“From the Devs”: If It Wasn’t For Roblox, I Might Have Stopped Making Games, by Jamie_Fristrom
I’ve made a lot of games. I’m quite the geezer by Roblox standards.
The first game I worked on — The Magic Candle II — came out in 1991!
And later I worked for a studio you may have heard of: Treyarch, which college friends founded and would one day become famous for the Black Ops games. I was the second employee and instrumental in making a pretty remarkable game there: I was technical director and designer on 2004’s Spider-Man 2, which people still remember to this day and only last year lost the crown of ‘best Spider-Man game ever’ to the new Marvel’s Spider-Man.
So that’s my claim to fame, but while having the opportunity to have such a big impact on Spider-Man 2 was amazing, it wasn’t quite what I got into making games for.
When I was a kid I looked up to guys like Lord British of the Ultima series and Sid Meier of Civilization fame; guys who would design and program their games pretty much by themselves. Having such a big influence over Spider-Man 2 was amazing but I wanted the games I made to be more truly mine.
I made a pretty big change so that I could have a go at trying this all-encompassing approach to games. I quit my job at Activision/Treyarch and started making small games on shoestring budgets, including Schizoid for Xbox Live Arcade, Energy Hook for Steam and PS4, and Sixty Second Shooter for Xbox One. As the years went by these platforms started to get more and more saturated; it became more and more difficult to get noticed or stand out. Some people started calling it the ‘indiepocalypse’, though in my opinion it’s just the nature of the games industry. New platforms emerge, early adopters are successful, others rush in, the platform matures, and it’s time to keep an eye out for that next new platform.
So after Energy Hook, I realized that the existing platforms were saturated.
I didn’t know where to jump next, so I decided I ought to do the responsible thing and get a Real Job™. I was about to accept an offer to go work for Microsoft when a friend told me about Roblox and how much money some of the devs were making on it. I started playing with it and loved the feeling of programming-meets-plastic-brick-toys. This was the new platform I was looking for!
An angel investor and I decided to take a stab at making a game for it, and the result was Castleheart, and although the game wasn’t a financial success, I was officially addicted.
Once I put a game out there and spent some robux sponsoring or advertising it, I would start to see the players come in; and then when I joined in with them and start hearing ‘OMG creator’ and ‘this game is lit,’ it was gratifying in a way that I haven’t felt the rest of my career, even with Spider-Man 2; I’ve just never been that connected to the players before! The advertising / sponsoring mechanism on Roblox is just great;it’s like being able to hire playtesters super-cheap, and you can quickly get a decent idea whether your game is worth putting more effort into or not.
Roblox provides an opportunity to do something different. A lot of the most popular games on Roblox are things you just can’t play anywhere else. Jailbreak? Bee Simulator? Build a Boat For Treasure? Where else can you find games like that? It’s an opportunity to make things people haven’t seen before without spending too much time on it and getting it front of players to see how they react.
I made some crazy prototypes in 2018! Infection tag where you turn into a monster when tagged; a game where you shoot living marbles with special powers; a Shakespearean theater simulator; and Dungeon Life, an action RPG where players play the monsters as well as the heroes. That’s the prototype that was best received and I made a full game out of — it was just featured last month. It’s my most successful game on Roblox yet, and one I hope to keep updating for some time. Check it out!
As 2018 came to a close, many developers looked back on their past year on Roblox and began reminiscing about how they got into developing Roblox games. Some developers took to Twitter, posting videos or short messages about their time on the platform- others shared their stories in Discord channels.
Inspired by these stories, we have decided to dedicate the next Roblox Developer Medium module to the question “Why Roblox?”. Over the coming weeks, we will be sharing stories written by developers about the journeys they took to becoming Roblox developers.
