Justin Yook – Looking Outwards – 01

A trailer for No Man’s Sky Next, released on July 24th 2018. 

No Man’s Sky by Hello Games is a multiplayer action-adventure survival video game that lets players travel to planets, and outer space. The biggest feature in the game is that the planets, fauna, flora, are all procedurally generated. For example, features of a planet like the climate and biome are all unique. According to the director, Sean Murray, there are 18 quintillion planets available for everyone to team up and explore.

This project was inspired by science fictions by Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Robert Heinlein. The team started with one developer, which expanded to four, and finally a dozen; it took them four to five years to fully develop. They used a custom game engine that allowed them to create the game mostly through procedural algorithms and minimize the number of 3D and 2D art assets. In July 2018, Hello Games released an update No Man’s Sky Next, which vastly improved the game overall.

I find No Man’s Sky inspirational because it proves that indie game developers, even with a small team, can achieve big goals. As an aspiring developer, it gives me the courage to never give up no matter the what difficult situation my team faces.

Official site: No Man’s Sky site