Design your game item: Terraria

Things like the hook shot in Zelda or the Morph ball or 

grapple beam in Metroid are game-changing items that 

influence how players play the game and the new areas that 

they have access to. For one of the games that you have 

played, design an item and describe in sufficient detail how 

this changes the game and what new mechanics it enables.

The game I will be talking about today is Terraria, a 2D adventure, sandbox game developed by Re-Logic Game Studio. The game features a randomly generated open world that focuses on exploration, resource gathering, crafting and combat. Now there are a lot, I mean a lot of items in Terraria and offer a verity of game changing moments. I want to add one more, game changing item to its impressive list.

Terraria's worlds are randomly generated and open world so you are often traveling in the world. There are plenty of ways to move around the world from double jumping and rocket boots, to angel winds and grappling hooks. I would like to add one more method of movement, the Teleportation Stone. This Item has to be equipped in your accessories in order to use it and will consume the player’s mana when activated. To use the stone you press R and your character will instantly teleport a set distance towards the mouse cursor. If the cursors location is not accessible then the stone will more the player to the closest possible location. The stone will consume 40 mana and players must have enough current mana to use the stone.

The stone will offer a new way to navigate throughout the world. This item would make caving much easier as you can move freely from cliff to cliff and gather resources. It would let players get to though really hard to reach spots in caves. I found that there are not a lot of magic items that made you want to focus on mana. This item would make players spend more time on increasing their mana and regeneration as opposed to range and melee. This would add a whole new level to combat and would help melee heavy players to get in and out of fights. Lastly the ability is adds a coolness factor to the game. The ability to teleport fascinates a lot of people and it is a lot of people's (including me) ability. I would place this item near the end of the game as having it at the end gives players something to work towards. When players work hard and finally get that awesome ability it is rewarding to the player.  You are rewarding the player for making it that far in the game, and what better way to reward the player then with the ability to teleport.