Meet The Team: Pipeworks Engineer 1 Wesley Gyde

ClearConscious

ClearConscious

Terrarian
Pipeworks Studio
MTTwgyde.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 Wesley Gyde, Engineer 1 on the console versions of Terraria.

Can you give us your name and title?

Wesley Gyde; Engineer 1

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

Harrisburg, Oregon; 1 year

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

I'm pretty fresh out of college, so nothing commercial. I did make a pretty swanky shmup once, though ...

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

The short answer is: UI. Menus, HUD, Chat, etc. I worked on this alone for most of the project, but we recently added two more-experienced UI engineers (Zac and Adam) to help manage the complexity of some of these systems.

For the more technically inclined, I am responsible for moving all of the old UI code (XNA, transient, custom) into Unity (UGUI, persistent, standardized). This involves a little bit of normal UGUI implementation and a TON of refactoring in the old codebase to make the old systems play nicely with the new UI. Right now (3:27PM, September 8th, 2016), I'm in the middle of refactoring the inventory system - I am splitting up the old static ItemSlot class into non-static unity-compatible scripts, making things more data-driven to reduce the number of scripts, and updating how the UI interfaces with the player's inventory.

What makes you passionate about working on Terraria?

I had 350-ish hours logged on Terraria before I knew Pipeworks existed. More importantly though, I wanted to work on this game because I had some naive beliefs about how easy it would be to add an item, npc, enemy, or biome. Ever since I started working on this project, I have treated that naivety as a goal and have used it as motivation.

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

It should be the same as the PC version! If we do our jobs well, you’ll be able to look at the PC-only changelogs to see what we’ve brought (and what we plan to bring) to the console versions of Terraria.
 
ClearConscious said:
View attachment 139296

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 Wesley Gyde, Engineer 1 on the console versions of Terraria.

Can you give us your name and title?

Wesley Gyde; Engineer 1

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

Harrisburg, Oregon; 1 year

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

I'm pretty fresh out of college, so nothing commercial. I did make a pretty swanky shmup once, though ...

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

The short answer is: UI. Menus, HUD, Chat, etc. I worked on this alone for most of the project, but we recently added two more-experienced UI engineers (Zac and Adam) to help manage the complexity of some of these systems.

For the more technically inclined, I am responsible for moving all of the old UI code (XNA, transient, custom) into Unity (UGUI, persistent, standardized). This involves a little bit of normal UGUI implementation and a TON of refactoring in the old codebase to make the old systems play nicely with the new UI. Right now (3:27PM, September 8th, 2016), I'm in the middle of refactoring the inventory system - I am splitting up the old static ItemSlot class into non-static unity-compatible scripts, making things more data-driven to reduce the number of scripts, and updating how the UI interfaces with the player's inventory.

What makes you passionate about working on Terraria?

I had 350-ish hours logged on Terraria before I knew Pipeworks existed. More importantly though, I wanted to work on this game because I had some naive beliefs about how easy it would be to add an item, npc, enemy, or biome. Ever since I started working on this project, I have treated that naivety as a goal and have used it as motivation.

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

It should be the same as the PC version! If we do our jobs well, you’ll be able to look at the PC-only changelogs to see what we’ve brought (and what we plan to bring) to the console versions of Terraria.
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Sir, we appreciate your appearance and know that we can trust you to ensure that the newer consoles and PC versions of Terraria will be neck-and-neck. We'll be with you every step of the way, and good luck. :happy:
 
I love these features, thanks so much for doing them. It is very cool to get to meet and learn more about the team members working on the console version.

That's awesome, Wesley, hearing how you once thought adding in items would be easy, but finding out differently and instead use it as motivation. I know we're in good hands.
 
Is it possible to see the shmup to ascertain the swankiness of it? I'm very much a fan of the genre.

But seriously, I love learning more about the people behind the scenes. It's nice to give them a spotlight once in a while, so people see that everyone has a role they play to bring a project to life. Welcome aboard!
 
I am absolutely loving the 'Meet the Team' stuff. Please keep this coming. I've always wondered how many people it took to 'build' Terraria. Whatever the number may be, they are some talented motherf*****s.
 
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