Everything Coming to Roblox This Year: 2023 Creator Roadmap + Q&A Highlights

The 2023 Creator Roadmap shows a full comprehensive list of features and capabilities Roblox has planned to “make creation easier and more immersive” on the platform.

Over the past month, Roblox has released their four-part Creator Roadmap series, showcasing what features and tools they are planning to release over the course of the year to help Creators create next-generation content on the platform. The Creator Roadmap is not a comprehensive list of all upcoming features, and the details of the proposed features may change or some may not launch at all. Launch windows, e.g. (Mid 2023), are approximate and subject to change.

Dont feel like reading? Check out my latest YouTube video below where I summarize everything listed on the 2023 Creator Roadmap:

Roblox also held an “Ask Me Anything” session on the Developer Forum to allow Creators to go more in-depth and ask questions to Roblox engineering team about everything listed on the Creator Roadmap. All highlights and key questions answered can be found at the bottom of this post.

Part 1: Create However You Want

Roblox aims to make it easy and intuitive for everyone to express themselves. Whether you’re building experiences or designing accessories, Roblox will support more ways for you to create.

Easy creation, optimized for your ideal workflows

Roblox’s vision is to provide powerful, flexible workflows for creators to build next-generation immersive 3D experiences and user-generated content (UGC). Roblox is building a foundation that will make it easier than ever to create high quality content, while adding flexibility to your day-to-day tasks. Roblox is also exploring ways they can open the platform in a stable, supported, and future-proof way.

• Selection Improvements, Explorer Search Filter, and Multi-Cursor in Script Editor — Full release thanks to your beta
• Drag Detectors Beta — Make objects in your experience draggable and interactive without scripting (Mid 2023)
• Camera Speed and Rotation — Easier control while moving the camera (Mid 2023)
• Next Generation Studio Ribbon — A completely redesigned Studio Ribbon with easy access to the tools and plugins that best match your unique workflows (Late 2023)
• Live Scripting Beta — Script collaboratively with streamlined version history, like editing a cloud document with your team (Late 2023)
• Window Context Cues — See the Place name in addition to your current tab name in the Studio window title (Late 2023)
• Better Support for Your Tools and Workflows — Upcoming support for your preferred tools and workflows to promote efficient creation, including any external software you may use, starting with glTF support (Ongoing)

Studio will address long-standing bugs and pain points

Studio is a professional tool supporting long periods of sustained creation. Roblox is investing heavily in both bug fixes and quality of life improvements that will make Studio more functional and reliable.

• Studio Docking — Improved widget docking thanks to your feedback (Mid 2023)
• Faster Play Launch Times — Test your experience in less than 2 seconds (Mid 2023)
• Improve Team Create Join Time — Start working on your experience, of any size, faster (Late 2023)
• Terrain Customization — Adding the ability to customize the height of grass (Mid 2023)
• Script Editor — Better general performance in large code bases and for operations like find/replace all (Mid 2023)
• Script Diff Window — Additions like side-by-side view, copy/paste, 1-click merge, and edits in recovery mode (Mid 2023)
• Custom Logging — Allowing you to pass error locations through pcalls (Late 2023)

Create rich and lifelike worlds

Roblox is releasing aerodynamic simulation as their first fluid dynamics force, enabling completely new types of physically-accurate content. Roblox is also significantly improving Future lighting’s performance so that it can be enabled on Android and made the default lighting model.

• Global Wind — A new property to add more richness to your worlds with grass, clouds, and even falling leaves that move with the wind (Mid 2023)
• Lift and Drag Beta — Aerodynamic properties, such as air density, to better simulate flight for objects like wingsuits (Mid 2023)
• Future Lighting Android Beta — Future lighting model available as a beta feature on Android devices (Mid 2023)
• Future Lighting Studio Default — Future lighting as the default lighting model, boosting the visual quality of experiences for more creators (Late 2023)

Cloud creation improves collaboration and reliability

Large, lifelike worlds will require heavy computational power and vast amounts of storage to create. Offloading these needs to the cloud will ensure that you can reliably create megascale experiences without disruption, while collaborating with teams of any size.

