“I really just started with an idea.
I know it sounds clichéd, but I’ve been working on my programming for a while, so
when I had the basic idea of what I wanted to accomplish, I started working on it and
never looked back!”.
With this mindset, Andrew “Redigit” Spinks and the rest of the team at Re-Logic, created
Terraria, one of the most successful independent games of all time.
With over 30 million copies sold and spanning almost 10 years worth of updates and free
new content, the 2D sandbox game has more than earned its place in gaming history.
Despite its overwhelming success, there were multiple moments during its development that
could have caused a premature end to Terraria’s decade long journey, or at least put a stop
to the final version of Terraria as we know it today.
Growing up, Andrew developed an obsession with learning as much about computers as he
could, with the intention of making video games as a career.
At the age of 19, he joined the US Air Force and during that time he started hosting flash
gaming sites.
When his service at the Air Force was up, he had garnered enough success with his flash
websites to make a living out of it.
After a while however, he realized he wasn’t happy enough just making websites about games
and wanted to actually make them.
Right before he started development on Terraria, Andrew was working on a Mario fan game called
Super Mario Bros.
X, along with game developers Jeremy “Blue” Guerrette and Gabriel “Red Yoshi” Henrique.
Around January 2011, Andrew started forming more concrete ideas for Terraria and the driving
force was to make a game that combined different elements that he personally enjoyed in the
hopes to create something that was simply fun to play.
As soon as he planned out a basic concept, Andrew, together with Jeremey and Gabriel,
started development right away and founded their company Re-Logic.
Andrew taught himself how to code and was ready to tackle his biggest challenge yet.
During development, he drew inspiration from many of his most favorite games, but one of
the biggest inspirations is a game called Liero, an old freeware DOS game that can be
summed up as Worms in real-time.
Furthermore, it’s difficult not to mention Minecraft as a source of inspiration given
the similarities.
Andrew is fully aware of this and admits the game played a big part during the development
of Terraria.
“Minecraft was the final piece of the puzzle in putting this game together, and also one
of the biggest inspirations.”
It was decided to program the game in C#, using the Microsoft XNA framework and while
Andrew was hard at work coding the game and creating the original artwork, Jeremy was
in charge of the beta testers and all the internal documentation, as well as making
a lot of the major design decisions.
Gabriel assisted Andrew with drawing the sprite art.
Re-Logic also hired composer Scott Shelly to produce the soundtrack.
The developers didn’t add any story or lore to the original 1.0 version of Terraria and
this was a very intentional decision.
“We felt that players would like to create their own home, town, city, or even alter
an entire world.
And on top of that, they would also create their own story to match it.
So, if we had included a base story of our own, it could have interfered with their own
imaginative creations.”
One of the key elements the indie studio wanted to implement from the start was player choice.
Whether people wanted to focus on building structures, combat, exploration or adventuring,
it all had to be an option and equally rewarding, without either one of them being forced on
the player.
After all, no two gamers are alike and this was something the developers realized very
well, being gamers themselves.
Exploration is actually Andrew’s most favorite part of the game, saying he wanted to put
so much content in the world that the only way to fit in more is to generate a different/harder
world and bring your characters there.
The studio decided to first launch the indie game on Steam, which was and still is very
common practise for indie developers.
Andrew said that Steam takes care of all the player accounts and payments for the game,
leaving him and the other developers with more time to focus on the game itself.
Leading up to the release, Finn Brice joined the team to help out with the pixel sprite
art and speed up the development process.
He previously worked on an open source game called Hedgewars.
Everything was going smoothly for the people at Re-Logic, but disaster struck when a beta
version of Terraria was leaked online, forcing the studio’s hand to prematurely release
the 1.0 version of Terraria on May 16th, 2011.
Looking back on that moment, Andrew wishes he and the rest of the team had more time
to prepare for the launch.
“I would have continued to work on the game until I felt it was ready for release.
Because Terraria was leaked, I felt forced to release the game sooner than I would have
liked and worked towards getting it to my ideal release state.”
Which is exactly what the studio did with five updates that were quickly released in
the following weeks after launch and brought the game up to a state where it should have
been on day one.
Despite the leak however, Terraria was an incredible success on day one, selling over
50,000 copies.
That number grew to 200,000 copies in only its second week.
When asked about this sudden overnight success, Andrew and his team have no idea how they
pulled it off.
They had to scramble to keep up with everything that was going on right after launch and while
they made some mistakes, Andrew said it’s part of growing up in the industry.
The whole experience taught them a lot and gave them the confidence to keep pressing
forward.
After releasing the first five updates, the developers were able to focus on the future
of Terraria and introduced a ton of new monsters, bosses, NPCs and items with version 1.1 in
December 2011.
However, for a while it seemed like Terraria’s bright future and potential was going to be
very short lived.
In February 2012, less than a year after Terraria’s release, Re-Logic announced it was going to
stop any and all further development on their first indie title.
“After a lot of internal debate, we have decided that it is time to move on.
My wife and I are due to have another boy soon, and I want to spend some time getting
to know him.
