No Man's Sky

No Man's Sky: How I Learned to Love Procedural Art

The creation of an expansive, explorable universe containing 18 quintillion planets necessitates a departure from traditional, labor-intensive asset production.

• No Man's Sky utilizes a procedural generation system based on 2^64 seed values, resulting in approximately 18 quintillion unique planets.
• To avoid the 'ugly mess' of pure randomness, Hello Games implemented a blueprint system that functions as a template for all assets, ensuring stylistic consistency across procedural variations.
• The team manages the massive scale of the universe by deploying automated robot drones that visit planets and generate HTML reports with animated GIFs, allowing the four-person art team to audit visual quality efficiently.