Terraria for 3DS

This open world action adventure game was originally developed by Re-Logic for PC and later ported to a range of other platforms such as the Xbox 360, PS3, iOS and Android after the game proved to be hugely popular with over 20 million copies sold. The game often reminds people of both Minecraft and the Metroid series

This is mostly based on its exploration and adventure style gameplay supplemented by creative building in a tile based world. I had played the PC version with some friends before I was contacted to work on the 3DS version. That was really cool as I was already quite familiar with the game.

My Job

Created visual mockups for all of the required menus and HUD components

Worked out the control scheme

Wrote a comprehensive UI Spec document to go alongside the mockups, explaining how the UI should work for developers

Created multiple variations and performed in-house tests to see which design is stronger (I made at least 9 rounds of revisions!)

The In-game UI showcasing all elements at once including the build mode.

Design process

Control scheme template i made to try out and visualise different button mappings.

Designing for the 3DS was quite a handful because of its unusual mix of controls and screens. The thing that makes the biggest impact is which parts of the game you show on which screen and how a player controls that. I started off right away to sketch a number of possible configurations, listing their pros and cons. Do you show the gameworld on top and menus on the bottom or the other way around? The problem was, you want the gameworld on top when fighting because of the wider screen but you want the gameworld on the bottom screen when building things because you can then build by drawing with the stylus and come close to the direct manipulation you have on PC with a mouse. I came up with the crazy idea to do both, display the game world on both screens. Normally this is rather ridiculous and I had to stick to my guns quite a bit to keep it, but for Terraria it just made a lot of sense. An unusual device requires an unusual solution I guess.

Results

Our solution was a bit of a gamble but one that definitely paid off. There are people who rate the 3DS version as the best port of Terraria, sometimes even preferring it over the original PC version because it's so easy to take with you on the go. The biggest downside of the 3DS port is that we've had to make the worlds smaller due to technical limitations. There's some hope however that this can be improved upon for the New3DS version of the game. Regardless, I'm glad to see so many people get to enjoy the game who were maybe not yet able to try it on PC and that I was able to do the original game justice.