Today, I would like to share the story behind my hit Roblox game, BattleMania, which has been played 1,600,000+ times at the time of writing.

I’m sure that there are people ahead of me, who have games with multiple millions of plays, who I admire. But for me, this is a really great achievement.

So, I decided to write this article to inspire aspiring game developers.

Here is the story behind BattleMania.

The Idea

Totally Accurate Battle Simulator

One summer day, my brother and I were bored.

I had been on hiatus from Roblox development for 2 years, as I was building Quizzy, my startup that helps students study more efficiently for their tests. I was learning all sorts of web development and web design in order to build Quizzy.

I worked on Quizzy for about 2 years until I slowly let it go, due to not seeing as many results from all of my hard work.

And since I wasn’t working on anything at the time, I was free and bored.

So, my brother kept telling me “you should play TABS.”

And, I’m a reluctant person when it comes to trying new things. So of course, I said “nah, it’s probably boring.”

But he knew that I was like that, so he kept saying “just play it bro, it’ll be fun.”

So I hesitantly went on YouTube and searched for “Totally Accurate Battle Simulator“, ready to exit out of the first video due to it being boring.

But as soon as I saw the concept of the game, I was thrilled.

In TABS, you choose some troops, and you click the battle button to start battling.

So I began playing.

I played for 1-2 hours before I stopped, which was a huge record for me. I tend to get bored after 6 minutes of playing a game.

And I actually played through for a few days because of how much I liked the game.

BattleMania Started as a Joke

My brother saw me playing it one day, and he asked me “what if you made this game in Roblox?”

And we were both laughing at it.

• “haha you could record all of the voice effects”
• “you could make your own troops and your own attacks”
• “it will succeed because TABS is fun and it succeeded”

3 days later, I began working on a new Roblox game for the first time in 2 years.

Somehow, I still remembered how to script in Lua.

I remember the day I began working on the game, I was like “Ah boy I probably forgot how to script, since my mind has only been thinking React JS and SCSS for these past 2 years.”

But I did it. I opened up Studio and I just experienced flow.

The feeling of having a new game idea and the motivation carried me for 2 entire hours, where I just coded, without a care in the world. It was amazing.

I feel like that’s a feeling that modern vibe coders do not experience as much.

My brother came to see what I was doing, and he was like “Wait. Why are you on Roblox Studio?”

I said “look”

He said “wow you’re actually making TABS in Roblox?”

“Yup.”

BattleMania Development

After the 3rd day or so, I had a Roblox game where you can select troops and place them down.

BattleMania actually initially started with troops like “Talking Ben” and random characters I had found on the Toolbox.

But, I wanted to avoid copyright issues, so we made our own issues.

Enter Zewenix

A little while after I had began developing the game, a very skilled 3D modeler named Zewenix joined the team.

And we worked together. I received 3D models, and I scripted them into BattleMania.

I received the Cannon and Hwacha as the first custom character 3D models into BattleMania.

After having received the 2 troops, I was super excited! This was my first time being able to work with custom characters.

I was so excited to script these on Roblox. I remember I would grind development of the game from 3 PM -5 PM, and then from 6 PM -9 PM. I didn’t have a care in the world of anything else. I just wanted to make cool stuff.

The grind eventually persisted consistently, where I was working for 6-8 hours every single day. I loved every bit of it.

“Working 8 hours is a very long time to work for. But if it’s working on something you’re genuinely interested in, it will fly by.”

Over the year, development continued, and we added more and more troops, while I perfected the battling system to be able to handle hundreds of troops.

1 Month into Development

By September 12, 2023, the game was developed to a state where there were plenty of troops to try out and battles work well.

This is a video of the game and its state a month into development.

Now, if you’re a beginner Roblox developer, it might seem very impressive that I was able to get the game to this state in only a month, but remember that I have been scripting since 2016. I already had years and years of experience.

If you do continue learning Roblox game development, which you can do through my free scripting articles on my blog and my book, you’ll also be able to create really awesome games on Roblox.

3 Months into Development

After 3 months into development, we had formed the base structure of the game.

We added the ability for every troop to have its own level, experience, and unlocked moves, based on its level.

Here’s a picture of the new summary GUI that I developed.

We also added the ability to have your own inventory of troops, and the ability to equip up to 10 troops at a time.

Seeing all of the summaries of the troops was very exciting. I loved being able to have a troop in my inventory and see all of its stats and its future attacks.

This was so awesome. As I’m reminiscing this while writing this, I remember how much fun this was. I had a blast.

At this point, I had enjoyed the process of developing BattleMania more than the goal of what it could be.

I think this is a really big idea that you should take away from my story.

At this time, I wasn’t thinking about the money the game could bring or the player count or anything like that. I was thinking “oh my god its so much fun to see all of the troop summaries and all their attacks.”

“This game that started as a joke is becoming a huge reality”

And it was all thanks to my and Zewenix’s hard work.

All of those months of development. They didn’t feel like a chore “I have to do this.”

They felt like “I want to do this. I love doing this. I can’t wait to wake up again so I can work on this even more.”

Game development is the one thing that I love so much that I don’t think I can ever take it away.

I think this is the point that you should want to get at in your game development journey.

Once you are at this point of “I love doing this and I can’t wait to wake up again so I can do it all over again”, I think that’s a life purpose thing.

Loving your work so much that it just becomes a part of you.

Putting a part of yourself into your work and making awesome stuff.

Strive for that.

This is why I love building cool stuff.

Because it gives me a purpose.

To be able to build something amazing and continue working on it every day.

Thrones

I made the decision to give players their own thrones, and call them Commanders at this time.

Here’s a picture of a throne, early into development.

