As part of the ongoing IGN First, July edition, HelloGames founder Sean Murray goes into detail on how his infinitely procedural universe game No Man's Sky works. Basically, instead of artists creating each of the 18 quintillion planets in the game by hand, a series of highly complex fractal algorithms makes each planet, creature, plant, star and every other in-game object unique.
This leads to some surprisingly weird alien animals, each grown and perturbed from a single "seed" or template. This is a bit of a relief; the early trailers promised extraterrestrial dinosaurs, but until now all we've seen are some angry alien goats. Apparently alien life and planets can get quite a bit weirder in No Man's Sky.
Still, I'm a little frustrated. This IGN footage is basically the same thing Gameinformer showed off a few months ago. I've been pretty snarky and unfair to Sean Murray in my previous posts, but my irritation stems from my anticipation, impatience and excitement for this game. I know he wants to preserve the sense of discovery and he doesn't want to spoil his game for everyone, but they're really running out of things to show off and they're starting to repeat themselves.
With all of this recent publicity and attention the game is getting, I hope HelloGames let the other shoe drop and just give us a release date already.
