No Man's Sky

This is why almost everyone quits game dev when they want to rise a family.
The average guys works in game dev for around ~5 years then quit, IGDA says.

It’s probably higher than that. Depends on how much they have to pay Sony, but it’s likely they pay Sony very little for the PC sales. They’ve sold over 700k on Steam, so subtract 30% is what they get from there. They’ve probably sold more than that on PS4, and they make more from digital sales than physical copies so it should be a pretty good amount.

I highly doubt that they did spend 2m to develop the game.

That’s not my experience. In fact, many of the best developers I know love tinkering with procedural generation of anything from geology to wildlife.
A guy I hired in a previous-previous job even wrote his PhD dissertation on it: http://cs.brown.edu/~scd/world/dollins-thesis.pdf
FWIW, the Earth-scale planet in There.com could be procedurally generated, and you could walk around the entire Earth (we had to use double for the math.)

Other games that do this include Spore, and Spelunky (albeit in different ways.)

The reason people don’t do too much of this is that procedurally generated assets only go so far. In the end, what people do is not “look at the assets,” but actually “interact with the gameplay.”
Procedurally generated gameplay is much harder, and procedurally generated BALANCED and INTERESTING/FUN gameplay has not been solved. Solving that probably requires something close to hard, real, AI.

It’s Unity;
some ppl were experimenting with procedural planet generation in Unity around 2009 I remember, in Unity forums. Maybe that is where the game tech got inspired from…

That is around less than 3K/month payment for each employee.
The game was announced I think ~2013; so maybe development started around 2012. They may have spent even more than that.

Still dont think so. I doubt that they had a full team at the begining. And to be honest, the game itself is made up of following elements:

  • A couple hundred of AI texts
  • 30 different items
  • 3*3 alien character models which all share the same animations
  • About 15 different Ships
  • 1 space station and 1 cargo ship model
  • One procedurely generated and very limited terrain

The logic itself is rather easy and just seeded, I’ve seen UE materials which were more complex then that :slight_smile:
All together that game is not something which would require more then 2 developers at all. Others would just be creating meshes and writing texts. Not saying it’s bad, it’s actually really fun to play. But after about 20hrs it just gets very boring due to the lack of content.

The creation of art assets is indeed the hard part; that’s why the game is so empty, 15 ppl are too little to model a lot of 3D content.

Indeed. If someone can come up with an implementation for the method


bool GeneratedWorld::IsThisActuallyInteresting()

we could end up going places… but that’s a much much harder problem than merely generating some geometry and populating it with generic assets.

I don’t think two developers for a few years could actually have built that full game, even with procedural generation.
When they say 15-20 people and 5 years, I believe them.
However, let’s say they staffed up linearly – 3 people on day 1, up to 20 people after 5 years.
Let’s say the cost of an employee is $7k per month – this is European or Alabama salaries, not California or New York City salaries, plus overhead/taxes/equipment/whatnot.
That gives a cost of (3+20)/2712*5 == about $5M to develop.

wow 7$k per month :cool:

I can’t even tell if you’re ironic or not!

Costs of development vary highly by different countries and locales.
A fresh computer science graduate with some interesting side project, going into a start-up in San Francisco will probably make $100k/year. Make that an “enterprise” like Google, Microsoft, or Oracle, and it’ll probably be another 20-50% on top of that.
A senior will make more, and a lead/director will make even more.
Add $500/month for insurance (if in the US; in Europe this would be payroll taxes); 10% for pension and other payroll taxes; 10% for office, computer, electricity, etc; and some more for administrative (someone needs to do payroll, file corproate taxes, call the plumber, clean the office, etc.)
Meanwhile, game designers, QA, and artists may make less than engineers on average, but really good ones (lead/director level) still command a premium, and can make the difference between hit or miss.
Also, add producers and such to the overhead on top of developers …

So, assuming you’re outside this high-cost area, $60k/year as average developer cost (less for junior and art, more for lead and heavy tech) plus 40% overhead seems reasonable as an average, which rounds out to $7k/month.
I bet in low-cost countries, you can get away with much less (half or less!,) and in other high-cost areas (Seattle, New York City, Boston) it is more like San Francisco (two to three times higher!)
It’s really quite a range!
Also, this makes San Francisco a really bad place to start a cash-strapped company. Except, finding good developers and financing there is much easier than, say, Skokie, Illinois, or Lublin, Poland.

Checking the website Hello Games actually lists 15 employees, without titles, and is based in Guildford, UK, so they may be on the low end of the estimate I calculated, but I’d be surprised if it was as extremely low as $2M. They’d have to really scrimp and not hire much for the first 3 years to get there …

There’s…there’s a Final Fantasy - Devil May Cry crossover game?!

WHAT?!

Why was I never informed!?

~ Jason

Is it true that No Man’s Sky universe is actually not procedurally generated? I’ve seen some players taking screenshots from the same planet, same ‘lake’ etc.

That does not mean its not procedurally generated, using the same seed will result in the same outcome, so people can visit the same planet, and same ‘lake’ on that planet. But the entire galaxy is still based on a seed and this seed is used to procedurally build everything you see