The old English proverb says, “Laugh, and the world laughs with you, cry and you cry alone.” Most often the failures in the games industry are accompanied by lackluster sales of the new title or internal problems of a huge Studio. But No Man’s Sky was a very good sale. A small indie development has become the second largest release for PlayStation 4 of all time. Hundreds of thousands of copies were sold on PS4 and PC. A small team of developers Hello Games — and there were a little more than ten employees instantly became millionaires. But in this ointment was a fair amount of tar. Moreover, the events unfolded so that the honey had to collect the crumbs.
The game itself is in the genre of space action adventure with elements of survival, war and survival in a bottle, was released on 9 August 2016 on the PS4 platform, and after three days on personal computers. On the first day of sales far exceeded the expectations of developers — instead of 14 000 players, expected by the Studio Hello Games, there were hundreds of thousands. And almost immediately broke out not a drama, the dreaded tornado, which mixed in a bunch of horses, people, zillions of planets, the silence of developers and hundreds of thousands of negative reviews on all possible sites of distribution.
The story of the “Deserted sky”, which means No Man’s Sky, is a story of UPS and downs, sleepless nights and a Grand deceptions, dreams of millions and tragedy for one. Today the game sold almost a million copies, and tomorrow at the Twitter developers, the phrase “No Man’s Sky was a mistake.” Between the first event and the second is the story of Irishman Sean Murray a lifetime.
Still higher, and higher, and higher
Sean Murray was born in Ireland and later moved to Australia, in Brisbane. Since childhood it like a star from molecular clouds, began to crystallize the dream of space. His childhood had 70-80 years, the “Golden age” of science fiction. Then the world avidly read Isaac Asimov, Arthur Clarke and Robert Heinlein, the great science fiction three, and on the wall was hung the posters with the image of the other planets in pastel colours. Later, this style will be embodied in the game.
Life in the sand of Australia was akin to life recently mastered the planet. Frequent expeditions with his father turned into the study of the starry sky, and a ranch in Queensland reminded Sean of an alien Outpost. During the first game, the future developer has written at the age of six years — it was a text adventure, “expected terrible,” he said later. Like all kid Sean played Mario Kart, Super Monkey Ball and other arcade. Like everybody else, were interested in computers to back pain and eyes. But a special place in his heart took great Elite, many well-known “space Rangers” from the game world. Many hours spent in the founder of the genre, will affect the further ascent of Shawn.
In 2000, receiving a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the National University of Ireland in Cork, Sean Murray went to work at Criterion Games, which was later bought by Electronic Arts. In this Studio he worked on the Burnout series and other projects for six years. Watching as major corporations like the same EA to squeeze out of the games sequel for a sequel, Sean was eager to throw off the yoke and to engage in their own projects. He in 2006 he headed the independent Studio Kuju Entertainment, and a few years collected a few former developers from EA and Criterion Games Kuju under the wing of Hello Games. For eight years, starting in August 2008, Sean Murray, Grant Duncan, Ryan Doyle and David Rome was a long way up to the stars. As you might expect, this path is impossible to pass without casualties.
For the first game, Hello Games — Joe Danger, which was published in 2010, Sean had to sell his own house. But the success of the game allowed the Studio to become financially stable and release some more parts over the next four years. In parallel with this Hello Games have problems with the American publisher, and Shawn comes an Epiphany: he has the opportunity to break the cycle of sequels and stamping to create a completely new title, a concept which he nurtured from an early age, reading science fiction and imagining travel to other planets. From that moment began the development of No Man’s Sky.
The success of Joe Danger has allowed Murray throughout the year to take a few days weekly the development of No Man’s Sky behind a closed door. Writing the engine, he put to work several people. What team is Shaun of the four main developers, no one knew at Hello Games. In the latter stages of Joe Danger 2 was developed without his direct involvement — as it should be inspired by the child, he went to work.
