Wonderful idea! It’s honestly quite mesmerizing to see such initiatives underway to make Roblox home to bigger home-grown titles. $500,000 to start is no small amount either, so it’s clear Roblox is going for Triple-A experiences here. Best wishes to everyone who goes this route!
I might have to see what my team leader thinks of this 
The problem here is that performance is terrible (especially on lower-end devices) and developers are EXTREMELY limited by the assets they use and how they use them. A place with about 50k parts (or an even lesser amount of meshes) will lag pretty much any computer, assets you import will also lag the game out a bunch (especially custom textures/images) and most assets you’ll use are going to be limited in some aspect. For example, let’s look at Unity’s textures. Base Unity gives you the ability to add multiple different material maps on top of a base texture (for lightness, metalics, etc.). Or you could download an entire custom shader engine one of the thousands of developers have made and make your game look like it’s real life.
The only advantage Roblox Studio has is simplicity - like I said, it’s made for children to use. If Roblox wants their platform to not be made for children, they also need to make their development tools more complex to allow real development ventures that could make actually games and not simple places. I’ve been a developer on Roblox for three years now and my entire goal while developing has been to create the most impressive builds possible - it takes many, many hours to do that in Studio, whereas with Unreal Engine I import a few free assets, enable their graphics engine, and then have a game that looks like it’s real life.
If you’re going for a retro look, or you want to do low-poly stuff Roblox Studio is perfect. The problem is that Roblox doesn’t want to only be known for this style (which - generally, of course - is more suited towards younger audiences) and they want to expand their reach for all audiences. This isn’t to say Roblox can’t be played by all audiences, but it’s very clear that Roblox is a game made for children. If they want it to not be made for children, they need to allow developers to do complex development instead of the simple single buttons with one customization option.
I’m not saying Studio needs to be the same complexity as Unity. There are ways to make studio MUCH better whilst not being complex. Allow plugin developers to modify aspects of studio (adding more tabs and options, modifying graphics, etc.) Give more customizability to things like textures. Give us the ability to cull our models and objects if you won’t give us the ability to make our own graphics engines. Culling is a massive part of performance management and so far I’ve seen very little use of culling or the ability for developers to configure culling themselves. Making things like surfaceapperances have more options is key. Heck, I’d even settle for a toggle between “advanced” and “simple” mode.
My point is that Roblox can’t complain about their platform being childish if their dev tools are childish too. Simplicity isn’t always a good thing.
I hate to break it to you, but in the pictures I gave, the game has no lag on very low end mobile devices. We have no issues running it on computers/mobile or anything so far. I’d say our project’s graphics are on the higher end of Roblox games yet it runs just fine. We use almost all imported assets and use surface textures for all of them, so they have normal maps, color maps, and sometimes even metallic maps. Unity and Unreal are nice and all for graphics, but Unity needs insane optimization if you want to be able to run it. We haven’t really had to do any optimization tricks or anything for our Roblox project and it runs just fine. Unreal out of the box has a lot better optimization than Unity, but they have their quirks as well.
I don’t think it would be a bad thing for Roblox to update studio even more, but I wouldn’t agree that the games can’t be made with much higher quality and standards. The updates that we have been getting are simply amazing for the studio. Roblox has really come a long way in the past 2 years since I’ve been learning their studio. I also don’t really think that Roblox is complaining that their platform is childish, as they’re showing with funding that people can make really good games on their platform. It takes a lot of money to make something really high quality because of the hours you have to put into a game. Not to mention, high quality assets and such. Having really good game art costs money, even if you have someone that can make that art for you. Their time is worth money.
what were the specs if I may ask?
What exactly could we expect within said emails? As Kero mentioned we’d be discussing our key deliverables along with providing funding based on our progress towards milestones, but what exactly would that mean for us as project managers/developers? Would we be given funds we need to pay developers, get software/hardware required and other resources that we’d need right away to increase efficiency or should we expect something else? As an example, let us say I was accepted and asked for 10,000 USD as a start-up to get initial things rolling, would this be doable or should we be expected to reach a pre-alpha, if we don’t have one already, before getting any potential funding?
Now, here’s my concern as someone in New Zealand, would we be able to sort out our own meeting times? Since I, as a college student and someone in the glorious timezone of GMT+12, am not commonly available during times that people on the West Coast are in working hours. Furthermore, would this be the time that the team officially comes together?
