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Roblox wants you to vibe code its next hit game

In our industry, Roblox and Fortnite are often mentioned in the same breath. But that ignores one crucial difference between them: Fortnite is an actual video game, with developer Epic Games having built a top-played battle royale title and giving it consistent content updates from an internal team of developers.

Roblox, on the other hand, is entirely dependent on user-generated content. Its success has been built on the backs of independent video game developers that use its game creation engine, Roblox Studio, to make and publish titles.

Now, Roblox is jumping on the gen AI bandwagon with a new update it says will let anyone “build without limits.”

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We’ll give you the tl;dr right out the gate: This is vibe coding.

“Twenty years ago, Roblox launched with a simple idea: ‘You make the game,'” the platform said in a company blog post. “At the time, that was a radical proposition—most games were made by studios and professionals, and the idea that anyone could be a creator was far from obvious. But we believed it. And the millions of creators who built on Roblox proved it.”

Its vibe coding update, called Build, is a “new mobile-first creation tab” that is “taking [Roblox’s] original idea further than we ever have,” it said.

Like the many, many other vibe coding applications that have appeared over the last year or so, Build lets users turn ChatGPT-esque text prompts into “a basic game,” Roblox said.

An example prompt it gave is, “Let’s make a cozy adventure game set in a dense forest with environmental obstacles.”

Build will take that prompt and “automatically generate a starting point for the creator to iterate on, playtest, and share with friends or publish to Roblox,” the platform said.

We get lowering the barrier to entry for aspiring game devs, but ultimately this update means Roblox game developers will likely face what artists, writers, content creators, musicians, and more have been dealing with since we entered the gen AI era: a deluge of low-quality, low-effort content that crowds out actual human-made art and makes it more difficult for their audience to find them.

And Roblox isn’t stopping with Build. The platform said that in the coming months, “we’ll share a series of announcements that will give every creator a clear runway to go further.” It referred to Build and other upcoming tools as “agentic,” another favorite word among gen AI purveyors.

“With Build and Studio, creators can delegate the parts of development that don’t require their full attention,” Roblox promised.

David Baszucki, CEO of Roblox Corporation, took to Twitter to further elaborate on Roblox’s plans, saying that “the one reason” Roblox is adding AI is because “[t]he world needs more play.”

“Our role is to remove every obstacle between that play and the people who want to create it,” he went on. “Faster iteration and fewer technical constraints. And more room to push further than a single creator–or a small team–could have gone in the past. This isn’t just for studios who’ve already proven themselves. Some of the most important work in this industry has come from first-time creators–who were often Roblox players first–with a single focused idea.”

Responses to his tweet were lukewarm at best.

Build will launch for testing July 28.

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Published by
James Hale

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