roblox-development

This is the journey of how I became a Roblox developer and how it first got me into programming and video game development.

Game Overview: Roblox is an online video game platform primarily for kids where developers worldwide can come together and make spectacular games for players to play. Similar to Unity and Unreal Engine, Roblox has its own game creating engine that allows developers to make their own games using Roblox's resources and publishing them to the website. Within these games, they require you to have a valid understanding of programming, modelling, managing, collaboration, and other aspects that go into a video game. Like any game engine, each have their own programming language incorporated in them. The programming language that roblox incorporates is Lua.

Background: Roblox is a game that I fondly grew up with as a kid, and over the years, I've played all these amazing game created by the community. When I was 15 years old, in 2016, I wanted to know what it took to make my own game since I was heavily inspired by the games I've played. This meant that I had to dedicate myself to learn how to build, model, manage, and most importantly, program. It took me a few years to be able to familiarize myself with the Roblox Studio engine as I started off making small projects for fun. During that time, I was also self-teaching myself on learning my first coding language, Lua, which is the programming language that Roblox utilizes. I looked up youtube tutorials, developer articles, took free coding bootcaps dedicated specifically to roblox developers, and so on. I grew more and more knowledge everyday when I was developing my games and a few years after starting out is what lead to my first successor.

Cybernetic Tycoon: Cybernetic Tycoon is the first game that I really dedicated a lot of time into making from start to finish. Most of my previous projects were never complete because I always moved from one project to the next without finishing them. Growing up with Roblox, there is a genre of games that everyone likes to make that are called Tycoons. A Tycoon is a type of game where the player owns their own base of some kind. They use their base to earn cash with these money-making dispenser machines called Droppers. They then use the cash they earn to upgrade their base, whether it would be buying more droppers or building their base. The game goes like this repeatedly until the player finishes the tycoon. I decided to make my own tycoon and themed it based on the future and called it "Cybernetic Tycoon".

Progress - Cybernetic Tycoon: During the game's initial release in late 2018, I created advertisements that would be posted occassionally on the website, but that brought little-to-no players and the game died super easily. It was until March 2019 where Cybernetic Tycoon founds its way into the algorithm and gained a huge traction of players overnight. The game immediately went from 1-2 concurrent players to 300-400. Throughout the next 2 months, the game continued to gain more players playing the game and more promotion, peaking the concurrent player count up to 1,100-1,200 players. During that time, I focused a lot of my time on creating more updates to the game and managing it. This was hard to do since I didn't have a team and I was just a solo developer. The lifespan of the game was shortlived as after several of months, the game kept dropping in concurrent player count and the game today sits back to 1-5 concurrent players.

Statistics - Cybernetic Tycoon (As of Feb. 2022):
Total Visits: 6.2M+
Likes: 16K+ | Dislikes: 2,844
Favorites: 62,279
Total Revenue: $4,000.00+

Revenue - Cybernetic Tycoon: Believe it or not, Roblox developers can be paid real currency through a process known as Developer Exchange. Roblox has a digital currency called Robux and players have the option to spend them on microtransactions that the games they play offer them. I put down microtransactions in my game like extra cash, autocollect cash, overpowered weapons, and so on. Through these microtransactions, I was able to get a robux cut from each sale that I made, specifically 70% of the sales made. With these accumulated robux, I can transfer these earned robux back to Roblox and they will personally pay me through a process. The amount of money I receive depends on how much robux I transfer. If I transfer 100K Robux, I get $350.00. If I transfer 1M Robux, I get $3,500.00. I used this process two times, and in total I gained roughly $4,000.00+ from Cybernetic Tycoon.

Aftermath: After the overwhelming success of Cybernetic Tycoon, I continued to make more projects. None of these future projects were as successful as Cybernetic Tycoon, but I still had a blast making them. The next project I made was a direct sequel called Cybernetic Tycoon 2. This was going to be the "new and improved", modernized version of the first game with better graphics, mechanics, and so on. The game was in development for 3 months and after releasing the first version to the public, it got a slight bit of traction, but failed to maintain it. Afterwards, nobody ended up playing it and it didn't reach the same consistency as the first game. I made another game that was unfinished and never released called Bombastic Battles. I made some interesting code with this game, and although it was never released, I gained a lot of coding experience making it. The most recent project that I was proud of was another game called Unmasked. This game was also unfinished and never released, but once again, I learned a lot in terms of coding when making this game.

Conclusion: Roblox is an important piece of my childhood that I will never take for anything else. It filled up a lot of my boring times with games that I could always come back to. After having the passion of creating my own roblox game, I ended up fulfilling my dream of becoming a popular roblox developer; although it was shortlived. I got to learn how to program, build stuff in a virtual environment, make new friends, and learn how to manage a project. I had a lot of fun being a roblox developer and I hope I can utilize the skills that I have learned through creating roblox games to my fullest potential.