Upcoming indie videogame “No Man’s Sky” gives players a chance to make their mark on entire galaxies.
The premise of the game is to explore planets and discover new species of wildlife, battling aggressive creatures or fellow star travelers. This might seem like a fairly standard sci-fi game, but “No Man’s Sky” has a catch. Due to mathematical coding designed by the game’s creator, Sean Murray, there are over 18 quintillion planets that are continuously generating content. The universe that players interact with is actually infinite.
“No Man’s Sky” is a first person survival game. According to the “No Man’s Sky” official website, players can interact with the game in a wide variety of ways, including discovering and naming new creatures; uploading information about each planet to a game-wide database called the Atlas; harvesting natural resources to earn money; battling unfriendly creatures on hostile planets; and warding off space pirates (or joining their ranks and pillaging other ships).
Players start with the most benign planets on the outermost edge of the universe and work towards the very center as planets become increasingly more dangerous. Completing enough objectives on each planet and eventually reaching the center of the universe is the ultimate goal of the game, but Murray is very elusive about what awaits in its depths.
Because all of the game content is generated procedurally, according to Murray there are no loading wait times anywhere in the game. Each planet has its own unique creatures, atmosphere and weather system and rotates on an axis so that it will experience day and night at different geographic locations. The game’s designers created their own periodic table of elements, and it is within those re-defined parameters that players will interact with the natural resources on each planet. Murray says all of the planets are vast enough to be explored for days on end. Ships and weapons are also procedurally generated like the planets and wildlife, so there is plenty of variety in gear.
The mathematic equation behind this complex system is a biological algorithm called the Superformula. This formula emulates the diverse shapes and curves that appear in nature.
Murray, who initially had the inspiration to utilize this formula for a game setting, co-founded a company based in the United Kingdom called Hello Games. Hello Games previously produced a racing platform game called “Joe Danger,” and now the team of only 10 people are designing and perfecting “No Man’s Sky.” The game’s release date has not yet been revealed, but in a recent interview with Stephan Colbert on “The Late Show,” Murray hinted that it might be coming very soon.
An article in Forbes magazine speculated that the release date will be announced at Paris Games Week, a massive video gaming convention on Oct. 27. Some rumors even indicate that the game will be released to the public that same day. This would mean Play Station-exclusive “No Man’s Sky” will have the same release date as highly anticipated Xbox-exclusive “Halo 5.”
“No Man’s Sky” is slowly releasing more trailers for the game as its playable date approaches. Until then, gamers can only fantasize about the universe they will explore.
