The building blocks: getting into the hobby

Matthew Dean, a Roblox developer and former employee, has been developing on the platform since 2010. As a kid, Dean grew up building Legos. Upon being introduced to Roblox from an ad, Dean took up the opportunity and began tinkering with Roblox Studio, the Roblox platform that allows users to create games.

“One day, I saw an ad on a website talking about how you could build anything you wanted on Roblox. That was the start. After that, I downloaded Roblox Studio and started building things,” Dean said. 

As he grew more experienced with game creation, Dean released a few of his original games, his most popular being “Catalog Heaven.” 

“Originally, my game didn’t get that much attention. And then, a few months later, I logged into Roblox and went to the front page of games, and my game was just there, meaning it was one of the most popular games. On that day, it sort of blew up out of nowhere,” Dean said.

Another Roblox developer and former employee, Nathan Griffin, has a similar experience.

“I first discovered Roblox when my buddies were talking about making a game over the lunch table in middle school. When I asked what they were talking about, they told me about Roblox and encouraged me to sign up and check it out. So I hopped on, and it started there,” Griffin said. “I grew up playing video games with my dad, and I always wanted to make games. Roblox provided an easy way for me to do that.”

After getting familiar with developing, Griffin began to work on bigger projects.

“None of the games I have made are super popular. They’re just a bunch of projects and stuff like that. I started working on ‘Robloxian High School’ after it became really big. My job was to manage new content and build a team to produce new content for the game,” Griffin said.