No Man's Sky devs launching fund for proc gen games

After trapping a galaxy inside a computer using maths, No Man's Sky developers Hello Games are launching an initiative to fund and support other devs' wild dreams of procedural worlds. With first-hand experience of risking running out of money while working on something they loved, they'd like to help other folks working with procedural generation and experimental games research. 'Hello Labs', as they call it, has already befriended one project and more may follow. For now, it's all a bit mysterious.

"We would love to help people avoid some of the pain that we went through ourselves," GamesBeat report Hello co-founder Sean Murray said last week during his Game Developers Conference talk on procedural generation. "That's something I'm really passionate about."

Earlier in the talk, GB say, Murray had suggested interested math heads apply to Hello Games then went on to quietly announce Hello Labs for folks with games of their own:

"But let's say you're interested in working on that kind of [game], but you also want to start up and do your own thing, then we're gonna try and help with that as well. We're starting this thing. It's super low-key at the moment — it's Hello Labs. We're gonna try to fund and support a couple of projects. There's one already in development. And the focus is going to be on procedural generation, experimental games, games research, that kind of thing. More details will follow."

Shh! Don't let him know that we know. That's about all we know for now, though.

As for No Man's Sky, a huge update came out this week. The Path Finder update added vehicles to pootle around planets, more base-building options, the ability to visit other players' bases, a fancy photo mode, and more. Hello have said this update "[hints] at a path ahead for the future" so probably expect more planetside antics in future updates.

[Disclosure: Our own Alec Meer wrote words for No Man's Sky. Alec Meer, Alec Meer, are you far or are you near? And if you're going down the shop, could you grab us some beer? Stella will do - nothing dear.]