I joined Roblox in November of 2008, so it's been well over 16 years at this point. For most of that time I've considered myself a Roblox developer. Roblox has and always will have a special place to me. It was a very long time hobby of mine which brought happiness and challenged me throughout the years to better myself. It also led to me getting the job I have now, which I am very greateful for. So it's had a big impact in my life.
However, I've decided this is the point where I mention where I am with Roblox now, and where I'm going with my own personal time and projects.
From Roblox to Unity
In November of 2023, I pivoted from Roblox to Unity professionally just before we did our final work on Islands. This was a decision I had been thinking about for a while, as at the time I had been developing on Roblox for 15 years. It was a good time as ever to take the opportunity to do something different after so long doing the same thing.
This allowed me to learn the ins-and-outs of an entire new game engine, different from Roblox. it gave me a different perspective, and a new place to explore my creativity.
It's great to finally have that kind of inspiration and for things to feel novel and fun again when developing games.
In regards to Roblox
When your hobby becomes a job, it does tend to demotivate you from wanting to do it outside of that context.
But now - with doing something completely different from Roblox - I had figured that there was a possibility it could become part of my hobby again.
Unfortunately, I did not realise how much I was jaded with Roblox. It makes sense that after so long being interested in one thing like this, that this would happen. Roblox to me just no longer has that same appeal anymore.
So, I've accepted that for the forseeable future, I'm essentially "on vacation" from Roblox development... and this is what it means for my projects:
Zenerith
Zenerith: (the Roblox game) on hold. There may be a point I come back to it in future - when my motivation returns - as a hobby project of mine again. But for now, I wont be working on it actively.
I also have ideas for expanding on the world of Zenerith beyond Roblox as well, though with less of a scope! that's one lesson I learned quite well from developing that game.
Open source
- Zircon, Zirconium: (Deprecated) I will no longer work on these for the forseeable future. They were tools I primarily worked on for helping with debugging Zenerith, as it was a large and complicated game with a lot of moving parts. I do not have the time to maintain the language parser, a language interpreter as well as a console framework - especially if I am not using it at this point in time.
- RbxNet: (Evolving) I have plans to evolve RbxNet to more than just a Roblox networking framework, with serialization, static type enforcement and buffers. This will include support for Roblox as well. I will post more about this when the time comes.
- Tarmac: I would recommend possibly moving over to Asphalt nowadays, as it is actively maintained. Only thing missing is spritesheets, from what I can tell, right now. The code base for tarmac was pretty rough, and now with all the API changes, it's pretty much broken. Similar to Zircon etc., not using it at the moment, it's difficult to have to motivation to maintain it personally.
Anything else under roblox-aurora will also no longer be worked on.
My focus now
I plan to continue working on my non-roblox projects, outside of the usual work I do. I will also - as I did when I was younger - explore just randomly making games again, as well as little projects I feel like trying from time to time. I am going to work on things I feel like working on again, rather than what I feel like I should work on.
In regards to Roblox: I will still be around in the community and keeping tabs on it. I am more than happy to continue to use all my knowledge - including the Roblox TypeScript stuff - to help others who are interested in Roblox development. Later on I may revisit developing for and on Roblox - if I get the motivation to do so - it will just be on my own terms, when I'm ready.
Looking to the future
So with all that out of the way, I'm looking forward to posting more soon about the cool projects I am working on, or am going to work on. They may just not be Roblox-related for a while. So stay tuned!
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