Roblox Research Frontier

Roblox House Stack — Research Frontier: the Autonomous Dev Pipeline

Overview

Every problem below serves one studio-wide direction: agents shipping verified features end-to-end with near-zero owner time. Everything here is OPEN or CANDIDATE — nothing is shipped; each problem states why current practice fails, what asset the house stack already provides, the first three concrete steps in the current project, and a falsifiable "you have a result when..." milestone.

The recurring bottleneck: in house-stack projects, feature work ends code-done with verification owed — cards pile up in the Testing lane of docs/BOARD.html blocked on the same gate: a human opening Roblox Studio. Measure it in your project before choosing a problem: open the board, count Testing-lane cards, and check each card's evidence status (evidence bar per roblox-validation-and-qa). When all agent-executable work in that lane is exhausted, that gate is the frontier. (Learned in a shipped firebit game, 2026: five features sat simultaneously code-done, all waiting on one manual playtest gate.)

When to use

• Choosing what to work on when feature work is blocked on owner verification.
• Asked "what are the open problems / research directions / what can be automated?"
• Starting work on scripted playtests, headless sims, telemetry-driven tuning, or test coverage as a project (not a one-off).

When NOT to use

• Running an existing test or scenario → roblox-validation-and-qa (owns the evidence bar and spec/scenario conventions).
• Executing a live-launch decision campaign → roblox-launch-campaign (owns the phased campaign; Problem 1 below feeds its Phase 0).
• The hunch→result discipline for any single experiment → roblox-research-methodology.
• Deriving a formula or curve by hand → roblox-proof-and-analysis-toolkit.
• Anything touching the four hard rules (push, rblxsync run, flag-gated-code deletion, tuning-on-a-guess) → roblox-change-control owns their canonical statement; nothing on this frontier overrides them.

Problem 1 — Scripted playtests replacing owner verification gates (OPEN)

Why current SOTA fails: agents write and statically verify code, then a human eyeballs it in Studio. Every feature ends in a "needs Studio playtest" checkbox a model cannot check.

The house stack's asset:

Pick the softest target first: a feature whose behavior is driven by a plain data module (a cost ladder, a curve table) and whose services expose public server-side seams a Setup block can drive without real purchases or real network peers. Anything that ends in a Robux prompt still needs one manual purchase check, but everything up to the prompt is scriptable. (Case study, shipped firebit game 2026: an escalating revive-cost feature was the softest target — the cost ladder was a data table and the death/revive services exposed getReviveCount/Revive(targetUserId, buyer) seams, so ladder progression, inventory retention, and respawn placement were all scriptable server-side.)

First three steps:

1. Unblock the plugin end-to-end in your project (this is Phase 0 of roblox-launch-campaign): rojo serve default.project.json, open Studio with the MCP reachable, run /roblox-testing:test, and check the corresponding boxes in the project's plan file for the testing setup (create one under docs/plans/ if none exists).
2. Author tests/scenarios/<feature>.md for the softest Testing-lane card (per roblox-testing:writing-playtest-scenarios): Setup puts the game in the required state via server Luau, Steps drive the public service seams, Expects assert state: values against the data module and invariants (e.g. inventory unchanged).
3. Run /roblox-testing:playtest <feature>; paste the dated transcript into that feature's docs/plans/ file as the evidence path (evidence bar per roblox-validation-and-qa).

You have a result when: one named Testing-lane card is promoted to Done on scripted evidence the owner accepts without opening Studio. Falsified if the owner still re-verifies manually before accepting.

Problem 2 — Telemetry-predicted balance tuning (OPEN)

Why current SOTA fails: game tuning everywhere is tune-and-feel — change a number, play, vibe-check. Hard rule 4 (see roblox-change-control) already bans that here: every tuning change needs a stated rationale, predicted metric, and evidence path. This problem builds the machine that makes rule 4 cheap.

The house stack's asset (pattern, not a package): two services you build once per project over signals that already exist —

• A round-summary logger: subscribes to the game-loop lifecycle signals your services already fire (round/wave started and ended, NPC spawned/died, defended-object HP sampled, player downed) and prints one structured summary block per round to the console. Keep it behind a file-local ENABLED toggle. (Case study, shipped firebit game 2026: BalanceLogService summarized per night — NPCs spawned/killed, spawn-cap hit time, defended-object HP start/end, players downed — entirely from pre-existing service signals; no gameplay code changed.)
• A live analytics emitter for the few decision-driving events (player death with progress value, defended-object destroyed, purchase completed) via your analytics package.
• The prediction side needs a pure difficulty/economy data module — the curve as plain Luau functions with zero require and zero Roblox API calls, so it is derivable on paper. Derivation recipes: roblox-proof-and-analysis-toolkit.

