Hello Games is currently working on "No Man's Sky" a game with no objectives, no missions, no goals, just a galaxy, a player, and a spaceship. It will be the largest game universe ever created, so large that developers had to create robot programs to explore it.

 It will also probably change the way video games work forever. "No Man's Sky" release date is slated for 2015.

Sean Murray, one of the creators of the computer game No Man's Sky, can't guarantee that the virtual universe he is building is infinite, but he's certain that nobody will ever find out. "If you were to visit one virtual planet every second," he says, "then our own sun will have died before you'd have seen them all."

"No Man's Sky" is being developed by Hello Games, an independent studio in the south of England, it's a game that presents a traversable universe in which every rock, flower, tree, creature, and planet has been "procedurally generated" to create a vast and diverse play area.

"We are attempting to do things that haven't been done before," says Murray. "No game has made it possible to fly down to a planet, and for it to be planet-sized, and feature life, ecology, lakes, caves, waterfalls, and canyons, then seamlessly fly up through the stratosphere and take to space again. It's a tremendous challenge."

Procedural generation, whereby a game's landscape is generated not by an artist's pen but an algorithm, is increasingly prevalent in video games. Most famously Minecraft creates a unique world for each of its players, randomly arranging rocks and lakes from a limited palette of bricks whenever someone begins a new game

But "No Man's Sky" is far larger, more complex, and sophisticated. The tens of millions of planets that comprise the universe are all unique. Each is generated when a player discovers it, and is subject to the laws of its respective solar systems and vulnerable to natural erosion. The multitude of creatures that inhabit the universe dynamically breed and genetically mutate as time progresses. This is virtual world building on an unprecedented scale, so big it no longer is even world building, its worlds building.

Working on that scale has created new problems no game developer has ever dealt with before, specifically, how to test it.  The team is currently using virtual testers-automated bots that wander around taking screenshots which are then sent back to the team for viewing. 

While No Man's Sky might have an infinite-sized universe, there aren't an infinite number of players. To avoid the problem of a kind of virtual loneliness, where a player might never encounter another person on his or her travels, the game starts every new player in the same galaxy (albeit on his or her own planet) with a shared initial goal of traveling to its center.

Later in the game, players can meet up, fight, trade, mine, and explore. "Ultimately we don't know whether people will work, congregate, or disperse," Murray says. "I know players don't like to be told that we don't know what will happen, but that's what is exciting to us: the game is a vast experiment."

"Players will even be able to mark the planet as toxic or radioactive, or indicate what kind of life is there and then that then appears on everyone's map," says Murray.

Speaking about the early algorithms of the game Murray said, "Only around 1 percent of the time would it create something that looked natural, interesting, and pleasing to the eye; the rest of the time it was a mess and, in some cases where the sky, the water, and the terrain were all the same color, unplayable," Murray says. So the team began to create simple rules, such as the distance from a sun at which it is likely that there will be moisture," he explains. "From that we decide there will be rivers, lakes, erosion, and weather, all of which is dependent on what the liquid is made from. The color of the water in the atmosphere will derive from what the liquid is; we model the refractions to give you a modeled atmosphere."

"Similarly, the quality of light will depend on whether the solar system has a yellow sun or, for example, a red giant or red dwarf. "These are simple rules, but combined they produce something that seems natural, recognizable to our eyes. We have come from a place where everything was random and messy to something which is procedural and emergent, but still pleasingly chaotic in the mathematical sense. Things happen with cause and effect, but they are unpredictable for us."

"When I look at game development in general I think the cost of creating content is the real problem," he says. "The sheer amount of assets that artists must build to furnish a world is what forces so many safe creative bets. Likewise, you can't have 300 people working experimentally. Game development is often more like building a skyscraper that has form and definition but is ultimately quite similar to what is around it. It never sat right with me to be in a huge warehouse with hundreds of people making a game. That is not the way it should be-and now it doesn't have to be."

Examiner caught wind of quotes from Hello Games' studio founder, Sean Murray, who spoke to Gamespot about the studios' ambitions, aims, goals and why they've been trying not to over-hype their own game before the release date.

"I think that we strayed into this area that is not just excitement, but kind of like hype, and hype is your worst enemy as a developer, because it's that thing that's really impossible to deliver against. It's great that people have that excitement, but all it makes me want to do is actually go quiet and go and make the game."

"I think it is just pressure, you know? But I think the way we work we're happy with. I'll give you an example. Every other developer I meet keeps saying 'oh, how many is Hello Games now post-E3, it must be, like, 50 people? You must be hiring like crazy!' But that's not our attitude at all. " In fact they only have 10 people working for them

"We definitely don't want it to affect us. And I think it would be this ludicrous mistake as well. You could almost write it out that Hello Games would come back from E3, hire loads of people, go crazy, and never be seen again. But it's also quite nice that we have enough interest, because it allows us to just focus on making the game,"

"No Man's Sky" release date will be in 2015.