Lastly, what should we prepare for the review process if anything? From what I can see the review process revolves around KPIs along with the concept of the game, but there could be countless other bits of knowledge we could be expected of giving.
Now, here’s a few other questions my team, and others here, have asked:
What are we expected to spend these funds on?
How are milestones defined?
Are all of our team members supposed to be legal workers?
What support exactly do top Roblox developers get?
Will said partnership be lost if delays cause a studio, or developer, to miss a milestone?
Will studios, or developers, who are accepted be announced?
That’s all I can recall from the top of my mind, thank you for the transparency + interaction!
A member of our development team tested it with a lower end phone and a kindle tablet. The phone was a LG V20, albeit, it did have 4 GBs of ram, granted the client only runs off around 400mb on highest graphics. Haven’t personally tested what lowest graphics run at. I myself, have a really bad acer aspire 3 i5 laptop that doesn’t lag even on highest graphics. The laptop however, does lag in some areas of studio simply for the fact that studio takes a lot more resources than the game. The kindle used to run the game ran it fine as well, with only 2GBs of ram, and is only a $100 device. We didn’t exactly have anything older to test it with sadly, but the kindle was a good device to test it. Both the devices ran on automatic graphics. Also keep in mind, we haven’t done anything to optimize the game yet either, so even if there are lower devices that would have issues running the game, they will be addressed in the future 
What exactly did your game have in it at that time? I’d assume UI + the map from what you’ve shown.
The game was tested just lastnight with the kindle. It’s using a decent amount of the beta features and the futuristic lighting and such. There are over 200+ mobs running around all of which are high quality imported assets. As well as over ~27,000 parts in the world all of which are imported assets which are mostly high quality as well. And yes, the UI was part of it.
I’d like to add to this question if possible:
Will said partnership be lost if delays cause a studio, or developer, to miss a milestone?
What happens when a deadline is missed?
What happens if we don’t use the full amount of the minimum funding?
I’m sure they would work with you if you missed a deadline as those things do happen very often in the gaming industry. As far as not using the full amount of the minimum funding, I’m sure they would have no issues with you listing said extra as reserves in case things do go wrong.
Such as?
Nonetheless, great work so far. Do you use luanoids?
Agreed, I have funds acting as reserves for things such as software/hardware along with potentially hiring further developers if we have to speed up production in a certain department. Furthermore, I have it noted in my estimated dates that I have delays being taken into account due to a majority of my team being in college.
We’re currently using the cage mesh deformer, terrain quality of life changes, terraintools convert tool, surface appearances, and of course the futuristic lightning. We played around with the volumetric clouds as well. Haven’t heard of luanoids before. We were going to be using custom characters that would’ve made everyone, “wow!” at our project, but the game fund seems to want players to use their own avatars so we’ll be catering to that unless we don’t get accepted
Ahh, I see. I recommend looking into luanoids as it can help optimize your game further, or at least it did in my case. I personally love the new lighting that’s been put into Roblox as of late, lots of improvements and can allow for some beautiful projects on the platform. Any particular design you were thinking of doing for your custom characters? My team also looked into volumetric clouds and ended up creating a weather map(https://gyazo.com/62dfb758a5ed1fb9917cdb184f08bc10 old gif). Have you ever looked into holograms/things of that sort? Could probably use it to make people say wow to your project too if you have a lobby or something with it, though I don’t really know what your project wants to bring. Here’s an example of the hologram my project resulted in(opensource in due time too): https://gyazo.com/c68ad0a91b03d07a3e10ef85b243935d
That hologram looks pretty awesome. We’re going for a medieval type of setting with magic. As most typical MMOs are setup like that ^^
The luanoid stuff looks kind of interesting, but I think we’d prefer to continue using the Humanoid for everything. Especially if accepted into the game fund.
Ahh, I see. I reckon there’ll be a lot of MMOs in the applications as it seems like that’s what best suits the wants the Game Fund has set-up. Personally I’m working on a futuristic MMO, changed the era and sorted the entire concept draft in the two days. Thankfully I have worked on 7 other futuristic games so I had a fair amount of knowledge to get it working…
For what it’s worth you could probably do some sort of spell if you ever want to use a hologram… But there’d be better options for clairvoyance magic especially for that era. If you ever want some of my unused spells I could probably send them over, but they’re all spitballed spells so a majority would be tossed out or are already being done. But still, I recommend looking into luanoids. We have our own custom luanoids for our alpha Cardinal Engine that will be opensource soon which has increased performance for our humanoids by three to four times.
