The indie hit Terraria sold over one million copies last year, and it's success was well-deserved. Now Finn Brice, the lead sprite artist for Terraria, has announced a new indie project: Starbound. The 2D "sandbox RPG" will be almost entirely randomized and procedurally generated. What does all that jargon mean? Well, it basically means there is going to be a hell of a lot of unique content. For example, every player gets to occupy their own planet. Yes, you heard me. Not a house, not a city, not some landscape. A planet.
The official website has plenty more information about what we can expect in this intriguing and ambitious title:
"Planets in Starbound are entirely procedurally generated and filled to the brim with unique content. We went into the planet generation with one simple goal: no two planets should be the same. By procedurally generating even the smallest details, we're doing just that. Not only is the terrain of the planet procedurally generated, but the weather, the gravity, the difficulty level, the plant life, the behaviour and appearance of alien creatures, and much more all contain random or procedurally generated elements."Speaking to Piki Geek, Brice also explained how procedurally generating content means there are almost limitless options to the amount of weapons and objects in the game:
"We have a procedural item system that produces items on the fly... There are MILLIONS of combinations of rocket launcher. The game even procedurally generates the graphic used for the guns, right now there are 21,000 different visual styles for rocket launcher. Then each of those styles can be coloured individually. By release time, there will be many, many more, and that's just for rocket launcher."If you would like to know more about this cute and complex title, head on over to the Starbound website. The game is in development for Windows, Mac and Linux by Chucklefish games.
Thanks, Games on Net.