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What does a Roblox game look like? At one point, that was a relatively easy question to
answer—and even now, there’s a certain “look” that probably comes to mind when people think
of the platform. That’s a question posed by Nick Tornow, senior vice president of engineering at Roblox, in a blog post today.

And the company is rolling out one more tech tool this week that should make players and game devs think twice about their expectations for Roblox gaming graphics. It’s called the Terrain Early Access Program, which gives creators tools to customize terrain, alongside streaming and level of detail (LOD) improvements, unlocking the ability to create massive open worlds without the need for cross-server teleports.

“For me, having all these tools available makes it a lot easier for me to imagine and get to create what I actually am interested in creating without having these boundaries that block me from doing so,” said Mary Rukavina, director of creativity at Twin Atlas and the creator of Creatures of Sonaria, in an interview with GamesBeat.

It’s because of tech like this that Roblox games aren’t the same as what they were five, 10 or 15 years ago. It’s a full-fledged game engine, capable of realizing a vast array of completely different visions, depending on the developer.

Some Roblox creators choose to work in a blocky style with saturated colors, in part because it
is relatively easy and approachable. But many creators have started exploring what else is
possible in Roblox Studio, and the Roblox team is constantly adding features to help them push the boundaries.

The games that Roblox is showcasing include Creatures of Sonaria, a fantastical land of magical monsters struggling to survive, from developer Twin Atlas. The game was made with Roblox Studio, using the same tools available to all creators on the platform. Twin Atlas has more than 23 million players in its community.

“We’re boundary pushers. We want to see how much we can push the limits,” said Rukavina.

Rukavina said that some of the fans are players who want to create their own games. They want to learn how to do 3D modeling and post about it in forums or on YouTube. The team creates tutorials for those fans/game devs.

With this approach to art, the team isn’t trying to reach just kids. It’s trying to reach everyone who plays games and likes fantasy. Other highlighted 3D games include Frontlines and Frontlines Versus from Clarence Maximillian; Relived from Flourite; and Ecos: La Brea from Ecos Team.

Changing how developers create terrain in games

Last year at the Roblox Developer Conference, the company spoke about its long-term vision for terrain and shared some initial results on uncapping much larger and higher quality terrain. Now, we’re taking the first step towards shipping that vision through an Early Access Program (EAP) which creators can sign up for today. 

To kick things off, Roblox is overhauling the way it stores, delivers and represents terrain in the engine. Today, terrain is embedded directly into the place file and can quickly bloat the size of your RBXL. With the current limit of ~100MB for published place files, this means devs have to choose between adding detail to a place through instances vs. adding terrain. 

With this round of improvements, we are transitioning the engine to a brand new hierarchical storage format for terrain with optimized Level of Detail support. Roblox is also storing and streaming terrain to clients from its asset platform instead of embedding it into the RBXL.

“Some of the most useful things [from Roblox] have definitely been mesh deformation because, prior to that, our dragons at Dragon Adventures, had wings that were using beams, and we would have to set up every single attachment to connect the beams together, and it was an incredibly tedious process,” Rukavina said.

“Now we can just model the entire wing and connect it with weight painting and bones, and that makes the beam level up into a really believable state,” she said.

She also said the tools for open world games have leveled up.

While Roblox is kicking things off with these improvements, the team expects to continuously add more functionality to this early access program each month as it becomes available and are looking for creator feedback along the way. Roblox expects to continuously add new functionality to this terrain early access program as they become available for external testing.

“We started with our super outdated process of building these meshes at Blender, and then splicing them up to get all the different joints and connect them, and allow the players to color them,” Rukavina said. “For me, customizing your characters is super huge when you’re playing these creature animal games. Having something that truly and genuinely feels like a character that you can represent is really important.”

Rukavina added, “In Creatures of Sonaria, our characters are up to 300 to 400 parts, so that’s a lot of coloring from players. We always see these incredible, gorgeous characters that they create, where contrasting to that in Dragon Adventures, in our upcoming game, Warden, and Horse Life, those actually use mesh deformation rigs.”

In those games, the entire body is connected. There’s no major visible splits in a lot of them, and there are lower mesh counts in those, which helps optimize them a little bit more on the outside.

“Then we can do more really cool wing animations, especially with our dragons, where their webs are able to like stretch and deform and really believably look like a dragon wing,” she said.

Twin Atlas history

Twin Atlas is one of the largest Roblox studios today, with hits like Creatures of Sonaria (the game has two billion visits), Roblox platform events like The Hunt: Mega Edition, and partnerships with the likes of MrBeast, Twenty One Pilots, and others in their portfolio. The team has made more than 40 games.

Rukavina said Dragon Adventures (1.6 billion visits) got started in 2019 in Roblox’s headquarters. Now the company has dozens of people.

