The making of Terraria for consoles — Part 4, New Content & Release

Continued from Part 3.

New content

I’ll be honest: I was skeptical that Terraria needed new, platform-exclusive content like new weapons or bosses for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. My observation was that Minecraft hadn’t really added anything like that and had done just fine.

More specifically: my takeaway from Minecraft’s release on Xbox and mobile was that it was mostly new players buying it on those platforms, as opposed to old players buying it again (though of course that also happened occasionally). My assumption was that the pattern would be similar for Terraria — that it’d mostly be new players buying it on console or mobile, not old players.

With that in mind, I didn’t feel like we needed to try to convince existing Terraria PC players to re-purchase it on a console they might or might not have. Still, the marketing team felt strongly that we needed to add some new enticements for the console versions — if not to convince players, then to convince Microsoft and Sony to approve the game for their platforms (and to maybe encourage them to promote it a bit).

So that was the origin of the new content. Engine Software followed the marketing team’s request and designed various weapons, armors, monsters, and a new boss. They also added a bunch of new pets, which players seemed to enjoy. (Many more pets were eventually added to PC, as well.) And I commissioned some new music from the game’s composer.

We also changed the colors of the Zelda-inspired “Hero’s set” of armor, and the Mario-inspired “Plumber’s set” out of (frankly justified) fear we might incur Nintendo’s wrath.

The tutorial

The one piece of new content that I felt we did need — badly — was a tutorial. The PC version of Terraria, like the PC version of Minecraft at that time, didn’t have a tutorial per se — just a guide NPC who would give hints on request. And I saw how many players (including myself) struggled with really basic aspects of the game.

Many — if not most — PC Minecraft and Terraria players ultimately consulted wikis, YouTube videos, or other players to learn each game’s fundamentals. However, I felt strongly that we couldn’t rely on players consulting external resources; after all, I figured, players might not have access to them — or even know they exist.

With Minecraft: 360, I was blown away how elegantly they’d solved the challenges of the game’s learning curve through the creation of a small, self-contained “tutorial world” that introduced the game’s many mechanics in an approachable way.

Like Mario’s strategy of introducing novel elements in a safe, simple way before adding danger and complexity, the Minecraft tutorial world offered a safe and inviting environment to learn the game’s many elements at your own pace, while still immediately delivering on Minecraft’s promise of freeform exploration and sandbox play.

Naturally, I wanted to offer a similar tutorial experience for Terraria on console. Without a smooth on-ramp into the game — what today we’d call an FTUE, “First Time User Experience” — I was extremely concerned that many people would play for a few minutes, encounter a frustration of some kind (e.g. fall into a pit or get overrun by monsters at night), and then “rage-quit” and never return.

So I thought carefully about the most crucial mechanics we needed to teach the player — how to chop down trees, how to get out of holes in the ground, etc. — and then worked with Engine to create our own version of a self-contained tutorial world. Once again, Engine did a marvelous job.

After watching countless people play through the tutorial and then successfully transition to the real game, I’m proud of what we accomplished. I genuinely believe the tutorial was critical to the game’s success on console.

Other UI adjustments

As mentioned in Part 3, we redesigned many of the game’s menus to play well with controllers, split-screen, and TV resolutions at that time.

There were also a few more instances where we applied these considerations to the in-game user interface:

On-screen text reduction

Again, in light of resolution and split-screen concerns, it seemed advisable to reduce the amount of small text on screen — which also included the text number for your health (which was arguably redundant with the heart icons), and your currently selected item (which we changed to display briefly, and then fade out).

Enemy health bars

In the PC version, enemy health was displayed with numbers; however, I noticed that the numerals could be hard to read with a lot of elements on screen or, again, on standard definition TVs or in split-screen. So I suggested we instead follow the common console convention of displaying an enemy health bar:

Stronger “selected item” indicator on your hotbar

Once again concerned about visibility, I felt it could be pretty easy to lose track of which item was selected on your hotbar, so I suggested a stronger emphasis on the currently selected item in the form of a yellow highlight effect:

(It was nice to see that Re-Logic apparently liked this enough that it was eventually incorporated into the PC version as well.)

Highlighting interactive objects

During console playtests, I noticed that players consistently struggled to understand when objects in the world were interactive, such as doors and chests. In user interface parlance, we’d call this a “discoverability” problem.

I realized this was because in Terraria on PC, when you hovered the mouse cursor over game elements, the cursor would change to indicate you could interact with it:

But on console — without a mouse — you wouldn’t be continuously moving the cursor around the screen, especially if you were in “Auto Cursor” mode. So it was rare that you’d notice that an object was interactive. In UI terms: these elements lacked an “affordance” that indicated their interactivity. (Although an interaction prompt would appear for nearby objects, it was in the lower-left control guide, possibly out of sight.)