• Team Create Invitations — See invite notifications and share URLs to send collaborators directly to your Place in Studio (Mid 2023)
• Collaborator Activity — View who’s actively contributing to your experiences from the Start page (Mid 2023)
• Team Create Assets — Access newly uploaded assets without needing to restart (Mid 2023)
• Studio Reconnection — Automatically reconnect after a temporary connectivity loss (Late 2023)
• Enhance Drafts — Collaborative Edit for scripts with better data management (Late 2023)

Generative AI accelerates creation

Roblox is building Generative AI tools to scale your creation efforts and let you focus on the aspects that matter most. This technology will help you build faster, iterate more, and augment your skills to create even better content. These are the features currently available in open beta.

• Material Generator Full Release — Quickly generate visually-compelling materials using natural language (Late 2023)
• Code Assist Full Release — Powerful code generation tool for both experienced and new scripters (Late 2023)

Avatar creation and Marketplace

Avatars are a core part of Roblox. From using them to communicate to creating your own, our avatar features mimic real-life communication, empower self-expression, and drive creation. Here are some of the features Roblox will be enabling to create a community-led Marketplace where any creator can make an avatar that is expressive, communicative, and personalized:

• glTF File Support — Import avatar rigs in standard formats (Mid 2023)
• Improved Avatar Face and Body Tooling — Enhancing how you can import, create, and publish avatar assets (Late 2023)
• Bodies and Animated Faces — Members of the UGC Program and later all creators will be able to create items in the Marketplace including bodies and animated faces (Mid 2023)
• Community-led Marketplace — Everyone can publish avatar items to the Marketplace, including Limiteds (Late 2023)

Discuss your thoughts with the community in the original announcement on the Developer Forum.

Part 2: Grow and Engage Your Audience

Did you know that 100 of the top 150 experiences were created last year? Roblox is working to making it easier for new experiences to build a global audience and give you tools to engage and retain users.

Roblox Home page connects you with your ideal audience

The Roblox Home page connects people with experiences that they will love, and will help you find your ideal audience. Every user’s Home page connects them to new experiences through a state-of-the-art recommendation engine. Roblox aims to make it easier for every experience to engage and grow their user base by recommending the experience to the right audience.

• Continuous Home — Improving discovery on the Home page through an extended, continually scrollable feed (Mid 2023)
• Social and Contextual Descriptors — Labels like Friend presence in the experience and Genre to distinguish different types of experiences on the Home page (Late 2023)
• Recommendation Algorithm Improvements — Enabling up-and-coming experiences to reach their audience faster (Ongoing)

Powerful search and browse capabilities

Roblox is empowering users to explore a variety of content that matches their interests and passions, and be able to find anything that exists on the platform. These improved discovery tools will deliver more relevant traffic to your experience and help new experiences get discovered more quickly.

• Dynamic Filters — A community-requested feature that will enable users to find your experience based on genre or tag (Mid 2023)
• Algorithmically-Generated Categories and Sorts — Highlighting new, high quality, and trending experiences (Mid 2023)
• Combined Search & Discovery — Merging Discover functionality with Search to simplify navigation. Search, browse, and filter all in one place (Mid 2023)
• Semantic Similarity Search — Improving results through context, especially for non-english queries (Mid 2023)

Match users to the best server

Matchmaking is at the heart of Roblox’s vision for connecting people. Roblox abstracts away the complexity of game server management and use signals like friends, latency, language, age, and server occupancy to direct users to the server most likely to maximize engagement.

• Improved Scalability — Better support for large traffic spikes (Mid 2023)
• Auto-Reconnect — Connect players to the same server following an update (Late 2023)
• Flexible Join Destination — Send your users to non-root places when they join (Late 2023)
• Friend Invites — Groups of friends can easily connect to the same server (Late 2023)

Re-engage your community through notifications

Developer-driven Invites are a new way to customize and improve the invite experience for users, and some creators are already reporting a 10x increase in players joining their friends. Roblox aims to make it even easier for you to reach your community, and help you optimize the value of each notification.

