Are Roblox’s new AI coding and art tools the future of game development?
Enlarge / All these characters were generated directly by human developers, but future Roblox content may rely more on AI-generation tools. (credit: Roblox)
SAN FRANCISCO-At the Game Developers Conference Monday, Roblox rolled out a new set of AI tools designed to let the company's millions of player-creators create usable game code and in-game 2D surfaces using nothing but simple text descriptions.
Head of Roblox Studio Stef Corazza told a packed audience at the conference that the release is a major step toward "democratizing" game creation, taking it from "the hands of the skilled few" and giving it to people "who were blocked by technical hurdles but had a great idea" that they were previously unable to express without highly specialized skills.
Create a 3 by 3 grid of orbs"The release of the Roblox Code Assist beta Monday morning certainly seems to have the potential to let users create simple code snippets with a minimum of effort. In an example Corazza presented at the conference, a user could ask the system to "make orb turn red and destroy after 0.3 seconds when player touches it." The system then generates a seven-line Lua function that does just that, based on a coder-defined orb object provided earlier in the code.