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The Roblox Developers Conference 2019 is an annual event that took place from August 9 to 11, 2019 in San Francisco, California. Key portions of the event, including keynotes and sessions were streamed live. Unlike the predecessing year, the UK conference is a "private-viewing party where international developers can mingle and watch live video content from RDC 2019." Content frequently includes game and platform updates, networking opportunities with major developers, and game-building events. This viewing party took place in London. Roblox hinted at other international locations, though none are officially announced.


Prizes[]

Avatar shop items[]

Name Image Objective
RDC 2019 Champions Trophy
RDCCHAMPION
Win first place in the 2019 Game Jam.
RDC 2019 1st Runner Up:
RDC1
Win second place in the 2019 Game Jam.
RDC 2019 2nd Runner Up
RDC2
Win third place in the 2019 Game Jam.
RDC 2019 Participation Trophy
RDC2019
Participate in the 2019 Game Jam.


Goodie Bag/Swag items[]

  • Drawstring bag itself
  • Notebook
  • Mug
  • Bloxy Cola
  • Wireless charging pad
  • Beanie
  • RDC 2019 sticker
  • Roblox Dev patch

Day 1[]

David Baszucki's Keynote Address[]

RDC19 david

David Baszucki, the CEO of Roblox, seen presenting at RDC 2019.

David Baszucki (David.baszucki/Builderman), the Chief Executive Officer of Roblox, first presented about the state of Roblox. Additional features and projects were announced during this keynote address.

Announced upcoming features include up to 600 players per server without additional costs, simultaneous collaboration with up to 100 people in Roblox Studio, and a User-Generated-Content (UGC) catalog.

2023 estimations[]

Our new internal mission is, at some point, in one of these next few years, to have our developer community in sum earn over a billion dollars from the Roblox platform, and that's our new goal. And we think we're going to hit it some day.

David Baszucki
Feature Probability
No country containing more than 50% of the game's top developers "Holding"
One million players concurrently in one Roblox game "Out of the park!"
A major brand release to Roblox as their primary platform "Optimistic"
A movie based on one part of the Roblox platform "Maybe
Over 50 million players will learn to code through Roblox "Out of the park!"
50% of toys sold in the USA will have a Roblox scan tag "Maybe
A 100-person game company developing on the Roblox platform "Optimistic"
The President of the United States will mention his/her Roblox avatar on camera "Optimistic"
A major national movie will advertise on Roblox
Tesla will use Roblox developers in some productional effort.


Justin Sousa (JParty)[]

So seriously, look around at all your allies, all your teammates, everyone around you, and realize: This is your future company, this is your future teammates, this is everyone who can help build the imagination platform of tomorrow.

Justin Sousa


Justin Sousa, the head of the developer community, introduced information about the community of Roblox. Highlights include:

Feature Description
Roblox Developer Hub improvements
Localization, qualifying games for multiple markets
Sorting games "We are in the learning phase of sorts."
Live-Ops
Listening, transparency
Developer attention "We tried to make a big push this year to ensure your stories are told all around the world."
Game analytics Monthly macro economy, general numbers. Event tracking, micro events, "So that you can know everything about your game, your users, behavior, what's awesome, what's gonna be awesome, and how you can improve it all
Global Spaces Go around the world, unlock new spaces. Starting in Canada, moving to Europe, spreading from there.
Focus Groups "You should know exactly what's happening. We should know exactly what you're thinking."
Recruiting Tool Finding people, more explicit product tools to build teams and represent portfolios.
Meetups Dev meetups all around the world.
Developer Jira Giving developers the power to troubleshoot and report back to Roblox.
More accelerators New session, expanding sizes, new programs to support larger teams.
UGC expansion Catalog, plugins, merchandise supported by Roblox
Global reach Localization tools, opening borders
Reinvesting in developers New sources of revenue


Adam Miller (rbadam): A year in Review[]

Adam Miller introduced:

Year in Review, Year Coming Up[]

What we promised we'd ship (and did):

  • Packages: Make it once, re-use it everywhere. Can be made out of anything.
  • Power Studio Tools: Accurate Play Solo, Bulk Import, Mesh Splitting
  • Productivity: Beta Features (sneak peek, provide feedback, co-create the future of Studio), Cloud Saved Games (build and test in the cloud before you publish, never lose anything), Game Archiving (declutter Studio)
  • Real-Time CSG: Server API to Union and Subtract parts and CSG in-game, fast enough for simple things.
  • Level of Detail — CSG and Mesh Parts: Automatically compute levels of detail with RenderFidelity set to Automatic, lower triangle count and improved rendering performance for distant objects.
  • Physical Solver - LDL Decomposition: improved stability and fidelity of systems using mechanical joints, reduced errors, much-improved behavior with complex machines.
  • Forcefield material: Allows to simulate forcefield like effects, transparency driven by fresnel and vertex color and texture-based animations
  • Humanoid platforms: Stability for Humanoid light iconHumanoid dark iconHumanoids on moving platforms, multi-crew ships, joyrides, works by default.
  • New pathfinding: New agent parameters (AgentWidth, AgentHeight, AgentCanJump), new event (Path light iconPath dark iconPath.Blocked)
  • Future is Bright: Three major phases planned: Phase 1 - HDR and linear lighting (shipped), Phase 2 - Dynamic sun shadows (shipped), Phase 3 - Dynamic local light shadows (shipping in 2020)
  • Cross-server messaging: Communicate between servers, simple pub/sub model, enabled the following use cases: Matchmaking, real-time global marketplace, cross-server characters and chat.

