DUMP
Roblox Experience
Visits
36+m
Team
8
Peak CCU
145k
Role
Game Director
Game Loop
1.Dig up items (junk)
2.Place junk in base
3.Junk makes $/second
4.Use Income to buy better gear
5.Use better gear to dig up better junk
6.Defend your base using traps and a slapper
World
A Reason To Leave Your Base
Stealing gave players every reason to sit on their base and guard it. So I built the world to pull them back out — a spread of distinct zones, each with its own look and its own function, weather that rotates which mutations get buffed, and shiny spots dropping high-rarity items. Some zones also came with features like mutation rerolling and enchanting items. There was always somewhere to explore that was worth the risk.
ECONOMY
Value In, Value Out
Each item has a $/sec value set by size, rarity and mutation. Those numbers get big fast, so I scaled the rest of the economy — prices, upgrades, payouts — to sit in the same range.
Shovels carry durability on top of that: a high-luck shovel is worth a fixed number of digs, and when they're gone the good pulls stop until you buy another. That's the sink that keeps income from piling up.
Progression
What The Next Tier Actually Buys
I designed the shovel line. Luck sits on the shovel, so a new tier doesn't just dig faster, it changes what comes out of the ground. That's what makes the next one worth saving for.
LIVE-OPS
Every Sunday Morning
I designed updates along with Admin Abuse — an hour-long event run live in the server, hosted like a show, with boosted mutation odds and bonuses. We ran one every Sunday morning on the back of a weekly update, so the team shipped to a rhythm and players had a standing reason to show up.
Concurrents became something we could schedule instead of hope for.
Peak CCU: 145k
Production
8 People, 1 Direction
I ran production alongside directing the design, and it turned out to be the part I liked most. Eight people pulling the same way — art, engineering and design handing work to each other instead of waiting on it — is a good feeling, and it's what let us ship something big (new map section, shovels, pets, live event) every week-- week after week
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Biggest lesson here:
A team reads the director before it reads the roadmap. If I'm not showing up for the work, nobody else is going to either. Staying motivated turned out to be the most fulfilling part of the job-- inspiring the team to bring their best work each day.
Lessons & Learnings
What DUMP Taught Me
Ship Core then Add More
Ship the core, then feed it. Save strong features for post release content updates that bring players back and keep them around longer. Doing this would allow us to resolve anything with the core loop before building on top of a shaky core. Next time the core ships alone and the rest becomes content cadence, so every update has something to land. Design persistence before the systems that depend on it.
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DUMP saves thousands of items per player — size, rarity, mutation, and ownership that changes hands every time something is stolen. That's a hard save problem, and I'd now build it first rather than alongside everything else. This was the biggest learn since this was the issue that ultimately ended it.
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Theft changes what a cheat costs. Without stealing, an exploit mostly ruins the exploiter's own game. Once players can take from each other every hole becomes a way to rob someone — and the person who pays is another player. So anti-cheat stops being a launch task and becomes a permanent one: a system that has to keep evolving as fast as the people working against it.
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Data Storage
The Cost Of Stealing