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Sean Murray of Hello Games took to the stage at GDC last week to give a talk entitled "Building Worlds Using Math(s)".Murray has been quiet on social media since the game Hello Games developer, No Man’s Sky, launched to mixed reviews and significant backlash from players.
He talked mostly about the procedural generation technology that was used to create No Man’s Sky, but added other snippets of information from the early days of developing No Man’s Sky’s engine by himself, describing the shift when the public got their first look of the game as akin to "being fired into the sun with the skin burning from our faces."
Murray describes writing the engine for No Man’s Sky as something he undertook "selfishly, because I just thought of the things I wanted to learn about, and then I started to write an engine that had those things in, I guess."
He describes the work as a "fun period" in his life, where he was working on the engine every evening and weekend.
“Then we showed it," said Murray "we showed the first trailer, and from then on it was like, it was like we were building a rocketship on the way up, like, to the sun, being fired into the sun with the skin burning from our faces, right? It was like, it was a bit of a rollercoaster ride from then on. But at the start it was genuinely just a hobby and something super enjoyable.”
Hello Games has also been quiet since the launch, aside from a brief interlude where the company’s official Twitter account was hacked. They’re supposedly back at work on a new project, Hello Labs, but learning from past mistakes they’ve not revealed any details yet.
