That’s a Wrap on RDC SF 2018!

July 25, 2018

by YoSoyTofu


Creators Events

Roblox was proud to host our largest gathering yet at the fourth annual Roblox Developer Conference (RDC) at the Hyatt Regency in Burlingame, California. This year, nearly 400 attendees from around the world came together for one awesome weekend full of excitement, fun, and learning.

RDC is a special invite-only event for the best-of-the-best artists, game developers, designers, storytellers, and coders from the Roblox community. We hold this conference for two reasons: (1) to engage in an open dialogue with developers so we can continue building a best-in-class product and (2) to empower developers so they can achieve their fullest creative potential on Roblox. Although the conference is meant primarily for developers, we also believe that players can gain inspiration from the talks and even get some cool insights into the future of Roblox.

In case you missed any of the keynotes, panels, breakout sessions, or Game Jam presentations from #RDC2018, links to the presentation slides and video recordings are available below.

Keynotes

Breakout Sessions

 

 

Game Jam

  • Game Jam Presentations – Video

For more photos of the event, please click here.

Highlights from the conference

This year’s welcome reception was INCREDIBLE. We had a blast getting to meet so many creative individuals face-to-face, many of whom were newcomers to RDC!

On Saturday, Roblox CEO David “Builderman” Baszucki took the stage to share some amazing milestones. Among them, he announced that our developer community is on track to earn over $70 million collectively for their creations. Second, we are also now starting to approach one billion hours of play each month. To put this in perspective, that amount of engagement is on par with a major television network. These figures are a huge testament to the popularity of Roblox, and we expect there to be even greater momentum as we continue ramping up our educational programs across the world. Builderman also offered ten bold predictions for the next five years, including one million players in a single Roblox game and a national movie based on a developer’s game, story, or avatars!

Roblox CEO and Founder David “Builderman” Baszucki

Next, Grace Francisco, Roblox’s Vice President of Developer Relations, revealed in her keynote presentation that there are over four million active developers and creators on the platform. She also shared many inspiring success stories from our spring accelerator and incubator programs. Incredibly, six of the games that came out of those programs landed in the top 50, achieving more than 186 million gameplays total. Above all, she highlighted our commitment to the developer community, showcasing the tools and resources we’ve implemented throughout the year thanks to their valuable feedback.

Grace Francisco, Vice President of Developer Relations, sharing news about ongoing developer programs at Roblox

We also welcomed Kristian Segerstrale as our guest keynote speaker to share six lessons he’s learned over his 20 years of developing games for companies like Super Evil Megacorp, Glu Mobile, and Playfish: Build your team with an emphasis on talent and culture, focus on engagement and retention, build lasting value, make things that you love, localize your games, and get to know each other.

Afterward, Adam Miller, Vice President of Engineering, Technology, followed Kristian on stage and took us through some exciting upcoming features that will make playing Roblox even more immersive and fun. We saw an impressive preview of our beautiful new lighting technology, as well as 200-player servers, an in-game CSG system, new physics, and much more.

Adam Miller, Vice President of Engineering, Technology, showcasing upcoming Roblox features

And finally, Chris Misner, President of International, unveiled many great updates on our expansion into new countries. There are now over 1,000 games available in Spanish on Roblox, with more countries, more languages, and more support for game localization to come in the future.

In the afternoon, we hosted various breakout sessions where attendees could learn about specific design, development, and business subject matters. Topics included tips on world-building, optimizing performance, creating effective combat mechanics, monetization, game localization, and more.

Kelly Mayes, Director of Product, Social, getting ready for her presentation

At the end of the day, we held a panel with our engineering leads to field questions from attendees and discuss upcoming features. Afterward, Roblox developers zKevin, HenryDev, Biostream, and SilentSwords took the stage to answer more questions from their peers.

Overall, it’s shaping up to be an incredible year for developers, creators, and players alike, with an emphasis on new technologies that will enable enhanced immersive visuals, more ways to play with friends and people worldwide, and expanded avatar customization options.

RDC SF Game Jam 2018

This year’s Game Jam was bigger and better than ever. For the first time, teams now had a full 20 hours to build a new game entirely from scratch inspired by the theme “alternate physics”!

Bonds were formed. Skills were tested. It was both thrilling and inspiring to see so many creators of different talents and backgrounds—artists, programmers, and builders alike—come together to create something truly extraordinary in a short amount of time.

RDC SF 2018 Game Jam Judges

After a whirlwind of a day, our judges selected the winners based on the following criteria: Design, Audio/Sounds, Theme, Creativity, and Originality. A huge congrats goes to…

Third Place: Altered Scapes (created by Mimi_Dev, Sparklings, BonnabelleRose, DarthChadius)

An awesome adventure game where you play as a magical princess on a journey to rescue the prince from the great sorcerer Transformus Prime. She can manipulate objects to overcome various obstacles.

Second Place: Space Jam (created by SnakeWorl, Raguza, Roball1, B_rcode, EchoZenkai, TheBloxDev)

A unique hack-and-slash game with impressive combat animations and a pretty neat parkour system. You can acquire new powers, like the ability to summon gravity wells or freeze time, to defeat enemies.

First Place: BLAST HOOK (created by nsgriff, Biostream, Quenty, Crykee, Defaultio)

A super innovative three-player couch co-op game where players must work together to operate a giant hook and BLAST (!!!) their way up tricky cliffs and random obstacles in their way.

There were other cool games that deserved honorable mentions as well! You can play them below:

Crazy Caps (created by NewFissy, Dev_Anthony, AlgyLacey, raquiles, Bethink, Wsly)

A fun physics-based adventure game where you can equip all sorts of wacky hats, like a cannon or a rocket, to solve various puzzles throughout the world.

Event Horizon (created by Firebrand1, korky5000, TheGh0stRunner)

A cinematic story-based survival game where you need to repair a spaceship to escape a black hole. It even includes motion capture and voice acting recorded on location at RDC!

We saw well over a dozen full-fledged games come out of this experience, and we’re looking forward to seeing which Game Jam projects end up evolving into something more in the future.

For the rest of the Game Jam submissions, please see the list below:

Amsterdam, here we come!

Thanks to everyone who was able to join us, either in person or virtually on our live streams. It was great seeing so many familiar faces and new ones as well! This was truly the experience of a lifetime, and we look forward to seeing you again soon.

The fun might be over for now, but we’ll be heading to Amsterdam on August 17–19 to bring RDC to the European developer community! Stay tuned for more details from that event on Twitter @Roblox.