Hello Games announces Hello Labs to support indie game projects

No Man’s Sky developer Hello Games has announced a new program designed to help fund and support indie projects from other studios.

VentureBeat reports that Hello Labs will focus on procedurally generated titles – a method it employed to create the huge galaxy that featured in No Man’s Sky.

For us [procedural generation] is a big part of our future,” Hello boss Sean Murray said at a GDC talk last week. And making really unique, weird, engine decisions and allowing that to dictate a cascade of problems. … And we want to continue going forward making new, impactful technology.”

Murray said that his motivation for the project came from the tough time Hello had with the No Man’s Sky launch. Having received death threats after the space sim was initially delayed, the title then went on to receive a pretty torrid reception from fans, who felt it didn’t really represent the game that had been pitched pre-release.

I know what it’s like on top of that with No Man’s Sky: to do something new and weird and experimental [while] also running out of money and trying to finish something you care about creatively,” he added.

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 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.

We would love to help people avoid some of the pain that we went through ourselves. That’s something I’m really passionate about.”

A big update was yesterday rolled out for No Man’s Sky, which is currently on sale on both PSN and Steam.