sony expressed strong interest in having the title for the PlayStation 4. Murray stated that although Sony offered to provide financial support, he and Hello Games only wanted Sony's commitment to help market the game, including having the game formally introduced at Sony's main media event during the upcoming Electronic Entertainment Expo 2014 (E3); until that point, no independently-developed game has been demonstrated during these center-stage events.^[22][29] Sony's UK marketing director Fergal Gara has stated that Sony is fully committed to supporting the title, treating the game as if it were from one of their first-party developers and considering a potential retail release of the game.^[30]

Hello Games prepared a six-planet demonstration that would be used for the E3 event and subsequently used to showcase the game for the media while the full version - nearly always in a constant state of flux due to the procedural generation approach - was being developed.^[22] The game was announced at E3 2014 with plans for a timed exclusive release on the PlayStation 4,^[31][32] and would have later been brought to Microsoft Windows.^[33] However, speaking to the media at the E3 2015, Murray stated that they now plan to release the title simultaneously for both platforms, though did not specify a release date.^[34] Murray stated that unlike more traditional games, where completion of the fixed number of levels and other assets can be treated as an assembly line and schedules projected from that, the interconnectivity of all the various systems within No Man's Sky requires them all to be working together to make the game successful, and would only feel comfortable on assigning a release date once that is completed.^[29] Rumors circulated in the lead-up to the 2015 Paris Games Week in October 2015 that No Man's Sky would be released alongside Sony's press conference, but Murray and Sony denied these rumors.^[35] Instead, Sony used their press conference to announce the game's expected release in June 2016 for the PlayStation 4.^[3][4]

Since its reveal, Hello Games have showcased the game to numerous members of the press and video game journalists. Many of these demonstrations have provided possible ideas for gameplay additions as feedback, such as adding land vehicles to explore planets or allowing players to construct buildings on planets. However, Hello Games have opted to avoid such feature creep, with Murray stating that they wanted to be able to deliver on the large, grand vision they had, and to add more features would have required a larger team and more funding, something they did not want to do.^[29] The developers have stated they are looking at supporting virtual reality hardware, but as of June 2015 have not announced any plans.^[21]

Procedural generation system

The generation system of No Man's Sky includes the use of the superformula equation that can generate different shapes found in nature through a few adjustable parameters

Most of the universe in No Man's Sky is procedurally-generated, including solar systems, planets, weather systems, flora and fauna on these planets, the behavior of these creatures, and artificial structures like buildings and spacecraft. The generation system is based primarily on providing a single seed number to their deterministic engine which would create all the features of the universe exactly the same way every time this process is run with the same seed using the repeatability of pseudorandom number generators. One generator is used to create the universe, plotting the position of the stars and their stellar classification, using the phone number of one of the Hello Games' developers as the founding seed.^[22][36] Pseudorandom numbers generated from the position of each star is used to define the planetary system the star has, the planet's position is used as a seed to define the planetary features, and so on.^[22] This approach, used in early days of computer games to avoid high memory or disk use, avoided the need to craft every planet and store this information on a server; this also assured that players can always revisit the same planets, and share that planet with other players which would find the same features.^[22] The planet terrain generation code, for example, is only 1,400 lines of code; as described by Murray, the code was tweaked as to make sure that planets generated visually interesting but navigable terrain, as some early builds would produce wildly stunning planets that were impossible to traverse, while other fixes made planets look flat and dull.^[22] The approach also allows Hello Games to optimize the rendering of the game, as what is visible to the player can be determined directly through these generation algorithms. This did create some difficulty with features like rivers, which in most virtual environments are built by using a physics engine to track the flow of water down a slope. Murray and his team developed a brute force solution to include rivers and similar features without having to render out a large-enough section of landscape to perform the same calculation.^[22]

The development team built the planetary feature generation system atop this where they would first hand-create core structures and the art associated with those - such as a basic skeleton and skin for a creature - and then allow the algorithm to make randomized changes to that, as to make a wide variety of creatures, mimicking the diversity of species resulting from evolution on Earth. They made sure the elements of this generation process reflected the setting - creatures and plants inhabiting a planet that contained blue-colored minerals would be tinted blue as well.^[37] To assure that the procedural generation worked well, the development team created the in-game equivalent of automated probes to visit the various planets and take images to review; this allowed for some tweaks to be made by human developers.^[38] Other features came from looking at work done in the fields of biology and geology that attempt to describe natural patterns with mathematics; for example, their code includes the Superformula devised by biologist Johan Gielis that is able to describe many shapes of biological entities with a few adjustable parameters.^[22] The game also uses L-systems, fractal equations developed by Aristid Lindenmayer in 1968 that can create structures that resemble many algae and plant lifeforms.^[39]

Some facets of realism have been conceded in favor of promoting better gameplay. The planetary generator system will not generate any gas giants as Murray wants every planet in the game to be explorable.^[36] Unlike most planets containing an atmosphere where the atmosphere is visibly more dense closest to the surface, planetary atmospheres in No Man's Sky are reversed as to provide a more dramatic transition when a player is taking off or landing on a planet.^[36] Other elements of their procedural generation system were made to break the realism that was previously built into the engine as to have more alien-looking planets and features be potential outcomes of the system.^[40]

Music

The band 65daysofstatic is helping to contribute music for the procedurally generated soundtrack

No Man's Sky features a soundtrack by post-rock band 65daysofstatic as well as procedurally generated ambient music composed by Paul Weir.^[41] The game uses a generative music system called Pulse developed by Weir, using a large library of loops, textures and melodies created by the band 65daysofstatic to randomly create music to accompany the gameplay, reacting to the changeable terrain and becoming more or less menacing depending on whether a character is in danger.^[42][43] Weir is also working with Hello Games to create the animal calls, using another procedural generation system called VocAlien.^[42]

Promotion and marketing

The New Yorker featured No Man's Sky in their 2015 New Yorker Festival as part of their inaugural Tech@Fest event, highlighting topics on the intersection of culture and technology.^[44] Sean Murray made an appearance and gave a demonstration of the game on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on 2 October 2015.^[45][46]

Sony has expressed interest in publishing a companion work of fiction for the game. Murray has engaged with comic writer, artist, and editor Dave Gibbons about the possibility of helping to edit this work.^[22]

Reception

Pre-release reception

Dave Lee of BBC News felt that the game "stole the show" at the E3 2014 conference.^[28] The title won the show's "Best Original Game" and "Best Independent Game" by a panel of game critics, as well as receiving the "Special Commendation for Innovation" title.^[47]

Many commentators have compared No Man's Sky to 2008's Spore by Maxis; Spore used procedural generation to construct new creatures and worlds, though the extent of this was scaled back during the course of production, and the resulting game was not as well-received as anticipated.^[48] Murray stated that he is aware that some critics are applying caution to their view of No Man's Sky due to how Spore promised similarly lofty goals and failed to provide that experience to players.^[16][49]

References

External links

• Official website