by TmanDaCool.
SPEED RUN 15 is a Roblox game (it’s completely free, but you do need to sign up for a free Roblox account first). Recently, I’ve been getting into Roblox in a big way – there is so much interesting stuff happening on the platform, and I would love to start covering some of it here.
Unfortunately, Roblox games really push against what I think of as the “rules” for this site –
- I prefer to highlight recent releases, and it seems there’s really no good way to keep track of newly released Roblox games. By the time games hit the up-and-coming category, they’ve often been out for months, slowly spreading by word of mouth.
- I also prefer to highlight “finished” games, rather than demos or prototypes – but on Roblox, it feels like almost everything on the platform is in a kind of perpetual early access, more updates always coming soon.
- “Free” is a pretty important concept to me too, and while virtually everything on the platform can be played for free, even throwaway joke games will often let you pay 20 Robux (about 7 cents) for a fidget spinner or whatever. So that’s confusing.
But my own recent experiments on the platform have made me determined to figure out how to talk about all this, because there’s a whole universe of amazing creative work on here that is largely not getting talked about in my circles of game development. Roblox is making game development accessible to millions of people, many of them kids. Not only is it providing an excellent (free!) tool to make games with, it’s giving people the power to create their own online spaces for their friends – which is a particularly big deal with the pandemic.
So, SPEED RUN 15, then!
- Because this game was made as an April Fool’s joke, it gives me a rare chance to talk about a Roblox game that’s just come out.
- It’s also (probably?) not getting any updates, so it’s finished (the dead end in the Baudi stage is the end, I think, unless I’m missing something)
- And while at first glance it appears to have microtransations, it’s actually just making fun of microtransations. Excellent!
This is a 3D platformer (or Obby, as they’re called on Roblox) with the player speed dialled all the way up to 11. It’s incredibly dumb and hilarious and only a few minutes long, which I think makes it a perfect introduction to the platform.
[Play on Roblox (account signup required)]
(and if you’re new to Roblox, and want some suggestions for what to play next, I recommend Goldie’s recent medium post, where she talks about her experiences discovering Roblox over the past year, and lists some of her favourite games.)