Howdy y’all! I’m a indie gamedev based out of Tokyo. I worked at Microsoft/Mojang on Minecraft for 4 years, but quit to move out here and go all indie.
My big piece of my heart is my game Dragon Drop:
Been on hiatus for the last two years while I’ve built up my company and gotten the contracts that I need to stay alive and sponsor my own visa, but I’m slowly getting back into the swing of things!
I currently do Roblox consulting in Japan to make ends meet, and I also work on radically ethical games for the platform. Proudest work so far is Abyssal; it plays like an indie game and is an atmospheric platformer. Abyssal [Music Update] 🎵 - Roblox
I got my bachelor’s in CS, master’s in game programming, and now I’d say that my best skills are in Direction, Design, and Gameplay Dev. It’s a pleasure to meet all of y’all. よろしくお願いしまう！
Hey Cloudy! It’s great to have you on the forum, I’m very happy to have you here. I hope you get to finish Dragon Drop soon. When you finally get around to releasing Dragon Drop, Show Off is a great place to make an announcement ^^
It’s cool to hear that you’re making radically ethical games on Roblox too, and I can appreciate the effort.
I don’t think it’s wrong to say that, there are a LOT of wild west attitudes on the platform and a lot of people just leveraging all the dark patterns they can get their hands on in order to maximize their income. If you’re just handing a kid an ipad and they get to click on any front-page games, there’s a lot of risk there and I think parents should be WAY more engaged with their kids than most currently are. If I were a parent, I wouldn’t let my kids play most games on the platform.
For the games that I make, specifically Abyssal, I get to monetize a free-to-play game in a respectful and non-predatory way. Roblox is the ONLY platform in the world where having 1000s of users who never pay you a cent is inherently a good thing and doesn’t cost you anything. I use a single currency that’s free to pick up daily, think Mario 64 but all the coins respawn once a day. No pressure to come back, no streaks, no anything. The game is about exploration and finding cool unlockable cosmetics in the world that you can use the currency on to customize your player. All paid exclusive content is cosmetics or small quality-of-life item trackers that just make it so you don’t have to pull up a Wiki to find where certain things are.
If you’ve seen the two People Make Games videos, they are entirely accurate about Roblox being pretty shitty as a company. Someone buying $5 of Robux and spending it entirely on my game makes me about $0.98. It is incredibly frustrating to be beholden to the worst parts of gamedev, the worst parts of algorithmic Youtube, and only getting 1/5th of the money at the tail end. But Abyssal is still an indie game that makes about $3k a month, generally is entertaining about 100 people around the world even at a low time, and has someone on planet earth playing it at all times for the past 1.5 years. And that’s all because we respect our players time and money, and built something that felt different and hopefully is showing the younger generation that there is more to games than the crap they find on the front page. I’m doing what I can to be a part of the change that I want to see in the world!
Thank you! I’m happy to give you a key for free, and if you like it you could consider gifting a copy to a friend who could use a smile! :>
I don’t have a lot of nice things to say about it since I had some really rough stuff happen while I was there, but I can at least say that all the infighting is why they can only release like, a mob a year XD
Just went to look it up on Youtube ( I don’t play or know anything about Roblox really) it looks really great. Level design of some MegaStructure like this is really awesome.
Thank you so much!!! It’s incredibly different from everything else on Roblox by-design, we basically used the ease of making a networked game and built everything else on top of that, throwing out their default platform avatars to make something unique. I’m really glad you like the architecture; I think we’ve had a lot of fun deep diving into the style and finding more and more cool spaces for players to explore!
I’ll also mention that the easiest way to explain Roblox and it’s insane hold on the market is that:
It is YouTube, but for Games.
You can quickly get in and out of any game you want, free of charge, until you find something that you want. Wildly popular with children, who are time rich and cash poor, as their iPad can become a portal into any kind of roleplay game, FPS, whatever they want to try out.
