Are Roblox’s new AI coding and art tools the future of game development?

 

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.

 

Another prompt for a function to "create a 3 by 3 grid of orbs around orb" similarly generates a few lines of code to place a small grid of those objects in the game scene.

 

 

Corazza said that, just four months ago, it wasn't clear that this tool would work well enough for a public release today. But Roblox has taken advantage of advances in natural language code generation that have rolled out in just the last few weeks.

 

The key to getting usable results for the company's Code Generator Beta, though, was fine-tuning that standard model with code from the Roblox platform itself. That crucial context "significantly increases the quality of output," he said.

 

The need for context applies to coders using the tool, too, Corazza said. Asking the AI to generate code on an empty document is akin to asking a knowledge expert to take a test "in a completely white room where you didn't hear the question completely." In internal testing, though, Corazza said providing the AI tool with just three lines of sample code to start from increased the "acceptance rate" for the tool's suggestions by 50 percent over attempts that started with no such "context" code.

 

For now, the main focus of the Code Generator Beta is to allow experienced coders to not "have to work on simple stuff," Corazza said, and to "help automate basic coding tasks so you can focus on creative work." In the future, though, Corazza said he sees a more chatbot-style interface that can be used as a learning tool, explaining how code works and documenting functions for those still learning the basics.