I’m deciding to refocus my personal time on projects in the broader Luau ecosystem and my personal projects, rather than Roblox.
This is a strange post to write - Roblox tool development has served me incredibly well. I’ve been lucky enough to make a great thing out of plugin and package development; it’s covered my rent every month and it’s been consistent for me. If I were a ruthless capitalist, perhaps I’d ride out the income until it dried up.
But I respect you more than that.
The truth of the matter is that, since starting my day job last summer, I’ve found myself immersed in Roblox day in and day out. It’s great work! I enjoy it massively. But I don’t wish to take it back home with me.
Instead, I’ve found greater inspiration in the world of things that live outside of the engine. Whether that’s learning about voxel engines with Daydream, or thinking about the future of UI and declarative programming with Fusion, I’ve realised that’s what I want to spend my time on.
So I’m going to quit while I’m ahead. My Roblox projects continue to be massively successful, but I’m happy with where they’ve gone and what they’ve inspired in others. I like to say that “enough” is the most powerful word in the world; I think I have found “enough”.
What happens next
I plan to wind down Studio Elttob, which has been the brand under which all of my Roblox-only projects have lived.
This will involve opening up most of its products, cancelling in-progress projects, and rehousing some others.
- Cancelled: The Elttob Atmos and Elttob InCommand plugins have been cancelled.
- There was so much in the in-progress builds of Atmos that I was genuinely proud of! - but I don’t feel compelled to work on these projects at this stage.
- Cancelled: The VOLUMIKA 2 project has been cancelled.
- While this was already somewhat functional, I struggled with performance issues for a long time, and those haven’t been resolved.
- Opened up: The following paid products will enjoy extended support until 1 September 2025, at which point they’ll be opened up to the community so that everyone can benefit from them. This includes:
- Elttob Relight
- Elttob Reclass
- All Classic Suite plugins
- VOLUMIKA
- Continuing: Fusion will continue development, but:
- Studio Elttob branding will be removed from the project.
- The FusionKit for Roblox project has been cancelled.
- Fusion’s Roblox APIs will continue to be supported, but will be modularised over time to allow Fusion to be used for general purpose Luau development.
- Opened up: Vanilla 4 for Roblox Studio will be opened up:
- Vanilla 4 for Roblox Studio will be opened up to the community, but new icons won’t be designed.
- The Vanilla compiler, previously internal and proprietary, will be open sourced.
- Going private: Vanilla itself will be taken private:
- Plans for a commercial Vanilla icon set have been dropped.
- The Vanilla icons will return to being a personal icon set for my own projects.
My new priorities
With Studio Elttob going away, I can sharpen my focus on my remaining projects.
Front burner: Daydream
Daydream can be traced all the way back to some of my earliest Roblox projects back in 2012/13. Since then, it’s enjoyed multiple transformations:
- Becoming the first infinite voxel engine on Roblox capable of Minecraft-scale worlds in 2016
- Having its technology repurposed for the monumentally successful Blox in 2019
- Developing into a highly-optimised engine for Blox Survival in 2021
- Being spun off of Roblox into the standalone Project Stockholm, now called Daydream, where it is today!
In many ways, Daydream is the one project I’ve wanted to work on for the longest. It’s also the most educational project I’ve ever worked on; originally used to learn about the basics of voxel engines, then teaching me so much more about high-performance Luau and game optimisation, and now serving as a vehicle for me to learn computer graphics, GPU programming, and low-level engine development.
I’m more motivated to work on Daydream now than I’ve ever been before. I love it so much.
So, I’m now focusing my efforts on Daydream first and foremost, to give it the time of day that it deserves. I’ll continue to work on the Daydream YouTube series so that I can educate more people about the myriad of interesting computer science problems that arise from it. Perhaps one day, it’ll even be something you can play! But I’m not thinking that far ahead yet.
Back burner: Fusion
I still believe in Fusion as the ultimate companion for Luau development and remain committed to providing support for it. I also still intend to take Fusion further than where it is today, though I can’t say that I’ll do so on an expedited schedule.
I think Fusion is overall in a good place after the push to get 0.3 out the door. From here, things look to mostly be performance work and ergonomic tweaks, and some project restructuring.
As a little treat; I currently plan to use Fusion and Luau inside of Daydream! I want to build a complete non-Roblox UI using it. I’ve even been floating the idea of rebuilding the whole documentation website in Fusion one day, but that’s more of a wishful thought.
And that’s it
All of my other existing projects aren’t going to be actively developed. That doesn’t mean they’re over, and it doesn’t mean I won’t start more of them - it just means I won’t touch any particular project unless I have a motivation to.
I’m making a point of paring down my active projects to exactly two, because that’s where I think I’m happiest right now. If I don’t make progress on other projects, I’m fine with that. Daydream and Fusion are where I want to push right now.
This doesn’t mean I’m leaving the Roblox community, by the way. I have a whole lot of Roblox knowledge and I’m incredibly interested in the future of the platform. I want to help build Roblox up to be the best place it can be, so you’ll still see my username around.
It’s just that the user in question will be a hobbyist, not a full time creator :)