Creating games on Roblox – A fireside chat with Roblox developer Joshua Martheze

[Music] yeah so thanks all for being here and thank you so here we we're gonna have a chat a bit of a chat about roblox and we've got a developer that works on the platform here Joshua and you've made a number of games on the platform they include Disney's the big friendly joints the great yoke tales tales which is also which is also part of a robot sponsorship of ready player one and you've entered with roblox and your current currently studying computer science at University posture that's correct yeah thank you so robots I'm

sure you know it the game is estimated to have made 500 million dollars on mobile alone as of October 2018 it's also available on other platforms it's set to have 17 million monthly active users continues to me about the grossing charts and it raised that the company raised 150 million dollars in September yet all right it's coming a bit more well-known now but it still kind of flew under the radar so for such like the biggest game for those that might not know could you describe a bit about what roblox is and how users can create stuff in the game yeah sure so roblox is a platform where players can play and make games there's millions of games that people have made all the games are made by the users and the vast majority of those 70 million monthly active users are just playing games or roblox that's across mobile Xbox and PC and when Mac

and the developer can use the roblox studio which roblox provides to create these experiences that uses the 3d modeling which probox provides for you in studio they allow you to script your own games with Lua which is based on C to go technical and then I want roblox there's a currency called robots players can purchase roebucks and then developers can sell items in their game so you can get a bigger sword or a fast horse or something and you just pay robust to the developer and then developers can cash out that roebucks by the developer exchanged $4 so you were mentioning about some protein languages there how accessible are these tools immediate ultimately it's a kids game as well wrote the language that roblox uses Lua is very it's very quite easy to learn they also provide a lot of resources for you to learn them on the developer hub all the documentation all the API is there there are many YouTube tutorials which people

have made so there's a there's a lot of many ways to learn how to make games especially even there's a very large library of I think also millions of assets and scripts and you isn't user interfaces that the other people have made which have been uploaded which you can use for free and that's how I started just try to figure out how to use different things I want to add this to my game let me see what this person made how did they make it oh okay that's how I drew this and just going forward from that alright you spend a bit how you started getting involved with making stuff in the game how did you start actually making games of them earning money well at first I was just playing roblox with friends and then I found out you can make games and around that time roblox released the developer exchange program which is now what drives a lot of game development and I thought okay let me give this a try I like playing roblox games these games are cool yet let me make some of them and so I probably

spent about a year or two just playing around many projects which I worked for a week on and then left but when I got a new idea and everyone was just slightly better than the next one and then I got an idea for a game and I was like oh come and make this whole game and so I spent a couple of months making it just got a few thousand people play like in total played it and it was like oh man I made some really bad mistakes like I wanted to give players a house but the only place to put the house was like at the top of this area where they had to play I was trying to lock it was so I made the whole game again I'm like really using all these things that I'd learnt and all the techniques that I learned and just trying to design it a lot better from the start rather than just doing everything step by step and then I published that and I write around some ads on the roblox advertising system and shortly after this it got featured by roblox as well so you could apply to the featured program and then that's when started gaining traction I made some money from that and following that I applied for a

event partnership with roblox so that was the big knee big friendly Giants event you mentioned so that was for roblox themselves in conjunction with the Big Friendly Giant and following that I just started making more games like using what I'd learned in the previous games trying to improve on that trying techniques which worked in other games other popular games like if there were a certain trend of games from roblox in a certain style I'd be like how can I make this style better how could I make it any fun and just went on from that system I'm actually unaware of that I you can do when that purchases yes sure so everything on roblox pretty much runs off roebucks which is the roblox currency you can sell stuff in your game for roebucks and then roblox has this advertising system it's the advertising system and you pay roebucks in a bid system so someone who pays a

hundred thousand roebucks will have their ads shown ten times as much as someone pays ten thousand bucks so I've done it at times where i drop a whole lot of robots on the head system so I can get my ads shown a lot more than anyone else and there's other times where I'll just do it a small amount every day just to get a trickle of players coming in and it's really great because you can go on to roblox make a game for free publish it get a few people playing maybe one or two of them buys things and then you can use that money in the ad system and get more players in and after a month or two of doing repeating this you've got a bunch of players playing and you haven't spent any money do you consider this as like a hobby or do you consider this as a serious business is it so you're going to continue to do after your studies yes so at first it was just a hobby and this can be fun and then I think when I got that first event kind of around that time I saw like okay this can actually become something I do properly now and I got the two internships and I did another event with the great J hotels

