Hey ROBLOXians, we’ve got some exciting news for you! This Friday, January 16th at 4 p.m. Pacific Time, we’re launching a brand-spanking-new Twitch show where you can meet, chat with, and play games against the people who make your favorite games on ROBLOX. The show is as yet unnamed, but will focus on the developers of ROBLOX’s most popular and highest-rated games. To kick off the series, we’re highlighting one of the coolest new games to hit ROBLOX, Risky Strats, and the talented creator behind it, DevAdrian.

We got the chance to chat with DevAdrian about Risky Strats and how he went about making a real-time strategy game on ROBLOX. For the uninitiated, Risky Strats is a game where each player controls an army. By building up your army you can expand your territory, taking over neighboring cities, and eventually battling the other armies on the map. The objective is to capture 70% of the map. The design and gameplay are simple, but Risky Strats quickly becomes a fast-paced exercise in strategic resource management where a single slip-up could cost you the game.

Those of you who have been on ROBLOX for a while might remember the map-based strategy game Territory Conquest, which served as partial inspiration for Risky Strats.

“I basically took a lot of the things I liked about Territory Conquest, and added a bunch of things that I thought it needed,” DevAdrian tells us. “I liked the simple mechanics with troop movement and territory capturing, but I found that the maps were wildly off-balance. To combat this issue, I put together a random map generator that tries to create a layout with a lot of variance but minimizes choke points that restrict strategic maneuverability.”

Each colored area represents a different army, fighting over the remaining neutral white pieces.

Risky Strats launched with those basic ideas in mind, as well as a limited number of unit types, but DevAdrian has already been expanding the core game. Recently he added Forts and Artillery to the game, expanding both the offensive and defensive strategies for the game. And this is just the beginning of his plans for Risky Strats.

“I’ve got a pretty lengthy list of additions to the game including more structures, more game modes, and a co-op system. Polish on the side (better GUIs, sounds, camera movement, bug fixing) are also in order.”

What’s next?

DevAdrian has big plans for Risky Strats, even outside of ROBLOX. He says his main goal is to get the game published on additional platforms, a rare feat for ROBLOX developers (but a goal we think is really cool!).

This week DevAdrian will be the first guest on our Twitch developer show, where we’ll learn more about the making and future of Risky Strats, and his other projects (such as the cult classic, Strobe). Then we’ll try our hand at beating him at his own game. (Prediction: we get crushed.) If you want to have the chance to talk to a top dev live on air, make sure you tune in this Friday, January 16th at 4 p.m. Pacific Time on twitch.tv/ROBLOX