I'd say the fact we're gonna be getting some more patches/content is all but confirmed now:
Redigit wrote:
Night one..Bug fixes...
Today at 2:19 AM
Programmers love being up til the early hours of the morning fixing bugs.
Redigit wrote:
Really though to give you an actual answer to your question... I do intend on hiring on a spriter in the near future.
Hiring people? Yeah, thats ramping up produciton again.
Why has he suddenly decided to jump back into making Terraria? Well I guess the question is why did he stop.
Though never completely explained, it seemed to be a bunch of things all at once that simply burnt him out on it. Firstly, he had gotten married and had a kid, having a <1 year old kid kind of easily saps your time/life away. Secondly, his artist (Tiy) had abandoned him to start up his own studio and make his own somewhat-similar game with another group of people (Starbound). I'd guess the guy felt pretty betrayed about that.
Also, most people may not remember that Terraria also had a rocky launch. Terraria had only been in development for about 4-5 months when it was released. But it was released "early" because one of his beta testers leaked the game onto the internet. Being such a small game (it's like 30MB?) it was extremely easy to find a copy of and was basically the entire game (albeit unfinished). He was forced to basically release the game next week or risk losing tons of potential customers.
So the game ended up being released unfinished and if you recall the early days before patches, the game didn't even support any resolution other than 800x600, plus missing lots of other things he wanted in the game before it was released like buffs, and he was constantly adding new stuff that required you to re-generate your world to get because in theory nobody should have even played the game yet. Even though the game rushed out its patches, it ended up doing really well, but i'm sure all that rushing to get the game "finished" ASAP really burnt him out.
Of course, the guy did really well for himself off of it. Terraria sold over 1 million copies at $5-10 depending on sales, and was made by two people in 5 months. Average the price, split it in two, and take Steam's 30% cut off, and the guy still probably made $1-2 million in pure profit off of it. And who knows what kind of licensing deal he made with the other company to port it to console for him.
He was supposedly invited to the external company who were making the console version to play it. I imagine now that the console version is nearly done and he had the chance to play it and try out the new content, he remembered that he used to have fun making the game, and now wishes he was still improving it. The result is hopefully that we get a bunch of updates for a slightly older game that everybody still likes to play (as evidenced by this thread).
And wow, I wrote a lot. Bored at work I guess.
I'll message some people tonight about more Terraria at the weekend, since I guess a lot of people miss this thread. Hopefully we can get more people than we had last week.