The Next Chapter

Today, I am announcing my departure from the Roblox ecosystem. I will no longer be maintaining Rojo and other Roblox-related projects. There will be one more release of Rojo sometime in the next few weeks.

In the coming months, I'll be launching a new game studio. Stay tuned for more on that in the future.

I created Rojo in 2017. It is currently the de facto build tool for Roblox projects and has thousands of users across the platform. I'm proud of creating Rojo. It's been a gateway for Roblox developers to learn traditional software tools as well as a road onto the platform for developers from other ecosystems. Rojo enabled new workflows that weren't possible before.

Before I started Rojo, I felt that there was something fundamentally wrong about Roblox's relationship with traditional developer tooling. I had a vision for how I felt people should work on Roblox games and I pushed for it. That vision resonated with some people and put me in direct, very heated conflict with others. Working at Roblox and making a public push towards a specific Roblox developer experience was a bad combination.

Rojo ended up being at the center of why Roblox let me go in mid 2020. My relationships with people at Roblox working on Studio were bitter and hostile. I was labeled the "ringleader of engineering dissent." Several of my friends were relocated onto new teams and shown the door. For the damage caused to friends and others, I'm sorry.

My participation in Rojo's development since then has been intermittent and has slowed down. There have been a handful of amazing contributors creating features and fixing bugs, but my role has become just showing up every few months to merge PRs and cut a release. I can no longer give Rojo the attention it needs.

Rojo was never intended to be a long-term project. When I bought the rojo.space domain, I joked with my friends that I would only register it for two years. At that point, I would either abandon Rojo or it would be built into Roblox. Five years later, there has been no progress towards a Roblox-official version of something like Rojo.

This is the right move for me and is overdue. I hope that Rojo serves as a good foundation for the next generation of developers who want to solve the same problems that I did.

To everyone who supported me working on Rojo all these years, thank you.

See you on the far side.
Lucien