The sky behind the closed door
Great works known for their apparent simplicity. Something similar can be said of No Man’s Sky. The final code of the game after the release was only 300 MB in a dry form. On the final drive most part is occupied by audio and video. This small code appeared vast universe of the game world.
A new game was created in the office, whose walls were hung with science-fiction posters to create the right atmosphere. Of course, the secret work gave rise to some tension within the office. But Murray did not want to talk about the game, because I feared that accidental leakage will lead to misunderstanding and misconceptions about the nature and purpose of the game. Only in 2013, Geoff Keighley talked Murray show between VGX 2013, however, just a few days before the premiere, he decided to introduce the rest of his company on a secret project. After that, the development of space simulator began to connect and other, until they finally formed the final crew of thirteen men.
After the presentation at VGX attention to the game from the press and other developers has grown considerably. As told by Grant Duncan, the Studio turned a lot of developers, claiming that “always dreamed of working on such a plan,” or have already started to work.
On Christmas eve 2013 Guildford’s office is flooded by the spill of the Thames. Arriving at the office, Murray has found the laptops with the groundwork, literally floating in the water. Fortunately, most managed to save, and soon the work was continued. Coming back to the case, Murray recalled that he had a burning desire to quit, but the flood re-build a team of Hello Games. Before Christmas she was hopelessly divided into two camps: working on Joe Danger and working on No Man’s Sky. After all, the company has engaged in the restoration of the great office and reconciled among themselves.
Shortly before the launch of VGX, Murray found strong support in the person of the representative of Sony’s Shahid Ahmad, chief on the development of independent games in Europe. Ahmad did everything to No Man’s Sky was released on the PlayStation 4. In addition to financial support, provided by Sony, Hello Games managed to garner the advertising support of the company on the main event, Electronic Entertainment Expo 2014 (E3). Hello Games became the first at the time the company that has demonstrated an indie game on the main stage. Sony introduced the game as if she developed it, attracting the best developers and putting all the strength in her progress.
Obviously, the presentation was waiting for a big success. Interest in the game began to grow. On this and the following presentations, the developers went through the possible ideas to implement, for example, the addition of ground transportation to study the planets or the construction of buildings by the players. Murray also promised that the game will be released on both PC and PS4, and it will not affect the quality, although have a long way to go.
Simultaneously, developers began to have problems with the statements. At a presentation Murray said he wants to make the game feel “real console”. It turned out, he did not quite understand correctly:
“In fact, I had even a small problem after I said we want the game felt really console. We have always considered PC, but my understanding is [the console] is rather a stable framerate and responsive controls. I think the game on the PC can be “console”, so it’s meant as a compliment, but because these words I began to have problems.”
Procedural generation and zillions of planets
As a small team with a limited budget to create a universe that is large enough to make it impossible to explore the whole? Create 18 quintillion (18 x 1018) of unique worlds individually would be impossible, even if everyone on Earth began to work at Hello Games.
The answer was an amazing set of algorithms that work together on creating a play space. In the gaming industry this is called procedural generation, it is based on a procedure that uses randomness and the equations for generating the picture and objects in the game.
A primitive version of this process Ken Perlin used to create a graphic filter in the “Throne” in 1983. At that time it was a quick trick that adds texture raw computer graphics, and it worked. Thirty years later a similar technique was used for random Assembly of infinite brick Minecraft worlds. Sort of No Man’s Sky uses the same drawings.
“Our engineers told me that they take random elements and inserted in a “mathematical” box”, — told the art Director of the game Grant Duncan at GDC 2015. Born as a result of the sunrises of different colors, plants of different shapes and colors, animals of different sizes and types. Yes, they are not perfect and relatively primitive, but to find two identical complex of the representative flora and fauna in the game is almost impossible. There were too many options.
Working on the game, the developers kept getting distracted by the exploration of their own worlds created in procedural generation. Learning every time a new, previously unseen worlds, Duncan tried to check the quality of their build. To simplify his task, in the game there are drones that take pictures of distant planets and transfer the picture. Another way to reach them just yet. The game will always stay untouched corners of the universe, which nobody saw. Until then, manage to be only math and design rules.