and now I'm I'm working another game and I'm really like focusing on the monetization in this as well because previous games were like like my first game was hey let's make a fun game and then I kind of wedged in monetary monetization at the end but now I've got a plan to make a game I'm working on it's adding things like starter packs like retention proper retention strategies working analytics so I can actually make a properly functioning game and so I'm doing this part-time because I'm in at University as well but by the time I'm finished with University I plan to have at least one or two games which are relatively popular and then hi developers to work on those games and pretty much have the games pay for themselves while this store improved with players online so I can go on and focus on new games so you're not seeing it necessarily as a stepping-stone to make games with a unity engine to reduce of mobile you see as a as a platform yeah at the moment I don't really see a reason why I would once you go to say

units or something roblox provides everything you need for game development servers hosting databases if I've got one player online now and in our 50,000 online the servers automatically scaled you have to worry about any of that I can purely focused in on making the game and as the players they're ready to play the games so yeah and you can the amount of money you can earn on roblox at the moment isn't a limiting factor for my game development and do you work you work with other developers then what's it like putting a team together are you always looking for people within the roadblocks ecosystem already and also like is there a problem with age yes so interesting this thing with roblox is almost everyone all the developers on roblox work with other roblox developers where they found through like the developer forums on roblox myself I've made about three games now where I was the lead developer and I just got someone in to make 3d

models and assets because I'm primarily a programmer then the first the Big Friendly Giant events we develop on that and then I got two people to subcontract to make the maps and the terrain in the environments and 3d artists and then for the great details events we actually applied as a team so there were about six scriptures seven 3d artists to UI artists and a composer and we applied for this as a team and then my latest game which I worked on over the summer at roblox in their intern program was actually myself and two friends who applied and the three of us went there so it's it's a there's generally like people you find on roblox it's rare that you'll find someone working with somebody who's like not familiar with a roblox ecosystem it sounds like in some cases the team so it could be quite big actually yeah just a

couple people doing in yes generally the average team size is about maybe four to five this was one of the larger teams on roblox but this was for a specific event so we worked for about six months and released the event but generally there's about four or five and although there are companies starting on roblox purely robust developments they have about seven or eight people working in-house in an office at the same location yeah kind of talking about some design aspects certain if you could tell us about what do players actually find far on the platform and are you able to use like any data it's off I done what players like would you just use your instincts for development um it's a difficult question I've been trying to figure this out myself but generally I try and find something which is kind of a mix of two things one I need to find it fun because that's a really good starting point if I'm working on it if I find it fun I'm gonna have engaging with

I just try to think of okay I think this will be fun and let me do this so I mean which I think oh I would play that and then also looking at what other games on the platform that roblox players really like social games role-playing games things where they can interact with other players and what I have especially been doing more recently is getting feedback early on so have a game idea build a very small prototype or even before that I'll talk to some friends what do you think about this idea and then once I've got a prototype I'll tell a few players that play my other games like hey you've got a new game come check it out and they'll give me feedback and that's really helped to keep the game fun as you go along rather than just focusing on trying to build a game purely by structure do they do they give you any access to any kind of analytics so you could judge where how players are playing they give you robots has very basic analytics that's like average playtime users per day robux per you use

stuff like that but you can within your game specifically yes yes but you can use I use something called game analytics it's a websites you can use HTTP so robot allows you to send requests to websites so I track all magnitude of things like great player retention daily retention all the analytics stuff they allow you to do it on your own if you want to so I just connect with a website which allows that function so yeah everyone how do you think about things like monetization and other strict rules you have to follow um so generally no gambling but is that a broad definition or is yeah so you can't I'm not exactly sure on the terminology but you can't do gambling Weds is specifically related to money so it has to be like just in game tokens like like oh well done you won these five tokens for winning around but it's you can't

buy the tokens is it something like that I'm not too sure on it and in general it's not a really a rule but players don't like games where you can pay to one so if I have the biggest gun just because I bought it players don't like that and they all like avoid the game just because of that but if you everybody can earn the gun and if I want to buy it now I can with and not earn it players don't really mind because even if they don't have robux or they don't want to spend their bucks on that gun they can still earn it and cosmetics as any game rally cosmetics work what do you do usually specifically I pretty much all my games have some form of cosmetics whether it's anything from skins to like different items which don't really necessarily do anything different they just look different or have particles coming out of them or they glow or we offer simple power-ups like in the event egg hunt event game we