4 Months into Development

Physics Struggles

At this point, I was developing the Minecart, and you can see a funny physics issue that we had with the wheels.

It was all a part of the process of developing the game.

At the time, it was kind of frustrating not getting the wheels to function properly, but as I look back, it was funny to see things break.

Game development is very different from software because with games, when things break, it makes a grandeur appearance, like the mine cart sliding away. In software, when it breaks, it’s usually an error code.

10 Months into Development – Pre-Release Testing

10 months or so, after BattleMania began its development, I began thinking about pre-release testing.

Before release, I wanted to open up the game to selected testers, so that they would have a chance to try it out.

After testing began, I was working 12 hours a day for 2 weeks fixing bugs.

I would wake up and think “One day closer to release. Time for bug fixes”, and just work.

Release Day

As it always goes for the release of your first game, you think that a ridiculous number of players will hit your game the moment you publish it.

But during release day, I was telling myself that I would’ve been happy with just 10 concurrent players all day.

Through all of the advertisements, we did end up getting 30 CCU maximum on release day.

But the issue was that they didn’t stay for long.

They would complete the tutorial, and then stay in the lobby, tell me “hey script, I completed the tutorial”, and then they’d leave.

Looking back at this a year ago, I can tell that I had a lot to learn about game design and keeping players in game.

In the weeks that followed, I was working 8-12 hours a day fixing bugs that players found, and trying to get the game in front of more players.

The main goal at the time was marketing: getting the game in front of more players.

This was a game that we had worked on for nearly a year. I was willing to do whatever it took to succeed.

But, we were getting only 1-10 concurrent players from all of the YouTube shorts and Tiktoks I posted.

One of them actually blew up and got 10K+ views, and landed us 50 concurrent players. However, those players only stayed for a little while, and as soon as the Short stopped getting views, the players stopped.

This marks the point of an important realization in marketing games:

It didn’t matter how many views the YouTube Short got. What mattered was when it stopped getting views.

I had seen that we were hit 50 CCU (concurrent users) consistently for 30 minutes, but it slowly went down to 0.

The moment the Short stopped getting views is when the CCU also died out.

It took me another 1.5 years before I realized this, but:

In order to get more concurrent users, you need a source of traffic that continues getting players for a long time.

YouTube Shorts are infamous for getting quick traffic (traffic is the rate that players are coming to your game), but they die out quickly as well.

What we really needed was a way of getting players that would persist over the long-term.

In business, we call this organic traffic.

Now, I didn’t understand all this at the time.

The only thing I knew was that I needed to get more players into my game to get it into the front page.

But I was seeing 0 CCU even with all of my efforts.

I actually reached out to dozens of Roblox YouTubers to try to get it in front of a lot of players as well.

Unfortunately, we didn’t have the budget at the time.

So, I felt internally disappointed because my expectations of the game going viral seemed to be doomed.

Every single day I woke up with one goal: “I need to get this game in front of players.”

And I would keep seeing the 0-6 concurrent players.

This unfortunate result continued for a few weeks.

I didn’t know what to do except make ads on TikTok and YT shorts.

Until one day..

Traffic Insanity

It was a rainy Saturday in June.

I had gone out to some place and was on the drive back home.

I wasn’t feeling too well either.

I came back home, and checked the BattleMania concurrent user count.

Everything clicked.

It was the Roblox algorithm that saved the game.

The Roblox algorithm recommends your game to lots of players. That’s what was happening.

And these weren’t waves of players where we’d get 50 CCU for 30 minutes and go back to 10.

No, this was everything I could’ve asked for.

This was 100+ CCU that persisted the entire day.

Whenever anyone checked the player count, it’d be at 100+.

Vacation Scares

At this point, July had fallen upon us.

I went on vacation, and I remembered to pack my laptop and charger, as those would be most important during this phase of 200+ CCU.

I remember I was driving to different places on vacation and refreshing Roblox’s player count page, to see 400+ CCU.

The entire day, BattleMania was at 400+ CCU.

However, the game’s like ratio was dropping very fast, and I wasn’t able to point out exactly why.

The ratio had started at 85% and it kept dropping.

I remember it was so stressful to see this happening.

We had the players and the revenue that came along with it. But the like ratio was plummeting.

And on Discord, I’d get consistently reminded of the ridiculous amounts of bugs there were on the game, like using the Cannon would break the game itself.

I remember I pulled out my Dell laptop and I was working on fixing bugs for everyone.

And then it died 30 minutes later.

The best part?

I didn’t find the charger.

I looked all over the place we were staying and checked everything in the car.

There was no charger, tons of bugs, tons of players, and our like ratio was dropping like crazy.

The entire time on vacation actually, I kept looking for the charger over and over. It was so important for me to find that charger.

But I never did; the charger left me.

July 4

We came back home on July 4; it was about 3:30 PM when we did.

You can probably guess what I did as soon as I arrived.

I dashed for my desktop, locked myself in a room, and worked on a July 4 update for 5 hours straight. No outside communication. No breaks.

Just flow and work.

Then, I released the July 4 event and loads of fixes.

The hard work paid off.

What’s Next?

Due to a Roblox algorithm update a few days after July 4th, the players slowly went down, and now they persist at 6-20 CCU average.

From there, I spent the next year trying to figure out how to get it back up.

It all just comes down to making the game even better, I guess.

And well, that’s what we’ve been working on.

Making BattleMania great again.

It will happen one step at a time.

Even with our smaller CCU, we’ll keep making updates here and there.

BattleMania was my first very own successful game that I scripted with my own hands. It means a lot to me.

Also, despite that it doesn’t get as many players anymore, it has taught me a lot.

Behind every project, there are many lessons, which you can use for your next project.

It just comes down to having fun creating games for others to play.

Thank you very much for reading my article.

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