12 de dezembro de 2013

No Man's Sky: we are producing worlds that have a natural sense of gameplay and a natural sense of structure (entrevista)

A sensação dos VGX 2013 foi No Man's Sky, o space-sim procedural que os quatro membros que compõem os estúdios da Hello Games estão a produzir. Graham Smith, do Rock, Paper, Shotgun, esteve à conversa com a equipa a propósito do desenvolvimento e formato procedural e da criação de mundos, que a Hello Games pretende explorar de forma tão singular como ambiciosa.. Abaixo, alguns excertos:
RPS: There’s messages on screen in the trailer, showing the chemicals in the atmosphere and the water. What’s the significance of that?

Sean Murray [head developer]: If there is a thing that we’re doing, that I think we’re doing well, it is that we have built this from a – this is going to sound really wanky and Peter Molyneux-esque – but from a real atomic standpoint. We’re using really simple rules that have very complex outcomes and I think that we are producing worlds that have a natural sense of gameplay and a natural sense of structure that is very different to what happens when people normally make a bunch of random terrain. That is where a lot of the original development time went into and a lot of the stress. Grant [Duncan, lead artist] had to be really kind of fooled by us into working on it because we would, you know, at the beginning we were like, ‘Oh, we’ll build presets and all this kind of thing’, but actually, coders… [whispering] ‘Push it as far as we can!’ Grant was making concepts and he would say, ‘Like this!’ And we would say, ‘Yeah! Or infinite number of variations of that.’ And he would say, ‘No, exactly like this. It’s nice when there’s a planet’s there and the sun’s there and…’

We’re now getting to a point where I think, in the trailer, we’re seeing moments where it really does look like exactly like the concept art we were originally using to inspire us. It has moments where it looks like the scifi book covers. 
(...) 
RPS: Do you have rules that say make certain atmospheric make-ups more likely, dependent on the look you want?  
Sean Murray: [The atmosphere] actually leads to what minerals are in the landscape and it creates things which naturally are pleasing to your eye, because they follow the rules of the universe that you understand. So you don’t suddenly get everything being completely red, because that doesn’t generally exist. And trees get the shape of leaves, and the colour of them sort of matches what’s there in the terrain. So there are natural rules that we use, and we do have control. Oxygen based systems went in recently, and that was something something I was working on for a while, to get quite Earth-like things and pretty much everything in the trailer is of that type.
A entrevista completa pode ser lida aqui.

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