As for your edit, it’s certainly situational but for what we’re doing it works very well.
Sounds great, I’d at least be interested in seeing those spells, especially if you’re going to offer them 
. One of major aspirations for our studio is a futuristic MMO, granted we want to do it on UE5 in 2-3 years. We’re hoping to get established on Roblox before then and hopefully be able to fund the next big thing on UE5. We have a bunch of non MMO ideas that will be unleashed onto the Roblox platform soon after our MMO release though!
What made your team decide on trying for an MMO for this game fund though? In our case, we’re already 5 months into development so we’re close to dropping the alpha. I personally feel like they’re aiming more towards games like Adopt-Me and Brookhaven with the way the prioritization is worded.
We have 6 projects in total, with the MMO matching it the most. The current one the team is working on, Project Exodus, is not ambitious enough to match the Game Funds requirements so we decided to look at the other projects we have. Now, before I list them all just please keep in mind that before a few days ago ALL of the games but the MMO were in the same canon/era and would be using similar assets/scripts when sharable. Anyways, here’s a list of the projects we have:
Project Exodus, a tactical FPS based around Aegis Alpha/Beta from @Widgeon. A majority of our team was split from Aegis Reborn, a remake of Aegis Alpha by Wid, after events occurred within that group. The project is almost at a pre-alpha and currently serves as a showcase of sorts. As of now, we’re surprisingly close to an Alpha stage despite not even being in pre-alpha, primarily as our scripters are working on the mechanics inb4 doing the matchmaking. Currently, we have next-gen vehicle systems, optimizations, and our Cardinal Engine. But all in all, it’s an innovative FPS title with additional mechanics such as building bases, customizing vehicles, weapon attachments, ammo types, and several other QoL additions.
Project Tuara, a tower defense that’s inspired by BTD6 whilst tying it to a futuristic era with additions such as a story, missions, units, and several other mechanics seen in RTS games to the project. The primary bits of innovation comes from how we handle our towers/buildings along with how we handle ballistics, movement, and commanders/heroes.
Project Panga, a puzzle horror that’s inspired by deadspace 2 whilst tying it into the rest of the projects we have. It’d be rather simple with key innovations such as highly modular weapons, using the cardinal engines modular humanoids to create truly alien-like creatures and other mechanics that will be sorted when we begin working on the project. As of now, to increase the chance of people playing the game again we are thinking of having level editors, PvP/some sort of sandbox, and a few other things such as sub-difficulties.
Project Kaneke, a simulation of a futuristic city with various social mechanics within the game. We’d be expanding on games like Plaza 2(also by wid), welcome to bloxburg, and the countless other games by mechanics I won’t mention for the sake of NDA.
Project Komaru, a space RTS game that’s inspired by the likes of Stellaris. Again, due to NDA, I can not discuss any mechanics.
Lastly, Project Meliora, the MMO. Our MMO has no direct inspiration but is comparable to games such as starscape, lumber tycoon 2, no man’s sky, welcome to bloxburg, aegis, and all of our projects. It’s a very ambitious project that, if accepted, will come out in a few years. We chose this project as it’s a strong social game with mechanics such as auctioning, trading, multi-crewed vehicles, player-made factions, cooperative missions, and much more. Plus, as an MMO, it’s largely multiplayer-focused with several additional mechanics to improve that focus. We’d also have avatars being based on the user’s platform avatars, with optional decors that can be used within the game. Furthermore, the title is highly ambitious and offers countless bits of innovation that I will not mention. Overall, it’s our strongest project and checks the box of all requirements along with prioritization, and is well within reach of our development team.
Additionally to all of this, we aim to improve Roblox as a whole and send it to its next generation of development by adding advanced tools for developers on the platform. Examples of these tools would be plug-ins, frameworks, development packages(asset packs, scripts, etc), and of course our Cardinal Engine. All in all, our studio aims to cut down as much time as possible for developers on the platform to increase development efficiency.
Apologies for the late response, went to go make some lunch.
Does anyone know the expected amount of projects that’ll be accepted? I want to know because I don’t think many games especially on roblox will need to have this amount of funding, 10 projects is 5 Million USD at the minimum!
I reckon the number is up to change as this program seems to be set up to last for an extended period of time.
