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Barkley on 17 August 2016
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As someone who has been involved in game development in the past I really feel for Sean Murray, coming from Joe Danger to this project and the sudden massive publicity the project and he himself gained must have been exceptionally daunting and put incredible pressure on him.

Luckily I have never been involved in any type of PR, because I can certainly see that being both a Developer and being actively involved in interviews and PR could certainly cause a lot of issues as it has apparently done so with No Man Sky.

During the development of a project you get so many great ideas, so many features you toy with, features that sound amazing, that you test and prototype. Sean Murray was no doubt actively involved in these processes, and as they were the things that on paper sounded fantastic he chose to talk about them during interviews.

I firmly believe he was never purposefully deceitful, it's just that during development features get cut, features get lost or sometimes they even get forgotten, oops. There's something amazing you fully intend to put into the game, that you have a functioning example of in a test build, and as such if involved in PR you'll want to talk about it. But then you realise that making it work on a larger scale isn't going to be viable. Whether mechanically it doesn't interact well with the rest of the game, or whether performance wise or because of the immense workload it is unviable.

I believe the biggest problem with this project is:

Sean Murray being actively involved in both Development of the Title and PR.

A small team suddenly being thrust into the spotlight receiving far more attention then they could have ever expected and could ever be comfortable with. Being put under so much pressure because of the amount of people and the amount of hype those people chose to put behind the game.

Because of that immense exposure and public awareness of their project they felt incredibly pressured to release the game, it was a phenomenally ambitious project for such a small team coming off the back of a title like Joe Danger, and it clearly still needed a little more time.

At the end of the day though, what they achieved was remarkable considering who they were, the size of their team, what their previous projects were, the massive pressure and exposure they were under and the sheer scope of their project.


Updates could certainly add everything they talked about to this game, the beauty of procedural generation is one little change to the code can change the entire universe. They should have waited at least a few more months to release the game, but I can understand why they did not.