Procedural generation of the game creates the solar system, planets, weather, flora, fauna, the behavior of the beings, artificial structures, buildings and spacecraft. The generator of pseudo-random numbers sets the parameters for the creation of all these elements, each time a different “seed” data in different ways. At the dawn of computer games, this approach was used to avoid high loads on the RAM, so as not to create each planet separately and stored on disk. The final code responsible for procedural generation and the basic processes of the game was released only in 300 MB. The rest of the disk was taken by the music the band 65daysofstatic, who plays in the genre of post-rock, and pre-generated video sequences.
By February 2016, the total code size of the game was of 600 000 lines. The whole game takes about 6GB on a Blu-ray drive, of which a large part represented by the audio files.
Code generation planetary soils, for example, consists of 1400 lines. As described by Murray, it had to be corrected so that the planet had acquired a passable, but an interesting-looking terrain. First test the algorithms produced chic the planet which it was impossible to move, others have made the planet flat and uninteresting. Hello Games originally planned to use a 32-bit integer for planting, which would produce 4.3 billion planets, but in the end decided to take the 64-bit number to demonstrate the scalability of the game and just because I could. This was done in response to forum comments, where users doubted that Hello Games can make a game of this size.
Yes, Hello Games was able to create is immense. But to do it?
Parallel worlds
r/nomansskythegame: “How you guys were drunk on the stream today?”
Sean Murray: “yeah, so, everyone thinks we were drunk or stoned ? Just haven’t eaten today and worked without sleep. But the hype’s funny. 5/10. Not going to sleep again.”
A few days before the start of the game the subreddit r/nomansskythegame began painstakingly to analyze the stream of players who managed to get a copy of the game. Gradually it was overgrown with branches of discussions, consisting mainly of issues of angry people who thought No Man’s Sky doesn’t give what promised. As a leading developer space simulator Sean Murray was trying not to reveal all the details, in order to maintain the intrigue, however, appeared uncertainty and high expectations. In the end, every clear statement of Murray on the topic of the game systematically crashed in smithereens.
The planet does not rotate around its axis. The satellites do not rotate around their planets. The stars were unreal. Smash the ship was impossible. Just to fly to new star systems was impossible; it was necessary to go into warp mode. The starships were different, but the same inside. The list was endless.
That is especially important for players who are in the same place, could not see each other. Why do you need space when you are alone in the Universe? This feature has been repeatedly confirmed by the developers in interviews and has become one of the selling. And although the developers said vaguely that “the universe is too big to two could meet” and “the opportunity to see another player there”, very soon the hoax became apparent. All this together, a series of helpless tweets from Sean Murray attempts to justify himself, turned people’s anger into a furious tornado.
In r/nomansskythegame broke a lot of drama. And then there were new messages, mostly denouncing Hello Games and especially Sean Murray. Some ironically mocked. Others have done harder by adding (at least temporarily) No Man’s Sky to the list of worst games of all time on Wikipedia. The moderators left their posts. Media space around barely saw the light space simulator filled with typical Internet discourse, including the threat of violence in real life and wish for a speedy death. Twitter account Hello Games have been hacked — either from the outside or from the inside — and the hackers left a short and sharp message that clearly conveyed the dark mood of what is happening:
“No Man’s Sky was a mistake.” Can we call it successful?
The game was sold at a frantic number of copies. Immediately after the release of No Man’s Sky played more than 200 000 players simultaneously, and the total number of sales topped one million on different platforms. But after two weeks the number of concurrent players on Steam have dropped by 90%. The mass refunds. Implement game distributors — Steam, Sony, and Amazon — have decided to make an exception under the pressure of indignant public began to return the money to the players for the game you purchased, regardless of the number of simulated hours. The ratio of positive and negative ratings for No Man’s Sky was 30% to 70%, respectively — but they were hundreds of thousands. The game was similar to the ship that was thrown on the rocks and smashed.