• Real-Time Experience Invites — Send invitations to players who are currently active on Roblox (Live)
• Notification Analytics — Additional aggregated data provided via Creator Analytics (Late 2023)
• Universal Experience Notifications API — Create any kind of notification for your experiences, beyond just invites (Late 2023)
• Notification Insights — Automated suggestions to help improve the efficiency of your messages (2024)

Break down language barriers

Roblox strives to empower all our users to communicate with one another, regardless of language. By dissolving communication barriers, Roblox will help your community stay more closely connected, which will lead to increased engagement.

• Automatic Chat Translations — In-experience chat automatically translated to supported languages (Late 2023)
• In-Experience Translation Feedback — Allow users to share suggestions on ways you can improve your localization quality (Late 2023)
• Translated Documentation — Adding support for 7 languages (including Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese) so you can read in your preferred language (Mid 2023)
• New Regions — Support for seven new locales on platform by the end of the year (Late 2023)

Discuss your thoughts with the community in the original announcement on the Developer Forum.

Part 3: Benefit from a Growing Creator Ecosystem

Roblox will support you with a thriving ecosystem that simplifies the challenging aspects of creation. These offerings will enhance your productivity, maintain a safe and civil platform, and offer you new ways to earn.

Roblox Cloud helps you scale

Roblox Cloud will support a broader application ecosystem through a set of flexible and secure web APIs. Roblox envisions a world where you’ll be able to automate workflows through scripts, publish via the command line, or create bots to help manage your community.

• OAuth2 Public Release — Log in to third-party services (eg analytics or community management bots) using your Roblox account (Mid 2023)
• Inventory API — Check if a user owns an item (Mid 2023)
• Group API — A new way to manage groups (Mid 2023)
• Simplify ‘Right to be Forgotten’ (GDPR) Process — Reference solution that uses Webhooks and Open Cloud Data Store APIs to automatically process incoming requests (Mid 2023)
• Cloud Service Management — Additional visibility and customization for services like Memory Stores (Late 2023)
• Universe APIs — Update the metadata, such as the description, for your experience (Early 2024)

Accelerate creation

Creator Marketplace contains millions of high-quality assets, but it’s not always easy to find them. Roblox aims to connect you with the perfect asset for any occasion and ensure everything you find in the Creator Marketplace is safe to use. Roblox has also heard your feedback about Creator Marketplace monetization, and are working hard on a plan to improve earnings for asset creators.

• Richer Audio Discovery — Category support in Studio and Web (Mid 2023)
• Improved Search — Find assets using descriptive language like ‘red convertible car’ or ‘ambient restaurant sounds’ (Mid 2023)
• List View Beta — Making it easier to browse large asset collections in Toolbox (Late 2023)
• Additional Spam & Plagiarism Protections — More rigorous plagiarism detection and punishments for repeat offenders (Late 2023)
• Personalized Asset Recommendations — Discover assets based on the content in your experience (Late 2023)

Balanced safety and moderation

Roblox’s safety features, tools, and moderation capabilities have been built into the design of our product. Roblox is continuing to work to make those capabilities smarter and stronger over time and will be investing more heavily in the detection and prevention of in-experience exploits.

• Moderation Precision — We are working hard to lessen the burden of asset moderation while keeping the community safe (Ongoing)
• Anti-Cheat — Improving client-side and server-side anti-cheat, and giving you more ways to identify and block cheaters using Byfron’s technology (Mid 2023)
• Alt-Account Detection — Take action on repeat offenders and help us combat exploiters on Roblox (Late 2023)
• Relaxed Text Filter — Optionally adjust rules for experiences that are rated 13+ (Late 2023)

More ways to earn and advertise

Roblox recently introduced Immersive Ads, which allow developers to place high-quality, native ad units in their experience. These innovative ad units offer a new way for you to publish and earn from advertisements.

• Immersive Ads — Providing a new path for you to monetize your experiences. We expect CPMs to increase as more advertisers participate and more developers serve ads in their experiences (Early 2023)
• Ads Manager — Create Immersive Ads with our self-serve Ads Manager tool for ad creation, management, reporting and billing (Mid 2023)
• Sponsored Ads Improvements — Better targeting, reporting, and delivery for your sponsored ads (2024)

Discuss your thoughts with the community in the original announcement on the Developer Forum.

