Roblox, and "Authentic Fun"

RELATED ARTICLE: Art, The Smiley Tribute, what I've been up to, where I talk about my recent endeavors besides Roblox as of February 2024.

I entered another Roblox fixation within the past couple of months. Now, if you're familiar with Roblox, you may know it is an incredibly poorly moderated platform saturated with unsupervised young children with an infinite sluice of iPad baby microtransaction games. That's sad, but luckily I'm not an iPad baby (allegedly).

For years, I've been on the lookout for Roblox games that are enjoyable and less exploitative - surprisingly enough, they DO exist! It's hard to find one that is not a little shitty in some way though, primarily because Roblox is designed to encourage those kinds of development practices, and a lot of the developers are young (or raised on this idea) and accept it hook line and sinker.

For me though, the trick to a good Roblox game is whether or not it is fun to play if you have no money. I actually do have Robux, but I only spend it on avatar cosmetics rather than in-game benefits, but that's besides the point. This isn't a perfect metric - a game can be "fun" because it adopts addictive game design practices (incremental games etc.) but I am also fairly good at not letting this ruin my life and identifying what it is about Roblox games I like.

Here are some games that have interested me and Cooper lately, with screenshots if we've taken any.

the waiting room

i tend to find -core aesthetic labels and buzzwords kind of cliche - stuff like "weirdcore", "dreamcore", "liminal space" and the like. but these keywords sometimes lead to really intriguing roblox games of the exploration/hangout variety.

one of my favorite flavors of exploration/hangout games on roblox are the ones that lack real mechanical "systems" - they are hardly "games" - but have a bunch of tiny mechanics you can play with, transforming the experience into a toy of sorts.

the waiting room is like this, and combined with my inexplicable Smiley Face Autism development (go check out that related article by the way), i found this game to be cute and enjoyable. there's a room where you can play a single-octave toy piano. if you click on the smiley faces, it makes a soft "ding" sound. which is to say, i have 5 hours of in-game playtime for a Roblox game that doesn't even have gameplay.

there's a bunch of badges in the game, but besides that, it's just an environment you can explore and play around in. it calls itself a hangout game, but actually there's a mechanic i would say kind of undercuts this conceit if you want to talk to other people in the game - basically the game starts to fuck with your mind and reality over time. it's kinda funny to see new people getting confused by the mechanic in question.

Evade

Evade is a nextbot survival game. You run from loud pngs and that's it. Come on, this one's a top-played, you probably know this one.

I think Peter Griffin is a chronically unfunny entity. Every time I see or hear him I get a little annoyed. But that one voice clip of him just saying "Fortnite" kills me every time

balls.rng

This shit is a baby toy to me. My Subway Surfers gameplay. My soap cutting video. My dancing happy fruits and berries on a black background set to "Beware" by Death Grips. I cannot fucking believe that video has not been uploaded to YouTube, so I uploaded it to this damn website just so you can see what I'm talking about

Here's your background music for the rest of the article.

balls.rng is basically like, gambling distilled to its barest essentials except omitting the money part. A steady stream of balls will descend from the sky (don't laugh). Every ball rolls against the odds of having a certain modifier; it has a 1 in 5 chance of having Cubed, and a 1 in 120,000,000 chance of having Nova, for instance. And these modifiers can stack! All the modifiers combined contribute to a ball's "rarity", and you simply click on balls to collect them.

With around 300 or so modifiers in total, there is an unfathomable number of possible modifier combinations. Combined with the game's kickass soundtrack and if you're like me you will no joke sit in a Roblox server for 40 minutes straight clicking on fucking balls.

There is no point to this except you can display your favorite ball above your head including all of its annoying graphical and sound effects. There's one modifier that literally turns it into a playable tycoon with upgrades, and you can unlock a "sword giver" which gives you the teeniest tiniest shitty little sword that deals zero damage.

There is another modifier that turns a ball into a sawblade you can use to kill people very slowly

Breadwinner World

i actually, ultimately, don't recommend this game; i think its simple gameplay is fun, but it's a little too "dark patterns" for my comfort. i think it does some really interesting and unique things for a roblox game - it's simulator gameplay but it's very tactile, and i loved that aspect of it!

i made a whole tumblr post on my roblox sideblog freemodel acting as a review of the game and analysis of these intriguing features. i recommend you read the tumblr post if you wanna hear my thoughts.

i don't often get to say "this game does something i have never seen in a roblox simulator game before". and in all my years of playing roblox i can tell you if someone says that, it is either a good thing or a really bad thing.

in the future i may mirror this review to this website, for the sake of those of you who groaned when i told you to look at a tumblr post. i understand, trust me, i just can't be assed right now.

The Repleh County series

The Repleh County series by Ignited Softworks consists of three games: A Stereotypical Obby, Repleh County Archives, and Repleh County Archives 2. These are narrative horror games. Cooper wrote another tumblr post about this one, which is actually short enough that I can mirror parts of it here.

An issue a lot of Roblox narrative horror games have is that, well, good video game horror tends to be based on anticipation, atmosphere, and/or danger. A lot of narrative horrors lack a fail state, which means they lack danger; I often come to this realization pretty quickly into a narrative horror game if it seems like it's going to be Like that. Without danger, you're reliant on that anticipation and atmosphere, and many narrative horror games fail at all three of these.

Thank fucking god, these games do not fall into this trap. Well, okay, one could argue a case for its first installment.

I found "A Stereotypical Obby" to be very weak, but each entry in this series is more impressive than the last, I feel. ASO invokes being "stereotypical" in an ironic way, because it's like a bait and switch creepypasta kind of thing, but unfortunately I feel like it's a bit stereotypical as a horror experience for that same reason. I did not find it all that scary until near the end, where it creates a little bit of tension, which I liked.

