Lessons Learned from My First Roblox Game
mandeepbhutani.comOdd mix of business, design, and technical implementation details here.
I feel kind of lost as to what the goal of the game was. Spending money for advertisement for a free game that you think people should play for 20 minutes and also looking at things like retention. Why?
What is odd about the mix? I wanted to include a little bit of everything to show what one may need to think about when developing their first game on Roblox.
Thanks for bringing up the other points. I should add clarification on that in the post.
I had to pay for advertising because after 1-2 months there were still 0 players. I thought Roblox would push games to discovery with an algorithm, however this doesn’t seem to be the case.
Roblox provides analytics so I leaned into them to see if my changes were making a positive impact.
I had no intention of creating a hit game. It was just a way to have fun and see what happens. I really enjoyed the process and loved to see how many players had fun playing the game.
Personally I think the article tackles too many things which is a bit frustrating if any of the threads are interesting but it’s your article
I thought it was interesting
Thanks for the feedback.
Do you mean I’m not expanding on these threads deep enough? Instead, it feels like everything is a summary I suppose.
Just trying to learn how I can write these posts better.
Pick one concept and talk about that concept.
I see at least three perspectives here:
* business / marketing
* level design
* technical implementation
Do only one of those concisely and completely. And if you want to do all three, make it three articles.
Got it. Thanks for taking the time to help me with this!
Is Roblox anything other than exploiting kids?
This is my take as a parent who was very hesitant to let my kids play roblox for this same fear.
The exploitiveness of an individual Roblox game really depends on that game's developer. They get to decide how to extract money from their players.
I've seen a lot of different sales techniques used. Most common are pay to get an overpowered weapon or ability or to skip levels.
The ones that annoy me the most are the artificial scarcity/limited time only sales techniques. "Adopt Me" is one of the most popular games. Their main product is digital pets that cost about 12USD, or upgrades for your pets. They have rotation of pets that are only available for a limited time. My kids are really suspectable to that technique.
There are also some games that are obnoxiously full of unavoidable little floor buttons that when stepped on will trigger the confirm purchase dialog. The dialog is easy for kids to learn to just-cancel, but the developers who use this technique seem to have real contempt for their players.
That said, there are tons of fun games that you can play without spending any money or being exposed to obtrusive ads.
My favorite game is called Secret Staycation. It's really well made, and there are zero in game purchases. I only saw one ad in the whole game and it was for a physical plush toy of one of the game characters.
Also, shame on Mark Rober for his buggy abomination of a Roblox game. That felt gross and exploitive.
What convinced you to let them play? I’m genuinely curious as I’ll never allow any my kids to play these sort of exploitive games (or in this case platforms since not every Roblox game is exploiting).
I’m not preaching by the way. Exposure may be a better strategy to teach about the dangers of these digital garbage cans. I just don’t want my kids to grow up having even experienced any of these things that I consider terrible consumption patterns. Similarly they don’t get on YouTube or any form of SoMe until they are at least 13. I am a little undecided when it comes to actually creating something… I’m not sure how I would handle it if my daughter wanted to make a YouTube channel about her gardening as an example. Or in the case of Roblox create a game.
> What convinced you to let them play?
They had friends that played it and they wanted to play it with their friends. So we started out small by letting them play it only when their friends were visiting. That gave me a way to say yes, but also with strict limits. Once I got to know it better, I got comfortable letting them play it on their own.
I also let them know that if they ever want to buy Robux (the in game currency), that they will be using their own money. It gives them experience with budgeting and valuing money. My daughter has spent most of her Christmas and birthday money already on toys and Robux, and she is learning that money is finite and should be spent wisely.
Once cool thing about it: my daughter's best friend is our neighbor's granddaughter, but she live 2 hours away. However, Roblox plus video calls means they still get to play together regularly.
on average roblox games are not much worse than most other free-to-play games with in-game sales, especially compared to mobile games. i let my kids play almost anything (screened for violence and other undesirable stuff), but i don't allow them to spend any money on games whatsoever. not even their own.
i want them to learn and accept that computer games, and especially in-game sales, are not something to spend money on. they can do that when they are grown up and have learned the value of the money through their own work. we don't let kids smoke or drink alcohol either. some things don't need to be learned that early. (i didn't learn anything from getting pocket money as a 10 year old, but later i got all the money i needed to build my own bike and travel through europe on my own because i could justify the expense. (while we were living on social security))
Roblox plus video calls means they still get to play together regularly
that's the reason i loosened the "no phone" policy, because roblox no longer works on linux/wine.
I have a really hard time convincing my child that paying for 10M experience wouldn’t immediately end up with him doing exactly the same thing he was already doing.
I’m really tempted to show him by purchasing it once, but I very much doubt it would help, and just exacerbates the problem.
I do enjoy a bunch of roblox games though, even the ones designed to extract money. You don’t stick with them very long, but kicking soccer balls off the moon all the way to earth is fun.