What really happened with the game? Separate oil poured into the fire, the silence of the developers. People expected filled the silence with a hum and a conjecture. Among the conspiracy theories and pure anger was born a plausible explanation: the game was simply too ambitious. Another option — the developers were lying, but this is unlikely. Rather, their ambition exceeded capability. They wanted to grasp the immensity… and failed. Faced with the impossibility to implement all the functions to run, Hello Games has gone on a sharp decline. Planetary rotation and orbital mechanics replaced the static “box of heaven”. The fraction chopped. Procedural history: no. Hello Games saw the angel in the stone, like Michelangelo, and tried to release him, to bring the game to its final submission. But time pressure rarely has a positive effect on the quality of work — the developers had to release an unfinished version.
Afterwards Murray admitted that Hello Games “out of money”. In addition, over the past five years, the company employed an average of nine developers. For playing class AAA is extremely small.
However, YouTube has filled up with “breakdown cover” — openly mocking video in which Sean remember all of his statements, marking them “false”. That awkward moment when a Grand success turns into epic fail.
Heavy hangover
Dec. 90 days after launch. Star ship Nostromo No Man’s Sky cut the silence of space.
Fans of No Man’s Sky had lost all hope. In the universe of the game whistled the tumbleweeds — the unit played instead of hundreds of thousands — and the online community was to be eaten alive by trolls, conspiracy theories, and a local meme. The reputation of Hello Games burned to the ground. Everyone thought that the developers took the money and ran, and talk about the game simply stopped. Why? Yes, because to say it was not yet about this notion. But Sean Murray has passed all five stages of denial of the inevitable, a heavy hangover has passed.
And the silence ceased.
Hello Games announced (and almost immediately released) an update called the Foundation Update. Certainly without reference to Azimov’s “Foundation” is also not done. The update has corrected many topical problems of the game were reworked generation of ground and space battles, and the players got the opportunity to build a home base and to pilot a huge cargo space ships.
The transformation was amazing. The gaming subreddit is filled with videos and screenshots of the new game, and enthusiastic messages. The game even came out again in the bestseller list on Steam, though not for long.
With all the changes, the game remains the same in many key aspects. Inventory system gave teeth hurt. No Man’s Sky still did not provide great gameplay, shown in the amazing trailers at E3. And break the ship flying over the planet, it was still impossible.
Has not changed and most importantly, you could not see. In addition to the notifications about other people’s discoveries, you still were alone in the quintillion planets. However, a small change Hello Games still made the opportunity to create the communication terminals. You can leave a sort of Inbox with a short message for another space Ranger. This small but very important detail was the Ghost of the powerful, but not the realized dream of No Man’s Sky: loneliness is possible and makes sense only when it remains a possibility for contact. The ability to find someone in the vast universe of the game would add a completely different plane of existence in this infinity, yet another reason to play.
However, Hello Games continues to work. Sean Murray is too romantic, to deprive players in the game, of which he had dreamed all his life, this mere possibility. From a small indie company which fell tragic success, yet time and technical resources to do so, but they will. Ironically, No Man’s Sky 2.0 may be not so “inhuman” as the first version of the game. Laughter and tears in this universe will make sense, because their will be someone to hear.
Just a month ago it was announced the 1.2 update Pathfinder (“Pathfinder”), in which developers presented a planetary transport, shared use of bases, the mode of one’s death and more. “The update shows the path to the future”, a comment made Hello Games. For Sean Murray, Grant Duncan, Ryan Doyle and David Rome is the same way up, which is ongoing.
It’s amazing how much can change the attitude of people when they are fundamentally unable to find another human in an infinite universe and when should not. Man needs man. Similarly, moving from one planet to another in No Man’s Sky, subconsciously trying to find the most similar to our blue sphere to see the native green, native yellow-red sun. The Terrans need the land, anyway.
Inhuman sky: the tragic success of people who created No Man’s Sky
Ilya Hel