Part 4: Creator Hub is your Key to Success

Roblox is equipping you with all the information you need to maximize your success with open-source documentation, actionable recommendations to grow your experience, and timely notifications when your attention is needed.

Learn, connect, and create with one another

Creation on Roblox is constantly evolving, and Roblox strives to make it easy for users of all skill levels to learn and grow with the platform. In the coming year, Roblox will improve documentation coverage and quality, expand the Level Up series, grow the Creator events program, and support Creators who are making next generation experiences.

• Tutorials — Learn with tutorials and reference projects for building, scripting, and 3D Art. (Mid 2023)
• Open-Source Documentation — Anyone in the community will be able to contribute to Creator Documentation (Late 2023)
• Docs Available in Studio — Access advice and code samples directly from Studio (Late 2023)
• Game Fund — Supporting creators who want to build the next generation of Roblox experiences with a $35 million investment (Ongoing)

Actionable insights to grow your experience

Many top Roblox creators already use analytics to grow their experiences, but data can be overwhelming. Roblox wants to offer everyone the power of a trusted data analyst, to help you interpret complicated data patterns and know what actions to take next.

• Performance Monitoring — See live user stats, frame rate, memory usage, and more (Mid 2023)
• Actionable Insights — Celebrate new milestones and identify opportunities to grow your experience, along with personalized advice (Mid 2023)
• Error Reporting — Identify and fix issues with the help of Lua error reports (Mid 2023)
• In-Experience Schema — Instrument to unlock funnels and level progression (Late 2023)
• API Support — A new Open Cloud API for direct, easy access to analytics data (2024)

Notifications and personalization keep you informed

It’s important to know what’s going on with your assets, experiences, collaborators, and the platform at large. This information allows you to take the right actions at the right time, and Roblox want to make it even simpler to take advantage of insights and customize them.

• Expanded Notifications — Get informed about critical events like a spike in crash rates, a collaboration invite, or a ‘right to be forgotten’ request (Ongoing)
• Creator Hub Homepage — View everything important to you — such as experience management, top-line analytics, and more — together, in one view (Mid 2023)
• Expanded Creator Hub Homepage — Personalized insights unique to you from across all of Creator Hub. This includes: analytical insights, Talent Hub applications, Forum responses, and more, as well as light mode! (Late 2023)
• Creator Notifications in Studio — Access notifications directly from Studio, and support new use cases like collaboration invitations (Late 2023)

Collaborate more efficiently as a team

Most top experiences are developed by teams, and Roblox wants to make it even easier for you to collaborate. Talent Hub will help you connect with people to grow your team, and Roblox is re-building ‘Groups’ from the ground up to make it easier to manage permissions.

• Reputation Ranking in Talent Hub — See more listings from reputable employers and creators (Mid 2023)
• Experience Ownership Transfer — Transfer ownership to another individual or team (Mid 2023)
• Organizations and Permissions — Assign specific Experience-access permissions to collaborators, like limiting analytics access to error reporting (Late 2023)
• Asset Privacy and Permissions — Enable asset privacy, sharing, & collaboration capabilities for all asset types (2024)

Ask Me Anything: The Important Questions

Now that the Creator Roadmap is complete, Chief Product Officer Manuel Bronstein and Chief Technology Officer Daniel Sturman hosted an “Ask me Anything” session on the Developer Forum that allowed Creators to ask in-depth questions revolving around everything listed on the Creator Roadmap. Here are all of the key highlights and questions answered during that session…

Q: Roblox is planning on making UGC public. How will Roblox be able to manage and moderate the amount of new Creator’s creations? [original post]

A: With the launch of UGC Limiteds, we are improving our automated moderation, including duplicate detection. We will be opening up creation only to creators that we can verify and are in good standing. With Limited items, we are also learning about the impact that upfront payments have on the legitimacy of the items that people are creating and we will use these learnings when we open UGC creation for all. [original post]