To alleviate this, I suggested we implement a highlight effect on interactive objects (once again, a common convention in other games), with two levels:

1. A “light” yellow outline that would appear on interactive objects that would appear when you were generally nearby, to indicate that you could potentially interact with the object if you got closer to it.
2. A “strong”, flashing highlight effect that would appear on an object you were directly next to, to indicate that you could interact with it right now by pressing B.

Door city over here.

Once these highlight effects were implemented, the usability improvement was immediate and dramatic. Players were able to discover interactive game objects with ease. Again, it was great to see that Re-Logic eventually added object highlighting to the PC version as well.

Offscreen player indicators

In cooperative multiplayer games, it’s usually important to be able to find your friends, or to keep track of their location. In Terraria on PC, there was technically an offscreen indicator for other players, but personally I felt it had a couple snags:

1. In order for the offscreen player indicators to become active, all the players needed to join the same team color — something I suspected most players wouldn’t do, or might not even know you could do (again: discoverability).
2. The offscreen indicators themselves were text, displaying each player’s name and distance. (Again: text legibility concerns.)

To address this, I suggested that offscreen player indicators be active by default, and that — in order to avoid the text issue — we simply display an icon of the character’s head, with the size of the head indicating the player’s distance.

I think it worked pretty well. As I mentioned in Part 3, I was pretty fanatical about trying to reduce the amount of friction for people playing together, and I considered wayfinding cues like this as part of that broader goal. To that end, we also displayed these head icons for other players on your map.

Trailer production

An aspect of Terraria 360/PS3's development that I think inadvertently worked in our favor was that, at the time, 505 Games had so many other, costlier titles in production that Terraria flew somewhat under the radar. People at 505 just didn’t have a lot of time or resources to dedicate to us. So when I asked the marketing team if I could produce the game’s trailers, their answer was basically, “Sure, go for it”.

With their go-ahead, I meticulously planned out the scripts and visuals for the trailers, captured game footage, and hired a small team: a friend who was an editor at a Hollywood trailer company, a motion graphics artist, and a composer I’d found on YouTube who made wonderful orchestral versions of game music, including Terraria’s.

We also made a “new content” and “launch” trailer, and I’m still proud of all of them! I’d go on to use the same team for the PlayStation 4/Xbox One trailers as well. It gives me some pleasure that, a decade later, the 505 marketing team still reuses many of the motion graphics we created for newer trailers.

Social media

In 2013, social media and influencer marketing was still in its infancy, but I somehow convinced the marketing team to spend some of our modest marketing budget to commission a sponsored video from some friends of mine who’d been making viral, video-game-related YouTube videos (including Minecraft). Their channel was called Corridor Digital.

Corridor did a great job, and luckily the marketing folks considered the video a success (currently at 4.7 million views).

Release

Terraria was released for the Xbox 360’s “Xbox Live Arcade” and PlayStation 3’s “PlayStation Network” online stores in March 2013. The game was an immediate hit, despite the 360 and PS3 being near the end of their “console cycle” (the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 would come out later that year).

On PlayStation, especially, I think we were helped by the fact that Minecraft hadn’t come out for the platform yet, and wouldn’t come out there for over another year — leaving Terraria as the only available sandbox game on a Sony platform.

Epilogue

We announced the Terraria console versions in October 2012, and the announcement created a good amount of buzz. This included in the existing Terraria community, which had been saddened by the news earlier that year that the PC version wouldn’t be receiving any more updates.

In January 2013, Terraria’s creator, Andrew Spinks (aka Redigit), came to the 505 office to playtest the console version. He played long into the night. Shortly after, he posted on Twitter:

And a few days later, he posted to the Terraria forums saying that he was considering doing another PC update.

Terraria 360/PS3 came out in March, and within a couple months Andrew’s team announced that Terraria’s next PC update was officially in development. The game would go on to receive updates for many, many more years, and go on to sell tens of millions more copies.

In 2013, we thought we were at the end of Terraria’s journey; we figured the console versions would be a nice capstone on the life of a respectable indie game. Who could’ve predicted that it was just getting started?

I’d go on to work on — my goodness — Terraria on iOS, Android, PlayStation Vita, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Windows Phone, Amazon Fire Phone, Amazon Fire TV, Nintendo Wii U, and Nintendo 3DS. Every platform had its own unique challenges and quirks — stories for another time.

But as I said in Part 1, I’m grateful for my small part in a game that’s brought joy to so many millions. With any luck, it’ll continue to bring joy to millions more.