Meet The Team: Design Director Hal Milton

ClearConscious

Terrarian
Pipeworks Studio
mtthmilton.jpg


Meet the Team is a regular feature in which we interview members of the Pipeworks team working on
Terraria to give you a brief introduction to the people working behind the scenes to maintain and improve your favorite game. Today, our subject is Hal Milton, Design Director.

Can you give us your name and title?

Hal Milton, Design Director

Where are you from, and how long have you been working in games?

Earth, mostly. I've been working in games since the long, long ago time of 1995.

What have you worked on in the past that people might know?

Bits and bobs throughout the years. If folks actually want to go down that rabbit hole, they can find plenty of examples on the interwebs that vary in placement on a personal scale of proud to mortifying.

Can you tell us what you do on the Terraria team?

Mainly I marvel at the quality of the team, while doing my best to help folks do the right thing by Terraria's design and play.

What makes you passionate about working on Terraria?

An independent game that manages to break through the noise without a shred of corporate compromise or patronizing play, is one thing. For it to effortlessly reach young and old, while sustaining a community so positive that it could reignite a dead star -- well, that's a wonderfully challenging opportunity you'd have to have had a recent severe head injury to not jump at. Terraria is an onion skin of procedural content, user generated content, combinatory mechanics, secrets, lore...that tips the scale into dream town for any designer.

What would you like to tell players about the future of Terraria on consoles?

There are plenty of other things that I'd love to talk about, but my implant will explode.
 
Wow, you've been in the industry longer than I have been alive! That's the sort of passion and dedication to our field that I love to see!

I always thought that especially the mobile version at times fractured the unity of Terraria (mainly through exclusive content). It's great to know that Pipeworks has a Design Director in the team to keep everything cohesive!
 
I hope Pipeworks studio make the mobile terraria a complete mirror of the PC, it seems mobile fans keep getting watered down versions which is annoying. I hope the 1.3 update will fix this and cater to new devices to make the game a much better experience rather than dragging their heel's with the old devices.
 
I hope Pipeworks studio make the mobile terraria a complete mirror of the PC, it seems mobile fans keep getting watered down versions which is annoying. I hope the 1.3 update will fix this and cater to new devices to make the game a much better experience rather than dragging their heel's with the old devices.
What exactly do you mean when you say " watered down versions"
 
What exactly do you mean when you say " watered down versions"
Well for starters mobile has a normal world which i think is 1/4 of a small world on PC and an expanded world which is the equivalent to a small world on PC, only if you have 1GB of RAM. That's one point.
Another is the graphics in the game which are basic, due to hardware limitations. I find this quite annoying when you look at the PC version.
The other point being mobile didn't get all the items that PC would've gotten with the 1.2.4 update.

Now i can understand these points about 2 years ago. But devices these days can well support a much better version of the game. Like the PC terraria running 1.3.5 requires 2.5GB of RAM, new devices come with 3-4GB of RAM so mobile can definitely handle a more PC like experience. The developers can't keep diluting the content for those running low end devices. Though, this can be handled by having graphic and gameplay setting in the game menu so those with high end devices can get a more PC experience while the low end devices can play the game as it is.

I also think for tablet users should have their crafting menus and character menu more like PC as well as tablets are around 8 to 10 inches now. That blocky menu is so not cool.

Also mobile users cannot hide/show accessories, use all the dyes, paint the majority of blocks, hide NPC banners, move NPC's to specific housing, dye accessories ect and edit signs.

These may be little things but there's a lot of them and they all add up.
 
Do you guy take ideas from terraria gamer? Terraria have so many kind of tables n chairs etc. It would be cool if we can put foods items on the tables or like Turkey, hamburger, seafood etc when we put it on the tables the NPC would sit and eat with some cool animation. And add some sub NPC into the game, sub NPC are like workers or friends of the Main NPC and you can find them with NPC quest. I like to builds a lot of houses, citys, castle etc the more NPC the better lmao I heard you guy are adding season into terraria, like days, weeks, months, new trees animation etc that is awesome!
 
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