Inspired to tweak his favourite after-school games, Matthew Hufton has landed himself a career in game development just one decade later. The Spotswood College old boy tells Michelle Robinson how he made a living from developing some of Roblox’s most popular games.
Matthew Hufton had just started his engineering career when he was ready to throw in the towel.
“I told Dad I was handing in my notice the next day and he said ‘alright, haha’,” Matthew recalls. “The next day I texted him that I had handed in my notice and he couldn’t believe it. Neither could I, actually.”
At 22 and fresh from graduating from an engineering degree and beginning work with an Auckland firm, Matthew quickly discovered where the big money was.
Simultaneously, his after-work hobby of programming for popular online gaming platform Roblox had jettisoned from pocket money to six figures – a month.
Mall Tycoon, where players can create their own online mall, was a collaboration between Matthew, his Spotswood College schoolmate Cameron Angland and prolific creator from Wellington, Alec Kieft.
With millions of players regularly gaming on Roblox, the income potential for a successful game is quite simply – “heaps”.
“We had just released the game and not much appeared to be happening when one day the number of players doubled again, and again,” Matthew tells Live.
Then, just weeks after the successful release of Mall Tycoon, Matthew co-released his biggest game to date.
Teaming up with Janzen Madsen of Nelson to form Splitting Point Studios, Matthew again gained success of epic proportions with the release of Wacky Wizards.
Wacky Wizards is a favourite among younger players who enjoy experimenting with random and funny ingredients such as chillis, rotten sandwiches, witches’ potions, ice cream cones and mushrooms, to create the likes of flaming snake potions and spells which are used in the game.
“It was a super cool project,” Matthew tells. “It was just us playing around with things we thought would be funny. It helps with the style of the game, we could add things for fun. At its height, we were creating 10 to 15 new potions each week. That was really fun.”
The sentiment was shared with 140,000 players online simultaneously during the game’s peak. That’s double the population of New Plymouth, to put things in perspective.
“Part of the charm for Roblox is it’s not polished, it has the human touch, it’s not machine-made. The games are full of funny quirks and jokes,” Matthew explains. “They’re made with passion, they’re relatable. It’s full of the fun stuff that kids make.”
That childhood charm was best captured in a Roblox STEM game version of children’s TV giant, Sesame Street.
For a period, brands were cashing in on games with themed games released to coincide with new release movies and songs. Matthew and Janzen were approached by the creators of Sesame Street to design and build a STEM game. The popular Sesame Street Mecha Builders game features the television voices of Cookie Monster and Elmo.
“That was super cool. We’d create the script and record it using our voices to fill in, then they would record with the voice of Elmo or Cookie Monster over top,” Matthew recalls. “I used to watch Sesame Street so that was surreal.”
So how does one become a six-figure earning game developer who is his own boss, drives a Tesla and a bright yellow McLaren, collaborates with American television producers and takes off to the States regularly for ski holidays?
This was not an established plan for Matthew, who started coding on Roblox after school at the age of 11, just for fun.
The platform’s coding language Luau is available to all. Matthew started off simply by building doors and teaching himself programming at a time when the site was young and there was plenty of room for expansion. He was just doing what he loved and someone saw value in that.
“You have to be passionate about it. These guys are the same as me, where we loved playing games and played heaps as a kid and got to the point where we thought, this is fun but I wish they did it this way or like that.”
Working from his Epsom flat with Cam and Alec has its perks. He can structure his own hours for one. But without discipline this can often mean working until the wee hours. The usual student dinner fare of two-minute noodles, baked beans and mince on toast has been upgraded at least, to more boujie and hopefully nourishing offerings, often courtesy of Uber Eats.
The flatmates encourage each other to put in the hours in their basement office, helping each other over any creative or technical issues. Matthew’s skills are in programming, the others are in design, so there’s expertise across all fields.
Aged 26, Matthew drives a Tesla on the daily, and as of recently, has added a bright yellow McLaren to his garage. The sports car is an attention seeker so an Uber is needed to get him to his interview over mochaccinos at Ozone with Live. But which he couldn’t resist blatting down in from Auckland to Taranaki to visit his dad and school mates.
Income comes largely from in-game purchases and upgrades, and the sheer volume of gamers is what makes the pay viable. Income figures can fluctuate up or down as game popularity waxes and wanes, so the way to manage that is for developers to form companies from which they pay themselves a salary.
For Matt, that company is under the cute pseudonym of Grandma’s Favourite Games.
For any gamers or parents of gamers, it’s amusing to realise the Robux virtual currency which players use for in-game purchases, is what the developers themselves are paid in. The Robux can then be converted into any local currency, which is convenient for travelling developers.
Snowboarding trips to California or Colorado are almost an annual activity for Matthew and his game developer friends. So are Roblox developer conferences where Matthew gets to rub shoulders with his childhood heroes at swanky functions in San Francisco, and which he has been invited to present at following his successes.
Matt’s favourite games to play as a kid were Survival 303 and 404, which have inspired his latest development in the works, set to be released later this year.
He admits to getting “a bit starstruck” when he sees the Survival creator Davidii at conferences or “when I see Roblox CEO David Baszucki walking around, or (Roblox employee) Stickmasterluke (Luke Weber)”.
“But it’s such a supportive community and with the flexible working environment, you can take your laptop and work anywhere.”