As art director, Duncan oversees a small team of artists using novel tools and techniques to generate large amounts of game content — whole worlds’ worth, in fact — quickly and effectively.
If you missed his talk in person, you can now watch it for free over on the Official GDC YouTube channel to learn how they pull it off.
At GDC 2015, Hello Games’ Grant Duncan popped up on stage to speak frankly about how the studio came to procedurally generate the worlds of No Man’s Sky, and how this approach has affected the development process.
The phrase “procedural generation” is experiencing a bit of a buzzword-y renaissance in the game industry right now — but what does it actually mean to embrace it as part of your game production pipeline?