Terraria is an indie title that took off like a rocket. Hot on the heels of Minecraft’s success, Terraria became the next great building and exploration game.
While Terraria is often referred to as a 2D Minecraft, the game has definitely established itself well in the community.
Released less than a year ago, the game quickly built itself a devoted following. It sold almost 50,000 copies on its first day of release. Andrew “Redigit” Spinks, the main developer of the game has worked hard to fix bugs and add a huge amount of content to the game; something that the fans have been grateful for. And it’s something that you don’t see nearly often enough.
But now that’s coming to a close. Redigit made a statement on the Terraria forums on Feb 21 that work on Terraria was ending.
His partner on the Terraria project, Finn “Tiy” Brice, has left the Terraria team to start up Chucklefish, his own development company, and begin work on a game called Starbound. This hurts Redigit’s options as far as further design work on Terraria. On top of that, he’s proud to announce that his wife will soon be giving birth to another son, and so he needs time to devote to his expanding family.
Naturally congratulations go out to him on this joyous news. But of course, hearing that a game you love is being shelved isn’t quite as good to hear.
Redigit has also made it clear that once Terraria is closed off, after a couple of final bug fixes, he will have various things to work on. His family takes priority of course. But he has also mentioned that he will be learning new programming methods. Combined with what he learned during his time on Terraria he hopes this will make his next project an even bigger success. He plans to come back in time to work on Terraria’s successor.
There has been some outrage from members of the community. Some have accused him of abandonment. But the choice is his. And while he didn’t make his announcement as delicately as possible, he has tried to make his stance and the reasons for his decision more clear. On Feb 28 he made a new post on the forums explaining everything further.
Some of the key points of note are that the game will probably become open source in time, which would allow others to modify endlessly. However he is holding off on that for now. He has also decided not to hand the game off to someone else, for both legal and creative reasons.
We wish him well with his new child, and can only wait to see what the future brings. Will his new game be as big a success as Terraria? Only time will tell.
