The After the Flash (ATF) and Legends of the Aether (LOTA) roleplaying games are Roblox classics, the former being started by user ChadTheCreator in 2008 and gaining over 100 million plays in its numerous entries. I began working on this titles as a gameplay engineer for Chad in March 2022, and since then I’ve had the pleasure of contributing to both games and their communities in various ways.
When I joined the team, LOTA and ATF7 were experiencing significant server crashing issues - After ~30 minutes of uptime, a full server would crash causing all players to disconnect. After a week of diagnosing memory issues on the server I found that a bug in StreamingEnabled network memory usage was the cause. As this couldn’t be fixed on our ends, I hatched a plan to increase the memory budget of the game’s servers.
A server’s memory budget is decided by the Max Players of the place that server is created for. To increase the budget of LOTA and ATF’s 60 player servers, I created a “lobby” place using Roblox’s MessagingService and TeleportService. This lobby would reserve and communicate data with servers of the actual game, which had their Max Players increased to 700 using a beta feature. This increased player count in the game’s servers nearly tripled the memory budget of the game, curtailing crashes entirely.
Another major contribution I made was to the ATF8 and LOTA Halloween 2022 Events:
I was able to contribute whole sections of gameplay to the event, including interactable puzzle elements such as pressure plates that dynamically increased their weight requirement with the number of players in the room. This event had a considerably short turnaround time and the whole team is incredibly pleased with the result.
Lastly, I was able to contribute numerous high quality models and assets to LOTA’s fantasy world, specialized textures of accessories made to fit the fantasy world as well as weapons with ornate and intricate designs:
