Lessons Learned from My First Roblox Game
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Lessons Learned from My First Roblox Game
1–10 of 35 posts
Re: Lessons Learned from My First Roblox Game
#2Odd 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?
Re: Lessons Learned from My First Roblox Game
#3Odd 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?
Is Roblox anything other than exploiting kids?
Re: Lessons Learned from My First Roblox Game
#4Odd 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?
Is Roblox anything other than exploiting kids?
This game certainly doesn’t feel exploitative
Re: Lessons Learned from My First Roblox Game
#5Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is Roblox anything other than exploiting kids?
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>
Re: Lessons Learned from My First Roblox Game
#6> 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.
Re: Lessons Learned from My First Roblox Game
#7Odd 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?
Is Roblox anything other than exploiting kids?
[deleted]
Re: Lessons Learned from My First Roblox Game
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
Re: Lessons Learned from My First Roblox Game
#9Odd 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?
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.
Re: Lessons Learned from My First Roblox Game
#10> 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.