I also want to spend the time recharging and bettering myself as both a programmer and
game designer.
I have learned a lot from working on Terraria and plan on using what I've learned, building
upon it, and moving forward with another, even better project.
However, we are still planning at least one more bug fix for Terraria.
I want to thank all of you for supporting us and making this games' success possible.”
By this time, some developers had also left the studio, including Finn, who moved on to
form Chucklefish.
The community that had formed around Terraria was both sad and frustrated to hear development
had come to an end, as lots of players felt version 1.1 was just the beginning of the
game’s potential.
Months went by and without the inclusion of proper mod support at the time, the community
had all but given up hope for ever seeing new content being added.
Surprisingly, in September 2012, it was announced the game would be coming to consoles.
Publisher 505 Games and developer Engine Software were in charge of the ports and they approached
Andrew with the idea of adding exclusive content, an offer he reportedly couldn’t refuse.
So not only were console players getting Terraria on their machines, they were getting a more
expanded version.
Furthermore, the console announcement didn’t mention anything about the PC version.
This made the community quite upset and they didn’t understand why Terraria on PC wouldn’t
receive the same additional features, or at least receive additional PC support to further
optimize the game.
Andrew mentioned in interviews it wasn’t an easy decision to stop support on PC, but
it was always his intention to bring the game to consoles at some point and when he felt
like he had done all he could on PC, it was time for console players to experience the
indie title for the first time.
Luckily for the PC community however, Andrew and his wife Whitney Spinks were playing Terraria
in December 2012 one day and by the time January 2013 came around, she convinced her husband
to add more content to the game on PC and reconnect with the community.
The first thing he did was reach out on the official forums, asking what kind of features
fans would like to see added to the sandbox game.
Later that year, the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions were released in March, with
mobile ports following suit in August and September and finally a PlayStation Vita port
that was released in December.
Bringing Terraria to consoles was quite the challenge for Engine Software as they had
to painstakingly translate the C# code to C++ and write custom wrappers for PlayStation.
The network code was particularly challenging according to David Welch, one of the former
producers of Terraria.
These versions were then used as a starting point for Codeglue, who were responsible for
the mobile ports.
Additionally, both Engine Software and Codeglue not only had to translate code, they also
had to translate the traditional PC mouse and keyboard controls to console controllers
and touch controls.
Not an easy task, but Andrew was very happy with how the ports turned out.
“I am definitely happy with how things are coming together.
Engine Software even came up with a few great ideas in terms of speeding up some of the
basic processes to really balance the gameplay with the new controls.
I’m really happy that they were able to add new content and streamline the experience
for a console audience and put the extra time in to really stay true to the vision of the
game.
That was extremely important to me.”
Terraria was reaching more gamers than ever before and the title was about to become even
more enticing for PC players.
In October 2013, Re-Logic released update 1.2 for PC, adding a whole slew of new game
mechanics, items, NPCs and so on.
As well as introducing graphical changes.
Around the same time, it was announced that Terraria 2 was in the works.
In fact, the sequel was in the planning stages for quite some time by now, ever since Andrew
first quit development on the original.
However, after update 1.2, he was finally ready to move on to execute his ambitious
vision for the second chapter in Terraria’s journey.
At the time the developer described Terraria 2 as something that would have a lot in common
with the original, but that it would expand on the whole Terraria universe as well.
He further said that he’s locked into a lot of stuff with Terraria, like the way the
loot works, the way character progression works and so on.
With the sequel, he wants to have infinite worlds so that the player is not just stuck
to one world, but able to travel anywhere.
Andrew also talked about introducing more biome diversity.
2013 was certainly a big year for Terraria, with the game finally moving over to consoles
and mobile devices, while giving players on PC a big reason to continue playing.
2014 and 2015 continued the trend of putting Terraria in more hands, with ports being done
for PS4, Xbox One, macOS, Linux and the Nintendo 3DS, while the Wii U version came out in 2016.
Additionally, console players finally received the 1.2 update in 2014 as well.
Re-Logic also revealed a new project in February 2015 called Terraria: Otherworld.
A teaser trailer was released with the promise of a novel take on the familiar Terraria experience
that’s set in an alternate dimension within the same universe.
Unfortunately, the project faced many problems throughout its development, but more on that
later.
Fans speculated that this new project might be the sequel that Andrew talked about back
in 2013, but it was quickly confirmed that that was not the case.
Otherworld was simply a spin-off, not a full sequel.
Re-Logic also made it clear that the project was still in its early development stages,
but fans wouldn’t have to wait much longer that year for more Terraria content.
June 2015 marked another important milestone in Terraria’s history with the 1.3 update,
which added more items, events, enemies, bosses, and gameplay features.
One addition that Andrew himself was especially excited about, was the inclusion of a final
boss, since he was never happy with the idea of Terraria not having one.
Back during its release, the developer also mentioned in interviews that update 1.3 marked
the last update he would personally work on and that it was up to the rest of the team
what would happen with Terraria in the future.
Andrew was seemingly done with the indie game once again and even discussed his personal
future plans.
