A pair of ex-Ubisoft developers have set out to accomplish one of the most ambitious feats of game production ever. They intend to map the entire surface of our planet, and use that information to create an open world survival game.
Julien Cuny and Louis-Pierre Pharand are both veteran developers from Ubisoft, and worked on games like Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry. So it is not like they haven’t worked on any sort of large project before. However, their current plan involves a scale that would make most people wonder how they intend to complete the project.
Pixyul, the new studio founded by Cuny and Pharand, has set out to map the world using autonomous drones. These drones are equipped with HD cameras and will slowly fly across almost every inch of landmass. The duo admit that there are some limitation to mapping the world, with some locations being off limits to civilian photography. They will also not map the 71 percent of the Earth that happens to be covered in water, instead preferring to procedurally generate the hundreds of thousands of kilometres of oceans.
The game, ReRoll, is currently being crowdfunded, although the duo are not actually calling it crowdfunding. Additionally, they are releasing the game in parts called BRICKS. Players will be able to buy the BRICKS individually, or receive all the BRICKS as they are published by fully funding the game.
[source: Eurogamer]
