I played a large amount of Roblox growing up and did a variety of things on the platform. It taught me a lot and gave me fun memories with friends and learning skills early on that I would've never been able to know otherwise. During the mentioned time, I combined a lot of the skills I'd picked up in the Roblox ecosystem to run a Roblox game studio; it's given me lasting memories because I got to involve friends in the operation.
This was a project that I ran during school and was mainly a way for my group of friends to work on something together. I led most of the efforts: directing our development and roadmap. We initially made a few games on our own that did well, hitting the front page of some Roblox game categories (for a short period).
The games we made weren't that innovative or good (they were slop in retrospect, lol). We just did remixes and iterations of currently existing game formats; this made development time and updating much easier. This was a deliberate choice that we made knowing what kinds of games people liked on Roblox.
After we had some success in our games, the funds were used to get involved in other upcoming games. This was because through me and friends, we knew lots of other people we found cool working on their own games. Some of them were newer devs, that e.g., needed help with scripting or didn't want to manage things like monetization or communities. We would join game projects we found interesting and help with technical or operational aspects.
It sounds generic but genuinely my favroite part was making updates/changes and hoping players would react well. It involved parts like developing fast in of itself but also methodologies on finding out what users wanted. This was part of the reasoning behind not trying to make the game unnecessarily complex or innovative without user feedback. The goal was to iterate through their feedback quickly. The most successful game in Roblox history "Grow a Garden" which was released in 2025 also utilizes this concept of simplicity.
Towards the end of 2020 I had moved on to some other interests, so I passed leading our group to one of my close friends that was highly competent. After a few more months, our game studio was eventually was disbanded; this wasn't due to the new leader but rather that most of our friend group had grown more experienced, older, and connected, which led to everyone having their own self-interests in Roblox to pursue. I'm not upset over that, rather I'm happy our project was fruitful and let us have a large impact on Roblox. The close friend that I had let lead is now one of the biggest Roblox developers, with many others going to do cool things in the ecosystem as well!.