“Now that Terraria is done I would like to start working on a new project that is
not Terraria 2.
I already have a lot of plans and ideas for Terraria 2, but that will be much later.
I want to make a game that is very modular, that includes mod support and makes it very
easy for players to add their own content.”
The following years went quietly by without any new major content updates, but a lot of
shifts were happening behind the scenes.
In July 2016, it was announced that Engine Software and Codeglue would no longer be involved
with the console and mobile ports of the game moving forward.
The reigns were handed over to Pipeworks Studios who are a part of the Digital Bros. group
that 505 games are also a part of.
In other words, it was an opportunity for Re-Logic to turn the developers responsible
for the ports into an in-house studio, making future business communication and development
pipelines much easier.
About a year later, Re-Logic had some less exciting news for fans of the franchise and
revealed that Terraria: Otherworld was shifting developers, which most likely meant a delay.
Engine Software would no longer work on the project and Re-Logic decided to hand their
spin-off game to their new partners at Pipeworks Studios.
Their statement also said there would be a “quiet period” surrounding the game while
the developers had to reexamine the vision of Otherworld from top to bottom.
Many fans were concerned after this announcement and in 2018 those concerns were proven valid
when Re-Logic made a post on the official forums explaining Terraria: Otherworld had
been officially cancelled.
They were very honest with the community, admitting they never should have announced
the game as early as they did.
Additionally, they realized too late they shouldn’t have outsourced such an important
project and instead should have worked on it themselves.
By the time they switched from Engine Software to Pipeworks Studios, the damage had already
been done.
It wasn’t all bad news, however, Re-Logic also announced that Terraria was still very
much in active development, with update 1.3.6 well on its way.
Furthermore, all the ideas they had for Otherworld would not just be thrown out and instead reworked
for future titles.
As previously mentioned, Andrew was seemingly done with Terraria after update 1.3, but he
was still closely involved with the Otherworld project.
Once that fell apart, he decided to come back to Terraria for the 1.3.5 update and any future
updates.
In May 2019, fans got their first glimpse of the final major content update for Terraria,
subtitled Journey’s End.
The team had so many ideas for update 1.3.6 that they eventually decided to bundle them
all in one last big update and release it all at once.
A year later, fans were finally able to experience Journey’s End on the ninth anniversary of
the game’s initial release and the update overhauled and added many elements to the
game.
800 new items, new enemies, a full revamp of world generation that includes new biomes,
quality of life improvements, the game of golf, a new difficulty mode, new enhanced
weather effects and more where all part of a final love letter to a game that the developers
had poured so much hard work into for almost a decade.
On top of that, the developers also released proper mod support for the first time ever
on the day of the update’s release.
Of course, mods were already available for Terraria for years, but the tModLoader app
made mods much more visible and accessible for the PC community.
The studio explained that fully-integrated official mod support is not something that
is feasible within the Terraria codebase, but the tModLoader is the next best thing
according to Re-Logic.
With Journey’s End being the last major update, the studio felt there was no better
way to show appreciation to the fans than to hand the keys to the community itself and
see how they might continue to explore the game further.
The Terraria devs have always valued their fans more than anything and it’s one of
the main reasons why Re-Logic never put a price on any of the major content updates.
They’re aware they could have very easily charged a small amount of money for Journey’s
End for example, without too much community blowback.
Still, they chose not to and strongly feel that forgoing those quick gains was and is
the right path to take.
"Primarily, this speaks to our core philosophy of games and gamers first.
Secondarily, it harks back to the way games were sold when we were coming up as gamers.
Namely, you bought a game and enjoyed it.
In this situation, we are just meshing that with the modern ability to update and add
to that game over time.
Deep down, it just feels to us like the right thing to do.”
Andrew Spinks and Terraria were involved in a bit of a controversy recently.
In February 2021, Andrew announced the Stadia version of Terraria was cancelled due to the
company’s Google account being suspended for no apparent reason.
He even went as far as saying that doing business with Google is a liability and any future
Re-Logic projects would not be coming to Google platforms.
For a while, it seemed like all bridges were immediately burned, but later on in February
Google restored all affected Re-Logic accounts and provided much needed transparency about
the situation to the studio.
All is well now between Google and Andrew and Terraria is even set to release on Stadia
once again.
Terraria was also released on Switch in 2019, making the game available on all major platforms.
In March 2021, it was confirmed that no less than 35 million copies were sold across all
available platforms, reaching another huge milestone in the game’s history.
Now that active development for Terraria is over, it’s anyone’s guess what lies ahead
for the developers at Re-Logic.
It’s possible that the much talked about sequel might still be in development or perhaps
the studio is working on a completely new IP.
Only time will tell.
Re-Logic did mention in the past it would like to be known for other things besides
just Terraria and that they have a couple of projects in the works that are not Terraria-related
and not in the sandbox genre.
Whether that’s still the case today, remains to be seen but whatever the developers choose
to do, they have a clear mission ahead of them.
“We hope to eventually have a few projects under our belt and to have positively impacted
the lives of many gamers and stirred in their imaginations something that wasn’t there
before.”
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