“A lot of these tools did not exist, and we were trying to figure out how can we make these creatures real because there were no pipelines. We had to invent our own plugins, we had to invent our own modeling and rigging process on Roblox to actually make it possible in the first place,” Rukavina said.

Headquartered in Nevada, the team was born of a merger between Samuel Garcia (CEO of Twin Atlas and former CEO of Sonar Studios) and Alex Hicks (Chief Design Officer of Twin Atlas and former CEO of RedManta), along with creative leadership from Mary Rukavina (renowned digital artist and fashion designer; more here on her perspective).

Their mission is twofold — 1. to build an expansive collection of best-in-class original IP, and 2. to help brands reach Roblox players and the 3D immersive world with unforgettable experiences. By prioritizing social elements within their experiences, the studio has seen meteoric success and created engaging, social and high-fidelity experiences that has won them numerous awards and competitive contracts with international brands and Roblox itself.

Some of their top games include Creatures of Sonaria, World // Zero, Drive World, Dragon Adventures and many more.

Building Creatures of Sonaria

Set in a sprawling open world split into multiple biomes and packed with fantastical wildlife,
Creatures of Sonaria was an early example of creators building bigger and more dynamic
environments on Roblox. It was so big and so dynamic, in fact, that an early incarnation of
Creatures of Sonaria ran into Roblox’s memory limits.

In the game, you can obtain as many as 500 creatures. You spawn into the game, try to survive the environment, collect resources, hide from other players or engage with them in combat. You can lose your character if you aren’t careful and have to start over again. The games are continuing on for years and they have a lot of content in them.

One major change Twin Atlas made was to use instance streaming to dynamically govern how
Creatures of Sonaria loads from the server, based on what players see.

“We realized that our map was 99 million cells, which…that’s a lot of different things for players to load, especially mobile players,” said Rukavina. “We carved up the map from the bottom to reduce how many terrain cells players were loading, and we got it down from 99 million to about 25 million.”

“When you use Roblox terrain, you’re adding cells like you’re adding voxels or cells of terrain as you kind of brush it on and you extrude it and grow your terrain to make like mountains and structures like that,” she said. “It adds to that count.”

Twin Atlas is expanding from its core base of Roblox games into merch and other businesses like a possible movie or comics or books.

The titular creatures in Creatures of Sonaria also presented a challenge. Each creature might
look like a single entity in-game, but under the hood they’re made up of hundreds of small
components, all bonded together.

“First we model a creature in Blender. Then, we have our modeler chop it up into all these segments to make sure that it can rotate and be animated in the way that we need it to. Then we take this sectioned rig, and we export it into Roblox Studio and use local Roblox plugins to actually connect the entire creature together, giving it bones and making sure that the rotations look good,” Rukavina said.

“We were able to make the game smaller by changing our meshes to hull—generalizing the
shape of a mesh,” Rukavina continued. “For instance, rather than a really complex set of antlers defined by specific meshes, we turn that into a hull—sort-of a balloon surrounding the shape.”

This simplifies collisions, while preserving an aspect of the game that players love: They can
customize the color of creatures on a per-mesh basis, as Creatures of Sonaria uses Roblox’s
built-in Color and Material properties instead of textures.

“Because we’re using the local Roblox Colors and Materials, when Roblox released Surface
Appearance, we were able to get some really cool materials in the game,” said Rukavina. “And
with emission maps now, we have leveled up the visuals of some of our projects tenfold.”

Rukavina teased that her next project is going to push Roblox’s boundaries, just as Creatures of Sonaria did at release. “We’re exploring mesh deformation and pushing the boundaries there, and the character colors as well,” she said. “You can have some really awesome-looking
characters with glowing and translucent and reflective skins. “I think knowing where the boundaries are helps us to push them further.”

“Every single game I want to design is literally the craziest game idea ever, and we ask, is this
even possible on the Roblox platform? I love how easy it is to create inside Roblox, and I just
feel like I’m not done here yet.”

For aspiring creators, Jumpstart applications remain open. We’re supporting and mentoring
creators as they build their dream games, and we are always looking for talented people with
great ideas.

Check out the DevForum as well for technical details on the Terrain Early Access Program,
including new customization tools and streaming improvements.

The future of terrain

Roblox has teased what is coming down the pipeline for terrain:

1. Terrain material customization: Apply custom MaterialVariants to Terrain voxels.
2. Terrain tooling and authoring improvements: Assign and organize custom terrain materials, improved brushes, adaptive, multi-resolution authoring tools
3. Texture Streaming and 4k textures on Terrain: 
4. Virtual Texturing and Meshing quality improvements: Improved visual quality of terrain materials and 

For each of these improvements, Roblox expects to introduce them first to the Early Access Program participants to collect feedback and fix issues before making them available through Studio / Client betas.