What wasn't promised but shipped anyways:

  • Faster Game Loading: optimization, more than 75% reduction load time
  • New Lua VM: Lua interpreter written from scratch, 2-3x speedup, shipped more performance for API calls.
  • More Game Servers/More Concurrency: Massive growth in-game server capacity, tens of thousands of CPU cores added over the last year.
  • Faster Game Engine and Servers
  • Viewport Frames: Add 3D elements to UI in games or in plugins
  • Top Dev Metrics: Downloadable monthly report containing, D1, D7, W1 retention, monetization, top countries for your game

What we promised we'd ship but didn't:

  • Dynamic Skies: Beautiful animated skies and clouds, atmospheric scattering, procedural clouds, cloud lighting, different cloud types, all generated from elegant, simple settings.
  • Server Blocks: An attempt to simplify client-server messaging. Problems: upvalues, serverevent/serverfunction keywords weren't scoped, server-code couldn't preserve any state.

What's coming up next year:

  • Big Idea: Large, Immersive Worlds: Bigger scale, more players, better detail and rendering.
  • Level of detail: Model: Works with the existing streaming system, lightweight mesh shown for models that aren't fully streamed in, automatic
  • New lighting model: Metals, more physically correct specular reflection, image-based lighting. Custom materials, environment reflections, mesh material
  • Terrain Vegetation: Procedural terrain decoration, large-scale and efficient, "small" objects like grass, rocks, etc.
  • New Lua Type System: New static typing system similar to how Typescript extends Javascript, robust type-interface system, warn on incorrect 'self' usage, later: a broad array of compile-time warnings and static types in Lua.
  • Team Create with Source Control: Scripts are never locked for editing, for anyone. Versioning for objects, who changed what and when. Rollback to any version, no more broken games. Diff and merge between versions. Make changes, test them, and commit when ready.
  • New Avatars: Skinned characters, material support, clothing that can be layered, fully customizable character controller and state machine, avatar editor integrated with catalog.
  • UGC Catalog: Catalog opening up to creators, build, upload, price, and sell. Tools for creators to manage their catalog assets. Optimized catalog search and discovery. Efficient and fair deduplication of clothing.

Game Jam Announcement[]

The Game Jam instructional video was shown at the end of Day 1 by JParty. Attending developers were instructed to create a game within 24-hours, and they had to create all of the assets within the time frame (i.e. they could not open an old game to work off of). The theme they had to follow was "Bite Off More Than You Can Chew". The video itself was narrated by Sousa, in a satirical tone.

Day 2[]

Day 2 mainly consisted of developers working on their games for the 2019 Game Jam, and at the end of the day the games were shown off and the winners were announced.

Game Jam results[]

Place Team Game Users (left to right)
3 melonslice
GrannysHome
Granny's Home
RDCGJThird
Plutonem, jeparlefrancais
2 Team Meow
Cats
Cats
RDCGJSecond
theloudscream, SkeletalReality, Builder_boy, TheGh0stRunner, Explod_e, Brick_man
1 Stealthy Carrots
More than you can stew
More Than YOU Can Stew
RDCGJFirst
Wsly, AlgyLacey, xJennyBeanx, Arch_Mage, Quenty, Zomebody

Schedule[]

All times are in PST (UTC−08:00). The schedule is retrieved from here.

Friday[]

  • 4:00 - 6:00 - Registration
  • 6:00 - 9:00 - Dinner & Party

Saturday[]

  • 8:30 - 9:30 - Registration and Breakfast
  • 9:30 - 9:35 - RDC Opening
  • 9:35 - 9:55 - CEO Keynote David Baszucki, CEO & Founder
  • 9:55 - 10:15 - Developer Keynote JParty, Head of Developer Community
  • 10:15 - 10:25 - Break
  • 10:25 - 10:45 - Product Keynote Rbadam, VP of Engineering, Technology
  • 10:45 - 11:10 - Guest Speaker Keynote Crystin Cox, Playfab Evangelist, Microsoft
  • 11:10 - 11:30 - Guest Speaker Keynote Robin Hunicke, Co-Founder, Funomen
  • 11:30 - 12:30 - Lunch Break
  • 12:30 - 3:00 - Breakout Sessions
  • 3:00 - 3:20 - Break
  • 3:20 - 5:15 - Breakout Sessions
  • 5:15 - 5:35 - Break
  • 5:35 - 6:05 - Engineering Panel
  • 6:15 - 6:20 - Closing Remarks
  • 6:20 - 6:30 - Game Jam Kick off
  • 6:30 - 7:20 - Dinner / Swag Handout
  • 12:00 - 1:00 - Midnight Breakfast

Sunday[]

  • 2:00 - 8:00 - Game Jam Continues
  • 9:00 - 10:00 - Breakfast
  • 12:00 - 2:00 - Judges Arrive/Lunch
  • 2:00 - 3:00 - Game Jam presentations
  • 3:00 - 3:30 - Judging & Awards
  • 3:30 - 4:30 - Group Picture & Farewell


Trivia[]

This section is a trivia section. Please relocate any relevant information into other sections of the article.

  • MisterRedTurtle gave out turtles during the event.[1]
  • This is the first RDC event to give a trophy just to attendees of the event.

References[]

Developer Quotes[]

See Developer Quotes.


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