The making of Terraria for consoles — Part 3, Split-screen & Menus
Continued from Part 2.
Split-screen multiplayer
One of the biggest surprises when I played Minecraft: 360 Edition, was not just that they added split-screen multiplayer — but that it supported up to four players.
It’s hard to overstate how genius I believe this was.
In watching people play Minecraft on PC, it was obvious that a huge part of its appeal was the multiplayer: exploring together, building together, or just generally farting around. My biggest takeaway was that Minecraft became so popular not just because it supported multiplayer, but because it allowed players to pursue their own, individual activities while still “hanging out together” in a shared space.
Minecraft was “ambiently social” in a way that almost resembled an MMO like World of Warcraft; you could log on to chat with people, help each other out, and occasionally come together for a shared challenge (like a dungeon). But mostly you were free to follow your own, self-guided goals, your intrinsic motivation. This was decidedly unlike most multiplayer games at the time — Call of Duty, StarCraft 2, etc. — where the multiplayer experience was usually fragmented into matches that were highly structured and often competitive. In such games you could rarely just “hang out” with friends and chill.
It’s also worth noting that by the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 generation, split-screen multiplayer was starting to go away. It certainly wasn’t gone yet, but the heyday of four-player Halo (and other) games was disappearing as more and more people played online. If a game offered split-screen — which was becoming more rare — usually it was two-player. So I was shocked that Minecraft not only had split-screen, but that it allowed up to four players.
Drop in, drop out
What’s more, Minecraft: 360 supported a form of multiplayer referred to as “drop in, drop out” — meaning that local split-screen players could join or leave a game in progress at any time. This was in direct contrast to many — if not most — split-screen games, which only let players join or leave when the game started. It’s worth noting that the “drop in, drop out” functionality also extended to online games (like in the PC version), where players could join or leave a world at any time, unlike in most games where you could only join at the beginning of a “match”.
Once again, I was stunned by the brilliance of including “drop in, drop out” functionality for both online games and local split-screen. Its use case was immediately clear to me: players — especially kids — could hop in or out of a Minecraft game on the TV (or with their friends online) without interrupting the continuity the game and without affecting the other players.
“Drop in, drop out” was a subtle feature, but I was convinced that it was immensely powerful. If you went to a friend or relative’s house, and they were playing Minecraft on the TV, there was absolutely zero friction to joining their game — and they’d probably urge you to do so. And then, once you understood the appeal of hanging out with people in Minecraft’s sandbox world, you’d probably go home and buy your own copy.
The combination of four-player split-screen, online play, and “drop in, drop out” multiplayer, I was convinced, was a huge force multiplier for Minecraft: 360 Edition’s popularity, especially with kids. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind: we needed these features for Terraria.
The only problem was that we were already months into development, and we definitely had not included split-screen multiplayer — much less “drop in, drop out” functionality — in our production plans.
I made an impassioned plea to 505’s leadership and, armed with a quote from Engine Software to add these features, managed to get the go-ahead.
Then we could deal with the next problem: Terraria’s user interface was absolutely not designed for four-player split-screen.
The inventory menu
On PC, Terraria’s in-game menu consisted of multiple distinct user interfaces: a grid of inventory slots (the area below outlined in red), a crafting UI (outlined in green), and character equipment slots (outlined in yellow). And if you happened to be interacting with a chest or merchant, there’d be a set of slots for that, too.
It all worked pretty well: you could easily use your mouse to drag things from one area to another, such as from the crafting UI to your inventory, or from your inventory to your character equipment slots. It was pretty similar to Minecraft’s PC UI, which was itself probably modeled on PC RPGs like World of Warcraft or Diablo.
At first, Engine carried this UI over to console pretty directly, just without a mouse cursor. Instead, a single slot would be selected, and you could navigate the grid slot-by-slot (like a Zelda inventory).
However: because of Terraria’s large inventory grid and additional crafting/equipment UIs, I noticed that with this approach it was pretty slow to navigate around with a controller.
Even more obvious was that this UI would become absolutely crushed and unreadable in four-player split-screen, since each player’s inventory could only cover one quadrant of the screen — especially when displayed in the TV resolutions of those days.
Because of this, I lobbied for a solution that, while imperfect, I figured would at least be more usable: separating the inventory, crafting UI, character equipment slots, chest/merchant UI, and housing UI onto individual screens, which you could navigate by switching tabs:
This approach still had some serious flaws — namely: how to move items from one screen to another (though, in retrospect, we definitely could’ve improved this). But overall I think it solved the main issues of navigating quickly with a controller and keeping the UIs readable when they were shrunk down to a quarter of the screen. Once again, I think Engine Software did a beautiful job with these menus. And sure enough, players learned to navigate them pretty quickly.
The crafting menu
Since we were already moving the crafting menu to a dedicated screen, I took the opportunity to push for some bigger changes to how it worked.
In Minecraft on PC, I’d observed how difficult crafting was — especially the need for external wikis — and how they’d solved this in the iOS/Android Pocket Edition and on 360: namely, by giving the player a persistently available list of recipes and their ingredients:
I pushed for a similar crafting UI in our console versions of Terraria — a persistently available list of recipes, separated into categories:
I also proposed that you unlock recipes as you collect ingredients, in order to keep the number of recipes manageable. Basically, your recipe list would gradually expand as you played.
Overall, I think these were good solutions for consoles at the time. When I watched people play, they made use of the persistent availability of the recipe list (without needing to consult wikis), and as players unlocked recipes, they naturally created their own goals for things to craft.
Other split-screen considerations
In Terraria on PC at that time, the resolution you played at determined how much of the surrounding environment you could see (your “field of view”) and, as a result, how small your character appeared within it:
Once again, since we knew that some players might still be playing on a standard definition TV — or in four-player split-screen — we kept the view relatively “zoomed in” (compared to PC) to make sure that you could always clearly see your character, even though it sacrificed some situational awareness.
If I remember correctly, when we eventually launched Terraria on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One (and once HDTVs were more ubiquitous), we let players adjust the zoom level.
The map
Another important feature we added for the console versions was a map. Quite simply: we’d observed that there was a popular mod for the PC version adding a map, and it seemed to dramatically improve the game experience (helping you find your way around the world, find your friends, get back home, etc.). So we included it as part of our initial pitch.
We put the map on a dedicated screen, and combined it with arguably related multiplayer settings such as toggling Player-vs-Player mode or choosing your team color.
I think it was another small, but powerful feature. Eventually the developers of Terraria on PC added a map to their version as well.
Other menu changes
A couple other menu changes worth mentioning:
- We created a new, visually driven “character creator” UI that was more in line with these kinds of UIs on consoles:
- We created a dedicated “pause menu” (to keep game settings, etc., separate from in-game elements like your inventory).
- And, once again inspired by Minecraft: 360, I pushed for a main menu that would automatically show you if there were any online games you could join. Like with split-screen, I was convinced that online multiplayer was powerful, and that the more we could subtly push people to play with other players, the stickier the game would be.
I know these sound like subtle, pedantic, possibly unnecessary changes — but I was absolutely intent on making Terraria feel “native” to console the way I felt Minecraft had done. And in my mind, that meant making the game look good on TVs, play intuitively with a controller, and play great with friends.
After all our adjustments to the game’s controls and menus — and the addition of split-screen — the game was becoming genuinely quite fun to play on console. Which meant we could turn our focus to Terraria’s marketing and release.
Continued in Part 4.