I didn't find much good about Roblox in the past few years here: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=roblox%20comments%3E10&sort=by...
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2024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28247034 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39934101 "Roblox executive says children making money on the platform is 'a gift'"
>Arguing that it's a "gift" when they're taking a 75% cut is just offensive.
2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36812765 "Data breach exposes personal information of 4k Roblox developers"
>who was hiding the incident for 2 years?
2022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32014754 "Problems at Roblox"
>It is as dangerous as any dark corner of the Internet, except that it appears child-friendly to parents.
2021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28247034 "Roblox faces criticism for 'exploiting' young game developers"
>to withdraw it, they need to have raked in roughly $1,000 worth of Robux [...] That $1,000 worth of Robux becomes $350 when you go to extract it
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Personally I recommend disabling chat and creating on some other platform (I'm going to try Godot first).
FWIW Roblox open-sourced their "Luau" scripting language and there is even VS Code support. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37962711
Today I learned you can filter by amount of comments when searning hn.
This game certainly doesn’t feel exploitative
The one being exploited is the developer. From the article:
> I spent $100 on advertising after publishing the game
More information: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gXlauRB1EQ>
Shrug. The developer seems to be enjoying their experience and is not profit motivated (at least as far as the article indicated).
In this case, the developer is an adult seasoned game developer. But if you know Roblox, you know how this is not the case for most developers on that platform.
Ok? It’s still irrelevant
I’d argue that this developer is still being exploited.
Exploited how? He made a game for free, it’s hosted globally for free, and he decided to pay for ads to advertise his game. How in the world is that exploitation of a child or an adult?
As I understand it, the platform is closed; i.e. you can’t get the word out any other way than buying the platform’s own advertisements. And even I am wrong, and you can, the overwhelming majority of people don’t look at anything else than the platform’s own ads for choosing what game – I’m sorry, “experience” – to play. The platform does not make it easy to see good games, only the top played games and advertised games. The platform lures developers in with the promise of a large audience and a chance to get huge amounts of money if their game becomes popular. But the only games becoming popular are those for which developers pay the most for ads. Therefore, it’s exploiting developers’ drive to make good games popular, by requiring them to pay for expensive ads.
Bonus: Now, since most of the developers on Roblox are kids, replace the word “developer” in the previous paragraph with “kid”. Does it seem exploitative yet?
How
Came here to make this remark. As a society we've really evolved in hooking our kids onto things that they cannot resist as early as possible in their life, building a future customer base i guess?
> It’s better to spend more time on a game to ensure everything is feature complete, rather than releasing something sooner and iterating on it over time. This element differentiates the work of Technical Artists and Software Engineers, and it seems to apply to games as well.
Every part of this is completely opposite my experience. I’m totally baffled how this was a take-away lesson.
I think it’s a good takeaway for something that’s sold once on an app store. If it’s junk, the rankings will tank it, and it may never recover from that. There are a few instances of games that have turned things around after the initial launch, like “No Man’s Sky”, but that’s quite rare.
Take Half-Life as an example. The team realized it wasn’t great after multiple years of development, and ended up essentially rebuilding it over the course of another year or two. To quote Gabe Newell, “Late is just for a little while. Suck is forever.”
Your take is spot on for SaaS apps and enterprise software that’s subscription based: ship early, ship often, and iterate fast.
> "Late is just for a little while."
Or until corporate pulls the plug since it didn't meet the expectations that they had, or you just run out of money if you're on your own, since neither money nor patience are infinite. At least in part, that seemed to happen to: StarCraft: Ghost, Prey 2 (we did get the 2017 release), Half-Life 2: Episode Three, Duke Nukem Forever (the original version), Silent Hills, TimeSplitters 4 and some others.
Edit: to some degree, it seems like the recent KSP2 situation was a case where being late would have definitely been preferable, if not for corporate: https://youtu.be/NtMA594am4M
Also, sometimes you'll do good development work, just for things to go wrong anyways in ways you didn't anticipate, as happened to the launch of Brigador: https://youtu.be/qUsuusNLxik
On the opposite end, since we have early access, many will release the first presentable version of whatever it is that they're working on. The good news is that sometimes customer feedback will shape the final product (as long as the developers actually care). The bad news is that many will buy into the "promise" of the final product, as opposed to what they're actually getting at the time of making the payment and then be disappointed if it doesn't pan out.
What experience do you have creating games on Roblox?
Today I learnt that “obstacle course” is so common as a game mode on Roblox that it is regularly shortened to “obby”, a word I have never heard before in the fifty-two years I have been speaking English.
First syllable plus diminutive is a super, super common English construction though. Beverage to bevy, for a sort of contrived example. Sometimes these take a bit of work to go from the shortened version to the long one.
iirc, there was once a character limit for the title of your game. Obstacle course got shortened to Obby in order to comply