Q: I was wondering if you guys have expansion to more console platforms (PS4/5, Nintendo Switch, etc) on the horizon. I would love if there was a renewed focus towards making Roblox on consoles the best it possibly can be. What about a standalone Roblox VR app? [original post]

A: Our goal is to make Roblox available on any relevant device or platform. Our vision for the Universal Roblox App is to have a seamless and consistent experience on every device that, at the same time, captures the richness and uniqueness of each device. Console is a big area of focus for us and we will continue to improve the experience there. We believe VR offers great opportunities for immersion and shared experiences. Stay tuned for future announcements. [original post]

Q: Would Roblox ever be getting an official FPS Unlocker that is built in? Will there ever be any optimizations done to the engine to increase performance? [original post]

A: Yes, we’re actively working on unblocking frame rate. Separately, we’re always working to improve our performance! In the past few months, we’ve improved the performance of fundamental Luau operations like table.sort and math.floor/ceil, we improved avatar load times by ~16% (P50), reduced memory usage in part of our physics system by 70%, and more. [original post]

Q: What are the plans for improving the Inventory system? Even when Inventories are set to private, anyone is still able to find our assets. [original post]

A: We want creators to be in control of how their content is used, whether they are on-platform or off-platform creators. We’re actively working on extending the asset privacy feature, which we launched with audio last year, to other asset types (focused on images, meshes, and models) so developers can avoid leaks and ensure only authorized use of their assets. [original post]

Q: What happened to VideoFrames? When can we expect them to become available? [original post]

A: For video, we hear you, and we’ve been working on making video available to all creators for a while–it’s a very hard problem (safety, global distribution at scale, etc.)! We plan on releasing the first version later this year and improving it over the next year. [original post]

Q: Regarding the Open Source Documentation, how will developers be able to contribute to it, as well as that, do you intend on developers being able to document their own libraries, frameworks etc. on the Creator Hub? [original post]

A: Our initial focus will be to improve the quality and coverage of Roblox platform documentation and best practices. We will eventually expand to include documentation on community generated libraries and frameworks. Once open source docs launch, edit links will become available to developers on the docs site. Any edits will result in a Github PR, which will be reviewed and approved by internal tech writers or engineers. This will ensure completeness and accuracy of information we share with our larger creator community. [original post]

Q: One of the biggest pain points has been paying out these developers percentages of revenue on a per game basis. Currently, we cannot automate this and there’s concern that there is no accurate way to do this at all. When can we have the ability to send out recurring group payouts per game instead of the entire group? [original post]

A: Sharing revenue is a common frustration for many creators. We are actively working on a complete overhaul of the ‘groups’ system, and this foundation will eventually make it easier to pay your collaborators. We hope to have more specifics to share later this year. [original post]

Q: I’m curious about what could be the future of UI Design using the Roblox Engine. I feel that we don’t have much options, especially for UI built directly on Studio to really be created into something we want, apart from the cool things we can use (like UIGradients and Strokes which are both amazing in their own regard.) Do you think UI will be more customizable at some point? [original post]

A: Yes, we want even better and more customizable UI systems. Today, we provide flexible, low-level access, and you all have built impressive systems on this, such as Elttob’s Fusion UI framework. We’re working on three areas to improve our built-in framework: more controls (like sliders–we want you to have the best!), better customization with a stylesheet system, and dynamic layouts that scale across all platforms we support with no extra work on your end. We expect to release stylesheets and more controls this year and dynamic layouts afterwards. [original post]

Q: Roblox’s stance appears to be to enable users to use external tooling for many things like animation, modelling, UI, and just about everything except scripting, which is being pushed to use in-studio tooling only. What changes will be made to support external scripting tooling, and generally using the filesystem? [original post]

A: We want our creators to use the best tool for the job and that does include external script editors and source control. We are working on a way to seamlessly expose files from Studio to support script editors, source control, etc but also doesn’t lead to inconsistencies in Studio, Team Create and our cloud APIs. Right now this work is in the design phase. We’ll keep you posted and give you an update at RDC. [original post]

These are only the top few of the many questions answered during the Ask Me Anything session. To view the full list, check out the Activity feeds on the Developer Forum for Dan and Manuel.