Sean O'Neil is working on a cool galaxian conquest project which he's been posting on his site. After spending countless hours getting the game to the point where had planet generation and rendering down, O'Neil started posting articles on his project to GamaSutra. It wasn't long before Maxis noticed him and gave him a part-time contract to continue his work for them.
Although he can't talk about what he's doing for Maxis, the game and screenshots seem like they would fit in well with Will Wright's Spore concept. In particular, the screenshots of the surface of the moon labeled, millions of craters packed into 4 bytes of memory, seem very Sporish. What do you think, new unheard of Maxis pet project or galaxy section of Spore?
A Real-Time Procedural Universe [O'Neil's Site, thanks Richard]
