00:07I was always kind of dreaming of this game since I've been a kid, you know, in a really real
00:13way.
00:14I didn't think, oh, I'll make that game. I just thought, wouldn't it be cool if there was a game
00:18where?
00:19And I think everyone has had that. I think I heard somebody saying it's like a pitch from a child,
00:24basically,
00:24which is like, you know, there'll be a universe and you can go everywhere and you can have a ship
00:28and you can shoot lasers and, you know, all that kind of thing.
00:31It's like the most childish idea for a game in the world.
00:37And it was really fueled by sci-fi as I had always experienced it, which was books,
00:43books that I'd grown up with, like actual science fiction.
00:51We always knew that we wanted to make No Man's Sky.
00:54At the time, that was called Project Skyscraper because we wanted a big, ambitious name for it.
01:00We always knew the type of game we wanted to make and we'd known it before we even started Hello
01:06Games
01:06and we had talked about it at that point.
01:08And we knew that Jodanger was going to be a stepping stone towards that.
01:15The Jodanger series, which was like four games in the end, like two on console and two on mobile,
01:23they were like a complete labor of love, you know.
01:27Like, I love those games still.
01:29A lot of people did and they were way more successful than we thought they would be or had any
01:35right to be
01:36because we were so terrible at everything apart from making games.
01:48It really kind of properly started a year and a half ago.
01:52It's not quite a year and a half ago, like a year and five months or something.
01:56And that was when four of us, slightly different four to the four that founded the company,
02:04just found a small room within that large office and we actually just like literally locked the door
02:10and had a separate entrance and stuff like that and squirreled ourselves away.
02:14And we started working on a prototype for No Man's Sky.
02:18And we actually didn't show the rest of the team because we just wanted almost the pressure and the isolation,
02:25almost like it was a start-up within this small studio that had to prove themselves.
02:32And so we worked for a year actually on that prototype, which then turned into something much bigger,
02:39which is what we first showed at the VGXs.
02:43World premiere.
02:45World premiere.
02:49Christmas Eve, I got like a text and a call saying like the office is starting to flood.
02:57This kind of space that we had done up ourselves and everything that was like, you know,
03:02kind of quite personal to us, I guess, was pretty much kind of wiped out within a few hours, basically.
03:11And we were back on our feet in a really crappy, lo-fi way.
03:19You know, within a couple of weeks, actually, we were set up and that was definitely like indie development in
03:28like a microcosm.
03:29It was like the highs of like, you've announced a game, people love it, you know.
03:33You've been flooded, you're destitute, everything's gone, it's wiped out.
03:37Go bankrupt.
03:39So, yeah, it was a crazy couple of months.
03:43But, man, like my faith in the community, like games, the community in general, was completely restored at that point,
03:53you know.
03:54And times like this at E3, we've had so much positivity about the game, you know.
03:59Like, you just never see that, where people really get behind something in such a big way.
04:06And that's massively, massively meaningful to us and really fuels you.
04:17There is this thing that it's set in this infinite procedurally generated universe, but that's actually not why we're making
04:24the game.
04:24We're not making some sort of tech demo or something like that.
04:27We had the idea of making a game that felt true to the kind of sci-fi books that we've
04:36grown up with, the kind of idea of that, the fantasy of that.
04:39And we wanted to deliver on that, and to do that, we had to create the universe for you to
04:45explore because that's the feeling that we wanted you to have for one of the first times in games to
04:50actually land on a planet and for nobody to know what was on that planet.
04:57Not the creator of the game, not the creator of the game, not anyone else, because no one else has
05:02ever been there before.
05:05Give everyone a spaceship, start them all on a different planet.
05:09Give them a working, living, breathing universe that has planets with ecology, that has space stations and fleets of freighters
05:21and military and police and different races and all of them interacting.
05:26And let players loose and let them decide the game that they want to play, because that's what's interesting to
05:33me.
05:33I'm really interested by things that are less descriptive, actually, and less, you know, hard-coded about what way you
05:41have to play it, and that don't start with a tutorial and then just kind of land you in and
05:45let you off to make your own fun.
05:47Having said that, it isn't just like some sort of empty, blank canvas, you know, there is a lore to
05:54the universe and their decisions that we make based on that, and it is, it has a personality.
06:01It is generally a pretty dangerous place to be, as it should be kind of for sci-fi, it isn't
06:07just some ambient utopia, right, you are always in danger.
06:12Actually, everyone starts on a different planet, but everyone starts on a different planet on the outside edge of the
06:17galaxy, and they all share that same galaxy.
06:22And for most people, they will try and make the journey to the center of the galaxy, and there's a
06:27reason why you would want to do that.
06:29But that is a journey that they will undertake, and to do that, they will need to upgrade their ship,
06:35upgrade their weapons, upgrade their suit, and they will need to plan, and they will need to cooperate with other
06:44players to an extent, and they will actually need to be quite clever.
06:51And there is a game beyond that, and you can continue to play, but for a lot of people, that's
06:57the core journey that they will be on, they will think, I started out with the smallest, crappiest ship you
07:02could imagine, and I got to a point where I could get to the center of the galaxy and see
07:07what was there, and we want that to be significant.
07:21To be continued...
Commenti