Terraria

Terraria is a sandbox, action-adventure, role-playing, and platformer video game. It offers gameplay that revolves around exploration, building, crafting, combat, survival, and mining, without having any set goals. It is playable in both single-player and multiplayer modes. The game's two-dimensional graphical style is reminiscent of the 16-bit sprites found on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System game console. Terraria is noted for its classic exploration-adventure style of gameplay, similar to games such as Minecraft.

When creating a procedurally generated world, the player is able to choose the size of the world from three options. Players start in a world with basic tools and a non-player character (NPC) guide that introduces aspects of the game and provides information on other NPCs and item recipes. Scholar Ji Soo Lim said in his study that the participants had to rely on a wiki to learn more about the game.

Terraria was developed by the independent video game studio Re-Logic and published by 505 Games. Andrew Spinks started developing Terraria in 2011 with support from a team of game testers and designers, including some volunteers. Spinks previously worked as a developer on a Super Mario fan game titled Super Mario Bros X. He built Terraria on the Microsoft XNA framework.

Spinks worked out of his living room, the small team collaborating remotely. Scott Lloyd Shelly composed the music. The game received attention early in development following a tweet from Minecraft creator Markus Persson.

Terraria received "generally favorable" reviews, according to the review aggregator website Metacritic. Gamasutra listed it as one of the best indie games of 2011. It had over a million reviews on Steam in 2022, maintaining its status as an "overwhelmingly positive" game. Terraria was nominated as the "best independently published game" for The Daily Telegraph video game awards in 2011. Famitsu reviewers commended the game's versions for PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4.

Reviewers have praised Terraria's gameplay. Its exploration has been positively received, and Nathan Meunier of IGN said that "the drive to explore every nook and cranny of the landscape kicks in right away". Writing for GameSpot, Britton Peele also praised its large world, and Tom Mc Shea commended its boss battles. Kevin Schaller of GameRevolution praised the smooth transition between day and night.

Terraria 2 was announced in October 2013, but has not been released and, as of a 2022 update, was only one option the studio was considering. In a 2013 interview with Rock Paper Shotgun, Spinks said that the game would be significantly different from the original, saying that it would have "infinite worlds" instead of one world. Later, in 2022, Spinks published concept art for Terraria 2 that was created in its early development. When asked about Terraria 2 upon one team member changing the location in their Twitter bio to "Terraria 2 – A New Age", the studio said it was considering options for future games, but had not yet made a decision.

In February 2015, a separate game, titled Terraria: Otherworld, was announced by Re-Logic as an offshoot of Terraria. The game tasked the player with trying to purify the world of the Corruption, which was to be achieved mainly by finding and activating "purifying towers" that push back the spread of the Corruption. Otherworld would have included more strategy and role-playing elements, such as a tower defense gameplay element, skill trees, and a plot. In an interview with Famitsu, Ruud van de Moosdijk, the head of development of Terraria: Otherworld said that unlike Terraria, Otherworld would have a story.