Other announcements focused on enabling higher fidelity experiences across devices include the following. Some are live (and linked) and others are coming soon (with estimated ship dates):

• Enhanced voxel terrain — Significantly increase the size of games, lower memory/storage requirements, and enhance mesh rendering for higher visual quality. (Coming late 2026)
• Texture Streaming — Texture streaming gives you the freedom to add more texture variety and detail to your games without having to worry about scaling across all devices. It does this by rapidly loading baseline quality textures first in order of importance and then increases quality of textures up to the available memory on the device. (Live)
• 4k Texture Rendering — Supports up to 4k resolution on compatible client devices by using cloud transcoding, texture streaming, and Harmony. (Live)
• Emissive masks — An additional Surface Appearance map for emission. This will give you higher fidelity control over parts of your object that should glow. (Live)
• Physically-simulated characters with the ability to ragdoll death — Enabling physically-simulated character movement by introducing the AnimationConstraint instance as a replacement for Motor6D alongside configurable force and torque limits for target pose matching. This, in combination with a newly surfaced BreakJointsOnDeath property will easily enable ragdoll death. (Live)
• Scalable Lightweight Interactive Models (SLIM) v1 — Automatically composites models and renders LoDs to reduce triangle counts, improve performance across devices, and let creators build bigger, more detailed games without sacrificing performance. (Live)
• R15 with optional joints – The R15 schema is being extended to include optional joints for spine, clavicles, head, finders and toes to unlock a new level of realism of avatar movement in the platform. (Live)
• Scalable Lightweight Interactive Models (SLIM) v2 — Ongoing tuning and optimization of SLIM v1 and support for platform avatars. (Coming Mid 2026)
• Mesh Streaming and improved mesh LoDs — Continuous improvement of LoD (Level of Detail) generation for your meshes. Optimized delivery for 3D meshes to reduce client asset download times. (Live)
• Studio device simulator API — Expose API for device simulator which helps creators understand how their game performs on specific devices. (Coming Mid 2026)
• Acoustic Simulation — Automatically simulate real-world behavior of audio in your environments including occlusion, diffraction, and reverb. Out now in Client Beta; full release will include Sound instance support and configuration. (Coming late 2026)
• Advanced Video API — New video instances and APIs that intersect with and build off of the advanced Audio API. This provides more control over how videos can be used and displayed in-game. Currently in Studio Beta. (coming late 2026)
• Improved debuggability of the Physics system — Improve the ability to debug physics in Studio by overhauling the pause/step functionality in Studio (Live), adding the ability to temporarily simulate selected parts in edit mode (Live), and visualizing force/torques (Coming late 2026)
• Improved physics solver — New and improved physics solver that enables more complex mechanisms and makes existing mechanisms more robust. (Coming late 2026)
• Improvements to fluid dynamics — Extend existing aerodynamic fluid modeling to better simulate hydrodynamic forces. (Coming late 2026)

Roblox is also cooking up some exciting AI tools that will help creators along the way. 

Rukavina said, “I do think there is something I still would really love [to see] on Roblox, though, and that is just volumetric fog and clouds. When you watch How to Train Your Dragon, or House of the Dragon, you see a dragon flying through the clouds. You see the cloud disperse and break up. You get to really experience immersive flying, and I would really love some clouds.”

In the games, the team builds massive open worlds with the Roblox terrain tools that are provided.

“We’ve always tried to make our own plugins because we’re working with thousands of studs of terrain, so we need special materials and tools for making our maps believable,” Rukavina said. “You’re in a world of dragons. You’re in a world of creatures. You actually need to believe that those characters are able to exist and live in those worlds, so for me, I’m very excited for the upcoming tools that are going to allow us to use multi colors on grass. Finally, I don’t need to make those trade-offs in my terrain.”

As for leaving the blocky world of Roblox behind, Rukavina said that the team always developed its own kind of stylized art.

“I feel like we’ve developed what we call the Sonaria studio style, where Dragon Adventures, Horse Life and Creatures of Sonaria, all have a similar shared themes in their 3D models,” Rukavina said. “The character assets and the environment themselves. So we’re trying to create a believable realm that goes beyond Roblox studs or Roblox squares. W want players to believe that their Roblox character is riding a dragon, and that environment is very real and immersive for them as a player.”

I asked if there was a lot of similar competition for 3D games on Roblox. Rukavina replied, “In my perspective, I feel like we’ve really got a very nice niche where we’ve developed theme and style that you know it’s different when you see the [Steal A] Brain Rot or cube games.”

Rukavina said that her vision for artistic style has always gone beyond the basic block style that Roblox was known for in the past. She struggled with hyper-realistic art, but she aimed for a style in the space that was in between.

“I tried to get somewhere between where it wasn’t super low poly, but it wasn’t like realism. I found a nice middle ground for myself,” Rukavina said.

The post Twin Atlas is among the studios changing what Roblox games look like | exclusive interview appeared first on GamesBeat.