This was fun to watch and I enjoyed it a lot, really neat to see the details and each team’s journey through it! Also listening to Mr. David in the fourth part was interesting…
2 Likes
Before this topic was made, I have been watching all the episodes and I am amazed at how all of the 400 employees made such great demo features! Even if some did not win, they did the best as they could and definitely can improve soon this year! Let’s see what Hack Week 2023 can show us
3 Likes
What do you mean I don’t understand
1 Like
Hack Weeks are when employees can create cool showcases and mock-ups for potential future features.
They don’t always become a fully fledged feature, but it’s cool to see what they come up with!
7 Likes
I seriously do question how much Roblox spends on marketing their company culture and writing fluff pieces about the Roblox employee culture. It feels like Roblox has built itself a little bubble and have gone completely out of touch with the developer community, no longer providing the kinds of updates and fixes that we need to make better games.
If any higher ups in charge of product and engineering see this, one thing in particular I would like is for the release of the Voice Chat API so we can do more with voice chat than just have unconfigurable bubbles attached to humanoids. The fact that this feature has been left half-baked for two years now is super frustrating.
8 Likes
While I do agree, I think the main issue is just the lack of communication. I’d love for Roblox to have something where they show their progress and what they’ve been working on each month. That way it doesn’t feel like features are just announced and then left floating in the void until one day it’s announced that the update is done, or is just forgotten. I’d at least like to know if something is being worked on or not. But I do think that Roblox is improving, especially after this post.
Actually, what would be really nice is a page that shows a list of features in progress, along with a progress bar and list of to-do checks (similar to Trello).
4 Likes
I think poor management is also to blame here. Roblox has grown and grown and grown and now their company is absolutely massive. It seems like the company has too many employees and not enough freedom to actually pursue projects, make decisions and make impact. Too many times brilliant ideas floated around here and obvious changes have been shot down here, and I think the issue is that nobody can do anything without going through a long chain of approval.
Roblox has become bloated, and it shows…
1 Like
I’m not entirely sure if that’s the issue, to be honest, in fact the opposite. Roblox is just wanting to go off in too many directions right now. They want to be everything, instead of polishing what they already have (like the entire website). We’re obviously also only able to look at it from the outside as we don’t really know what’s going on or what they have planned. But, at least from the outside, it does seem like there’s a lot of poor choices going on.
I believe in at least some of those cases, investors are to blame. Investors are notorious for being out-of-touch with the product or service they’re investing into. They see the sales, they see other similar products/services, then they try to convince the company to go in the direction they want, even when they have no idea what they’re working with or really what they’re even talking about.
5 Likes
I guess that’s another way of looking at it. Roblox is trying a lot of things at once, but in a disorganized and confused way. Too many new releases come with additional promised updates, which promptly are forgotten and never mentioned again. Voice Chat API? Extended terrain decorations? etc.
Also, so many minute updates that add a single button or a single tiny quality of life feature usually credit a team of several people for the change. This suggests to me that there is bloating in how the company works.
Investors are definitely a negative force working against the goal of making sensible, good product decisions. It’s really confidence-draining when you see a Roblox executive making interviews spouting nonsense about integrating NFT’s and blockchains into Roblox (which I fully believe to be a completely useless technology, why are we de-centralizing something that works just fine centralized, under Roblox servers and Roblox’s hood???)
2 Likes
Unless I’m missing information here, I don’t see why people are freaking out about Roblox’s “NFTs”. I don’t even recall them calling it that directly. All they’re doing is the same system they already have with limiteds, but with all UGC items.
1 Like
Although specific details on the integration are yet to be announced, Clark Lampen, who is the Vice-President and Digital Gaming Analyst at the game’s partnered finance firm BTIG, has stated that the Roblox team are “taking measured steps forward to introducing Web3 features into their product.”
I’ve heard about the new collectible items and I think at worst they will be harmless, and so far there is no indication of anything blockchain-related. Though I do think using blockchain/NFTs would be a tremendous waste of resources, unless Roblox wants to create an aftermarket for selling items off-site for real currencies, which seems to violate every safety principle they have??
Anyways, I don’t want to derail the thread any further so I’ll leave it at here!
1 Like
Some people might enjoy this, but personally, I think it’s far too long for little reason. Please call me back when there’s a recap on the hackweek that shows the experimental technology I’m interested it, not a mini-series.
1 Like
I really enjoyed this series! It was really interesting to see whats going on behind a few teams during Hack Week!
Hey, I watched it yesterday. It was fun watching and I’d like to be able to check out everything everyone created. I saw a spreadsheet in some of the videos, but haven’t found a link to any project/games.
Where can I find what everyone created? Or, is that available?
I’d also like to know what the hack week does to the norms of the company. I hope to intern and work at Roblox after college and the hack week is one of many things pulling me towards the company. I’d like more info overall and I can’t seem to find much on the jobs page, blog posts, Roblox website, ect.
1 Like
really interested to see the series
Documenting hack week projects is a great idea, but I wish these had gone into greater technical detail and cut out some of the fluff. I honestly would’ve preferred an hour of someone just explaining how they developed a feature from start to finish.
6 Likes
The whole thing felt more like a company commercial than an engineering adventure and I really hope this wasn’t it. What happened to the ambitious projects like luaujit?
I think Manuel Bronstein put the whole thing well when he said
'Cause you’re gonna be showing this infront of judges that are gonna be seeing the end product. And this is not about ideas. This is about you build something that could actually work and seeing it palying out. (4:56)
It’s clear this wasn’t done for the same reason previous hack weeks were done, which is a shame because I really enjoyed seeing projects like the real-time texture-synthesizer, seamless teleports and windy foliage, even if they weren’t feasible to implement.
Now we got concerts, virtual pianos and teleporting friends together. Like what? We could already do that with lua.
3 Likes
This is good but we don’t really know much exactly about the winners of the hack week? We didn’t get to see any presentations, how people felt before/after presenting. The winners we only heard about their announcement not anything else. I’d liked to have learnt more. So it feels as if there was all this momentum and it’s just cut short, but it still was entertaining 
Whoever ends up getting invited to hack week must be very lucky.
