Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Thanks to Bloomberg's Cecilia D'Anastasio, people in tech are belatedly beginning to grasp how huge Roblox is as a metaverse platform — or as she describes it, a "popular gaming platform", which doesn't quire capture why and how Roblox has become so huge, but anyway — yes: Roblox Game-Buying Frenzy Is Turning Teens Into Millionaires.

My book has a whole chapter devoted to Roblox, where I interview both a Roblox company developer and two successful community creators (InTrance and LAGurlz), about how to create hit games on the platform — excerpt below. Unlike say Steam, Roblox is very much a single social virtual world, which comes with its own particularities:

The Roblox game experience they created together, Starving Artists, is bright and cheery, plopping players into a sunny courtyard with a circle of art kiosks they can choose. The creators managed to script an entire drawing and painting system within Roblox, so that players can create simple images within the virtual world — and then try and sell them to passers-by. 

"Once we released it basically just went viral! Within a couple days of releasing we were hitting 40,000 concurrent users. It was such a unique concept so players really liked it." 

I have to wince at that number when she gives it to me: For Second Life, 40,000 is often the entirety of the world’s concurrency; on Roblox, it’s just for one game.

And while there are some quirky indie games about artists on Steam and other platforms, I can't think of any to immediately attract that many players at once. Then again, very few mainstream commercial games are that popular, let alone so instantly…

Getting started in Roblox

Creator notes: 

Intrance, co-founder of Double Bandit Studios, creator of "Starving Artist":

“My advice to creators who want to get started would be to figure out what aspect of development you're most interested in, such as 3D modeling, environment design, programming, UI/UX, graphic design, etc. and learn as much as you can about it. Then you can find a small studio or team on Roblox that's looking for your skillset. That'll allow you to contribute to projects without needing the funds to hire a team yourself. 

“Once you meet other passionate developers who have complementary skill sets, you can then work on your own projects. Lots of developers on Roblox are willing to work on a project in exchange for a percentage of any potential revenue generated by the project. And don't be afraid to fail!”

As for the kind of experience to create, popular genres are one route, but Int argues that the user base is large enough to encourage experimentation:

“There are a few tried-and-true game models that players are familiar with, such as tycoons and simulators. But the beauty of Roblox is that any game has the potential to become popular. I can't count the amount of times we've seen a game become popular and think, ‘I never would've expected players to play that.’ Building a community is fairly easy once you have a game with enough players.” 

Roblox developer notes:

For metaverse platform developers interested in following Roblox’s approach to metaverse platforms, Roblox senior engineer [and former Linden Lab dev] Richard Nelson has these insights into the workflow:

There are several things about the release process at Roblox that are worth emulating. We follow a regular cadence of shipping a new release every week. This makes it faster to get new features and bug fixes in our users hands. We combine this with the discipline of using "feature flags" for all functionality, which means we can immediately disable any new code we ship if it turns out to have problems.  This safety net is incredibly valuable in that it allows us to avoid most emergency releases and keep the platform stable and reliable.

I also think there is a lot to be said for a dedicated creation tool targeted specifically at the portion of users who want to create, like Roblox Studio. One of the immediate benefits as compared to the Second Life approach is that it allows you to streamline the client interface for non-creators. It also makes building a dynamic experience a lot easier, as you don't have to worry about objects changing state underneath you as you edit (like that physical object that rolled to the bottom of the hill). 

That also means Roblox Studio doesn’t enable multiplayer dynamic creation like Second Life, a trade-off he acknowledges. 

“I loved the experiences I had collaboratively building with friends in Second Life and there is something magical about being able to jump into build mode mid conversation to demonstrate something or just mess around.”

Read the rest here.