allowed players to place cannons around the map so they could get up to higher areas but then they could share that with their friends as well so you place a cannon and then for five minutes it sits there and anybody can use it so that's more of like a cooperative something which you can buy say oh is the notion of live ops games the service a thing with roblox do you just release a game and then it's out there or do you like update that specific game your wedding events in that game ready varies like for me my first two or three games which I made I published them updated them for a while and I saw our new projects I left them in a good state where they work but I haven't updated them for a while but generally the most most games will follow that cycle the really popular ones they get like every two weeks that have new content every month maybe or two months they'll be an event like they'll make the whole map snow for winter or for Easter they'll

have a special event so it definitely depends on the popularity of the games like top games that have been on roblox on the top front pages for a while you'll see them doing updates every two three months at least and they've been there for like a year or two just from the constant updates to get placed back in but yeah there's there's definitely as feel of publish the game and then keep update yet else plays briscoe girls we're talking can you be able to cross-promote your games within your games yes so you can you can give a link like in the description I've done this in one of my games and recently when one of them was featured I saw increase in plays in the other game as well because they saw hey I made this new game want to check it out you can also like you because everything is scriptable you can teleport players to different places or games rather so I could say hey I've got this new game would you like to check it out and then send please to my new game

if they want to or I could even offer incentives so earn this badge menteur the game and it will give you free cash in this game and vice versa so there's definitely the possibility the opportunity to get your players playing in your whole universe of games should I say all your games rather than just focusing on half of them just destroyed was really off for the opportunity for creators to make a success of themselves and also perhaps outside of the same platform is it easy to get sucked into that tool set and learning that language but should developers perhaps be looking at other things yes so roblox is a very good starting point and especially now it's definitely viable to continue but especially like to myself just the stuff of learnt in roblox has helped me not specifically in game development but at university even though I've only learned lower learning stuff at universe like

Python and Java it was way easier to learn that it was almost like the same language was just somewhere it's a different kind of thing and to go like into different games our different platforms someone who made two popular games and roblox back in like 2012 he stopped developing on roblox and went to make a game in unity and that's now I think like the third most popular game on steam so unturned oh yeah so he star on roblox decide it's like a Minecraft bit like it's like a survival zombie apocalypse game yeah so you start on roblox and decide okay I want to go try unity and now he's doing really well I think it's got like at the moment 20,000 concurrent and yeah he start on roblox so this is definitely a way it's the teaches you about game development yeah cool so I was going to open up to the audience if you've got any questions that's all we have one from Molly and then we don't

have a question I've I've taken the only mic is the real question in roblox I don't know I guess roblox is known for its kind of like blocky not not really realistic graphics so that would be they definitely improving that they've got new lighting systems coming out etc that would be a nice thing to have but at the same time I understand why it's okay without it because young kids often don't really mind they just want to play a fun game and it runs on everything I can play my game on my iPhone 5 my beefy PC or an Xbox and there's no lag issue but yeah maybe better graphics would be

it would be cool to have yeah more realistic maybe to basically get more realistic more realistic movements with characters yeah official retention or engagement the techniques in mobile that would include things like push which I'm assuming you don't have access to a push notification to players can follow the game and we can push updates to that ass as far as I'm aware that would send a push notification as well I think it sends your push notification if you personally if you subscribe to the game and that game is updated know you can you can

advertise wherever you want just provide a link to your game yeah there'll be a play button and it automatically downloaded the player and you can play a game as far as I'm aware the purchase rate for place to buy robux has never changed the exchange rate back has also is there's no fluctuation in currency occasionally roblox will raise the amount they pay you originally it was a hundred thousand robots for 100 dollars now it's a hundred thousand robots for three hundred dollars going up to three hundred million four million dollars per month but yeah that's there's no black I

know people who do I aspire yeah [Music] yeah so you can do plugins into studio which will version control your scripts specifically and there's version control in the games so you can have auto saves to every five minutes so I can go to one of my games and choose like one of the 1.31 1300 versions so far and go back to any one of them I can download that if I want to so you can go back to pretty much any stage of your game and use it from there or whatever you want to do with it yeah so but yeah ask me questions afterwards if you if there's any more okay thanks very much for that [Applause]

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