-- I wrote this feature request for a policy to be added to PolicyService relating to drawing and other free-form creation features. I explain most of my reasoning in the post, but to sum it up I believe giving developers the ability to restrict drawing mechanics from younger users would be much less restrictive than the current method, which essentially bars developers from having any sort of smaller drawing mechanics if they don’t want their game to be forced 13+.
-- I make this request as many non-Roblox games I’ve played in the past, mainly Nintendo games, had parental control features which allowed disabling just the drawing mechanics in these games, without having to block the entire game. (I also believe that parents should be able to explicitly disable drawing mechanics while still allowing their child to play 13+ experiences.)
Hi there, we’re aware of this feature request and it has been mentioned in the main thread on the new descriptors too. Feel free to read up on more details here. Let me know if you have any other questions.
Bump, still desperately need this. I have 2 identical versions of my game i have to constantly maintain, only difference being is the free-form creation aspect where creations/drawings replicate, which i can disable very easily if there was some kind of Policy Service API
@Caelestene After almost a whole year of having to deal with this work around, as a developer, i am getting very sick and tired of having to maintain 2 basically identical games.
This work around makes development, advertising, and updates double the effort and difficulty. This is a really poor solution to the problem and we need a fix.
Really need an addition to GetPolicyInfoForPlayerAsync for freeform creation
@Caelestene, any update on this? many developers including myself especially really need a policy api and updated questionnaire so we can disable free-form creation in games that use it as a side feature, but don’t want to get rid of it entirely just to make the game support a higher audience and not having the game forced as 13+
Spray Paint! has an extremely large audience that has been unable to play for over a year now due to these restrictions. My moderators often report that young players lie about their age just to join the game (usually discovered through voice chat).
I added a setting that prevents paint from other players being replicated to your screen when enabled, and I would love to force this feature onto restricted players to open it back up to all ages in a safe manner. It would also prevent children from lying about their age since many young players do not care about seeing other art and just want to draw and load their old saves and game passes.
My game used to average 8,000-10,000 players for years and has now lost 80% of its player base strictly due to these restrictions. Clones of my game that intentionally set the rating to “minimal” pop up every week and gain thousands of CCUs before being taken down, showing the high demand for such a feature. I am unable to publish a separate game for restricted players since the hundreds of thousands of bans in the main game and art saves will NOT carry over to it.
These restrictions are likely costing Roblox millions each year they remain unchanged, as there are hundreds of extremely popular free-form creation games that have suffered similar impacts. This feature would fix that.
(I’m aware it is on your radar, just hoping my input would help push this feature a little more )
any update now that free-form drawing games are being restricted to ages 16+? it feels incredibly detrimental to not have this policy as a feature, yet continue increasing the restrictions for it. it’ll hurt these games even more meanwhile creators have absolutely no say in it and still have no possible way of enforcing it
I was about to make a feature request about this until I found this post so I will share my input here instead.
My 2 friends and I have had a drawing/colouring game idea on our bucket list for over a year where users would be able to use colouring sheets and canvases to make drawings with advanced tools so they can add details such as shading, shadows, etc. We have not started development yet besides a basic demo, but I was informed by one of them that this game idea may need to be put on hold as a huge chunk of our desired demographics would be unable to play, removing the incentive to follow through with this project. One feature we planned to include would be sharing creations with other players, but this would not have been the main focus of the game.
I am aware that this solution even if implemented will not work for every free-form drawing game like Draw Me where the concept revolves around interacting with drawings from other users, but if sharing isn’t part of the core gameplay, our game could still exist if we had a way to restrict which users can view other creations based on policy. PolicyService already has IsContentSharingAllowed which could be integrated into this if that is not already planned.
PolicyService already allows us to check if users are allowed to trade paid items with ArePaidRandomItemsRestricted and IsPaidItemTradingAllowed, and the maturity compliance questionnaire asks if the policy API is respected, which allows games with those features to remain accessible. I believe the same approach should be applied to games containing free-form drawing and if PolicyService gets extended to include this, we can make the game accessible to younger audiences while remaining compliant with Roblox’s Terms of Service, ensuring users restricted by policy will not be exposed to unfiltered content.
-- i’m pretty sure the free-form content creation flags are specifically for games where your drawings appear for other users unmoderated. if you’re making a single player game with no sharing then this doesn’t apply. as for sharing, you can prompt your user to upload their creation through the AssetService so the image is passed through Roblox’s moderation first
-- keep in mind there’s no way to directly publish image assets, you’d have to upload a model containing your EditableImage in a decal or similar, then grab the image id from that published model
@Caelestene, with a recent change which pushes games which have free-form creation aspects from 13+ to 16+, we really need a policy/questionnaire update so we can use PolicyService so developers can disable replication of OR outright just disable free-form creation in their game without needing to keep the game age-gated at 16+.
It’s getting close to almost 2 years since we’ve been requesting for a solution like this. I hope we can get something soon
-- No, IsContentSharingAllowed shouldn’t be used for this, drawing in a world isn’t content sharing in the same way posting stuff online is, plus I’m pretty sure content sharing isn’t 16+ in most regions. It should be a different policy flag entirely.
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