How No Man’s Sky creator is using clever tech to build a truly indie game universe

Sean Murray isn’t creating just one new world. He’s creating a whole universe of them in his sci-fi game No Man’s Sky, which uses a clever technology to mathematically generate new worlds for players to explore.

This “procedural” technology has been around for a while, but it hasn’t been used on this scale before. And the remarkable thing about it is that it is so efficient at generating random worlds that Hello Games, Murray’s studio in Guildford, England, in the United Kingdom, doesn’t have to have massive data centers to store all the data associated with the worlds. It may sound geeky, but these algorithms will enable Hello Games to create enormous worlds with a team of just 10 people.