I saw Roblox on YouTube in 2011, it was videos of players driving monster trucks around a baseplate with some ramps. From there I made an account and began playing Monster Jam games.
Soon after I began messing with free models and with my NASCAR Stop Motion Community connections, I made my first racing league on Roblox. I’d host races every Thursday at the same track, one local to me in real life, Holland Motorsports Complex in Holland, NY.
Soon after starting that though, I hated how everything I did was scrutinized for being free models so I had to learn. I learned to make my own cars, my own tracks, and eventually how to make custom race suits for my character.
After some success making some nice cars and enabling them to be free in the community I started to want to innovate. I tried learning to code via Roblox’s (now Developer Hub) tutorials on how to code. I pulled out a notebook and started writing stuff down in it. I didn’t understand things, I felt demotivated, I stopped.
Later on however, someone I knew made some code to control cars’ speeds going down pit road. It was only about 6-7 lines of code. A touched event on in the vehicle seat checking for “PitEntry” and “PitExit” blocks, then setting the MaxSpeed of the seat. Learning about touched events opened the world of coding to me. I made different sounds based on the material your car drove on, I made checkpoint systems that’d disallow you from driving backwards, I made a checkpoint system that’d tell you who’s in first, second, etc, I made a pit road speeding system that’d tell the owner if someone was too fast on pit road, I made a system that detected when your car hit the wall and gave it damage, and I made a system where when driving your tires wear out based on which lane of the track you drove on. All of these were through touched events.
Eventually I put two and two together when seeing the drift community have code that generated blocks when drifting to give a “smoke” effect and I combined this with my touched event knowledge to make a drafting script for some Talladega Nights “Shake N Bake” action.
Around the same time I got interested in making an actual “game” rather than just places with cars and a track. I went to the now defunct forums and found a scripter. I paid him 1,000 R$ to make a primitive game where players could choose a paint scheme and then every round the game would set them up to be able to race. When someone completed the set number of laps, they won and the race would end in 30 seconds. The finishing results would then display and the whole cycle repeats. My first game “Xfinity ‘15: Rookies Come Rising” was born. The game following the real life “NASCAR Xfinity Series” in 2015, NASCAR’s step down from the Cup Series. I started playing with unions and learned I could union the side of the car so that I could use one decal to paint the whole side with a design.
This game however came crashing down due to an update Roblox made revolving around buoyancy for parts. This broke the cylinders I used for the tires. So, my next game, NASCAR ‘16, used the same code and same tracks, but brand new Cup Series cars that I made all on my own. Combined with my new knowledge of unions I set off making schemes to populate the game with everyone’s favorite drivers.
For NASCAR ‘17, the addition of user made meshes resulted in a catastrophic ending of morals. Some of my friends learned how to steal the meshes from Mods made for the game NASCAR Racing: 2003 (NR2003). I used these meshes in my games from 2017-2019 without any permission from those who created them. I also pulled paint schemes from the modding community as well to populate the inventory of cars for my games.
In early 2019 I shut down my NASCAR games, citing I did not like the moral irresponsibility of using textures, models, and trademarks that I do not own.
I reached out to some 3D Modelers in the Roblox community to start making me some cars. @GuestCapone was the first, and with him I got a few cars that never wound up in a game. When he got busy, he pushed me off to his friend @JohnDrinkin. The cars made by John finish the set Guest made, and then I had him create for me some stock car meshes. Those meshes are now featured in my follow up to the NASCAR series of games I started, “NASCRA’19” (National Association for Stock Car Racing in America) a parody of NASCAR. Rather than focusing on the big tracks of NASCAR however, I focused this game on short tracks all across America and made many parodies to real life ovals fo premiere in the game.
From 2017-2019 while making these series of games, I attended 3 different colleges. I failed the first two and didn’t finish the 3rd. School just never fit for me as the homework was something that troubled me. I took tests well because I was there in the classroom, but my focus during class was a loss and finishing work outside the class room felt impossible. I was diagnosed with adhd after the first school I failed out of, Rochester Institute of Technology, pursuing a Game Design and Development degree.
While at my second school, I applied for the Roblox internship program, at the time, Accelerator and Incubator. I made it to the first round of interviews, but got no further than that. Still though, making interview round one felt like a small victory in a big war. This interview also got me access to the DevForum as a then “Basic User” (now “New Member” or “Member” (not “Regular”)
I worked quickly to a “Member” (now “Regular”) status and got invited to RDC ‘18. This was the first time I made a trip without my parents, I was 19 years old, flying across the country alone. I enjoyed it. Every minute of it. I met great people, saw faces I’d have never known existed before, and made connections.
I continued applying for the internship alone to no avail and went to RDC ‘19 with another round of enjoyment and thrill towards trying to get an internship. After RDC ‘19 I did not return to school for the fall. I was burned out with school and wanted to focus all efforts towards getting the Internship. I was contacted by @Yozoh who saw me post about looking for teammates. I asked to see some of her work with vehicle related things and I wasn’t all too impressed. She hadn’t done much work in that field. I showed a picture of what I was aiming for and rather than explaining she was capable, she replied a few hours later with a 3D model of the picture I sent her. She had no basis except 1 picture. Instantly I was ecstatic to have such a highly skilled 3D modeler to work with. She found our coder for the project @Wrathsong. He works on a lot of side projects of varying success but the work is good and I thought our chances well.
After interview after interview we made the final cut to be Spring 2020 accelerators. The dream came true for me finally. We made our way to San Mateo at the end of February. The dream came crashing down however 4 days later when Pandemic Lockdowns set in place. The Roblox office was closed and the internship program was sent into a work from home status. Roblox worked with people to allow them to go back to their hometowns without taking a financial hit, but I had just driven 2,000 miles with my dad to make myself a life in California.
Motivation for our project dwindled with the work from home status. Mine especially. The project inevitably kinda flopped but I have some hope to revive it in the future. For now, I’m still here, in the Bay Area, and when I’m not working my security officer job to keep my financials afloat from living here, I’m still developing, creating, imagining.
I’m. Still. Here.