However, the two entries after this utilize environmental design, atmosphere, and tension far more effectively; I was actually fearful the whole way through for those two entries! Whoever designs their environments does a damn good job!! And I think it helps that ASO actually works to set up expectations for the next two, to let you know what kind of tricks this development studio is willing to pull. I actually find RCA 1/2 is some of the most effective horror tension I've seen in Roblox games, and that is pretty impressive.

I will echo Cooper's sentiments about the storyline:

unsure what they're going for with the storyline, because it's very clear they are going for A Storyline. there's some elements of pseudo-ARG here, and it sounds like there's multiple endings to these games? but it's all a little too cryptic and i don't wanna tab out and pull up a cipher website just to figure out what's going on. maybe some people are willing to do it but it's not for me.

The actual narrative itself I didn't find particularly engaging or drawing enough to make me want to investigate its secrets; there's hints, but I didn't want to take the time to flip between the game and a cipher tool to transcribe it by hand. However, if you want a Roblox horror game that makes you feel scared because you have no idea what the hell is going on, this does a pretty damn good job of it.

I will say these games are a bit formulaic, but the buildup is intriguing enough in my opinion.

i wonder why they have "lobbies" when they seem to be perfectly capable of holding up as singleplayer experiences; maybe additional players would affect the story? i worry multiple players would disrupt the delicately-balanced atmosphere they've crafted here.

Guts & Blackpowder

this game has one of the coolest concepts for a Roblox game i think i've ever seen. basically, this is a zombie survival game that takes place during the Napoleonic Wars. which means you fight off thick hordes of zombies using muskets and swords.

yes, the guns take like, 5-10 seconds to reload after firing a single shot. the loss of a few people can compromise the whole team easily. the game is so high stakes, and promotes teamwork like no other - you'd be hard pressed to find a roblox game where people are more committed to sticking together and working as a team; at times it feels like a sense of camaraderie.

there's an incredible attention to detail here, from the clothing design (provided by DrLivesey) to the architecture, to the fact they have voice acting in French and German. i actually eyed this game for a while before i played it because i get worried anytime i see a Roblox game that centers around military history and aesthetics, but actually this game seems fine on this front. i really admire the developers' passion and dedication to the topic here.

one of the most entertaining parts of the game, however, is the chat. i think this subject matter (military history, zombies, gore) attracts an older audience than your typical Roblox game, and as a result the people are way more talkative. this combined with the stakes, the aesthetic of the game, that camaraderie i mentioned earlier, means that most people in this game are either roleplaying or arguing.

when i say roleplaying, it's a very light form of roleplay; interactions like "ty" and "np" get expanded into whatever the person thinks a 19th century French soldier translated to English would say. i always thank my surgeons and rescuers in this game because a solid portion of the time the other person has some video game NPC dialogue-tier response ready. my favorites so far are the people who roleplay as priests when assuming the chaplain role.

even when people argue it's incredibly amusing. some people will argue in-character. some people will voice their fears like a character would and get into fake arguments about those feelings. there are of course some edgelords in this game (again, the subject matter) but you find those in any Roblox game.

in general i find this game to be really well-made and a great way to kill time. there's some stuff that is exclusive to gamepasses but it's not a pay-to-win game by any means in my opinion.

Authentic Fun

Whew! That's a lot more words than most people are willing to write about Roblox games, huh? If it isn't obvious, I tend to approach Roblox games with a level of critical analysis and sincerity, much like how I approach everything else. Call it my trademark, I guess.

A while back, I wanted to make a Roblox group called "Authentic Fun". The goal of "Authentic Fun" was to look for enjoyable Roblox games that weren't completely reliant on "dark patterns" (those game design techniques that gamedevs use to get you addicted to spending time/money on games). As secondary objectives, the group would've focused on developing an eye for critiquing Roblox games like they are a medium worthy of respect (or art! Because they are these things!), and making games that fit these expectations.

I did not make this group because I don't want to moderate a Roblox community. Sorry. (If you've ever been in a Roblox-related Discord server, you might understand why.) However, I have been thinking about the goals of this hypothetical group lately, and recently I scribbled up a new logo design for it because I didn't like the one I had before. Here is that new logo:

Effectively, this article is like a "test run" of the kind of analysis and opinion sharing I would expect out of Authentic Fun. It doesn't have to be this level of depth, mind you, but I wanted to write about some Roblox games I liked and why I like them.

At some point in the future, I may make a mini website for Authentic Fun, which I would like to attach to the IHATEART website when it eventually releases. (Here is where you can learn more about IHATEART, an artist community run by my friends.)

The Office Roleplay

Did you know there's no office job roleplay games on Roblox? This REALLY surprised me.

At some point I started picking away at a development place for an office job roleplay game. You know how I mentioned in the "the waiting room" section that I like games that lack major mechanical systems but have lots of small mechanics? I want this hypothetical office roleplay to be sort of like that, where most of the mechanics are related to item interaction and computer UIs and whatnot.

Development has slowed on this, but I made it so you get your own cubicle in a big cubicle office room, you have to wear a business suit, and you have a coffee mug you can sip from. I have an idea of what the first publicly releasable version of the game would look like, but it's a bit hard for me to focus on Roblox building.

Here are some development screenshots from this work-in-progress game.

Special Thanks

Thank you to my friends over at Eggware.XYZ, specifically the IHATEART community, for listening to me talk about Roblox games for countless hours.

My friend Mortis has been doing some blogging-type posting on their own forums, which, combined with me making a personal Tumblr for my random thoughts in text post form, has been giving me the motivation to blog again. Go check out Mortis's works, many of which can be found on the Homebrew Deviants website!

Here's that other post again: Art, The Smiley Tribute, what I've been up to

-Desmond (and cooper)