First three steps:

1. Derive the predicted early-game curve (NPCs spawned per round, expected cap-hit round, expected session-currency income) from the project's pure data modules, by hand or by sim (Problem 3).
2. Write the prediction with a tolerance into a dated note in the relevant plan file BEFORE any playtest — prediction-first is the falsifiability mechanism (roblox-research-methodology).
3. Run one playtest (owner or scripted via Problem 1), capture the round-summary blocks from console output, and diff observed vs predicted.

You have a result when: a predicted survival/economy curve matches an observed playtest log within the tolerance you stated before the run (e.g. "NPCs spawned per round within ±20% for rounds 1–5"). A miss outside tolerance is also a result — it localizes a wrong formula assumption.

Problem 3 — Headless simulation of pure game math (CANDIDATE)

Why current SOTA fails: on Roblox, "run the code" means "open Studio" — even for pure arithmetic. Iteration on economy/difficulty math is gated on a GUI app.

The house stack's asset: genuinely pure modules — zero require, zero Roblox API calls — individually loadable by file path. Find yours: grep -cE "require\(|GetService" <candidate>.luau (expect 0), then also grep for Roblox datatypes (Vector3|Color3|Instance|CFrame) — many data modules use them and are NOT candidates. Typical pure candidates in a house project: a seeded PRNG module, an XP/level curve, the wave/difficulty curve. (The originating game's were Rng.luau — deterministic xorshift32 on bit32 only — Level.luau, and WaveData.luau.)

CANDIDATE runner — lune. Nothing in the house stack runs headless today (as of 2026-07-05): the reference project's aftman.toml lists no lune and no luau CLI. Getting a runner means adding e.g. lune = "lune-org/lune@<version>" to aftman.toml + aftman install — a dev-tooling change; the commit stays local (hard rule 1). Whether lune's require loads house modules unmodified is UNVERIFIED (as of 2026-07-05) — expected to work for modules that touch no Roblox globals, but prove it before claiming it.

First three steps:

1. Propose adding lune = "lune-org/lune@<version>" to aftman.toml and get the owner's go-ahead first (the project's CLAUDE.md: ask before adding a tool/library not already referenced in the project); then aftman install and smoke-test: a 5-line script in the scratchpad that requires the PRNG module by path and prints 10 seeded values (determinism check: same seed twice → identical stream).
2. Write an economy sim script (propose scripts/sim/<loop>-economy.luau — new file, plan first per the project's CLAUDE.md workflow): loop the early rounds over the pure curve functions × a kill-rate assumption × per-kill reward + level-up rewards. Trap: reward constants often live in server services, not pure modules — copy each constant into the sim with a provenance comment (file + symbol) rather than requiring the service.
3. Calibrate against reality: run one instrumented playtest (Problem 2's log) and fit the sim's free parameters (kill rate, pickup rate).

You have a result when: the sim's per-round currency output matches a real playtest log within a stated tolerance, seeded identically. Falsified if the sim needs per-round fudge factors to agree.

Problem 4 — Spec-coverage ratchet on pure modules (OPEN)

Why current SOTA fails: agent-written code with no executable spec regresses silently; "the agent read the diff" is not a gate.

The house stack's asset: Jest Lua fully wired by convention — wally.toml dev-deps (jsdotlua/jest + jest-globals) → DevPackages, src/Shared/jest.config.luau with testMatch = { "**/*.spec" }, specs colocated in __tests__/<Module>.spec.luau, and specs excluded from production builds via globIgnorePaths: ["**/*.spec.luau"] in the per-place build projects. Count your project's specs: find src -name "*.spec.luau" — expect the number to be embarrassingly low; that is the ratchet's starting point. The pure-module hit list and purity classification are owned by roblox-validation-and-qa — beware modules that look pure but yield (e.g. anything calling MarketplaceService for a price). DevPackages type-stub trap: roblox-build-and-env.

The gate gap: the boilerplate .github/workflows/ set (deploy/docs/format/linter/release/version-updater) ships NO test job — check yours with ls .github/workflows/. Adding one touches the deploy pipeline and CI config → owner-gated (roblox-change-control; hard rule 1 keeps it unpushable anyway). The interim gate is procedural, not CI.

First three steps:

1. Pick the next module from the project's hit list (roblox-validation-and-qa); write a colocated src/.../__tests__/<Module>.spec.luau per roblox-testing:writing-roblox-tests. A deterministic PRNG or curve module is ideal first (determinism + range assertions, no mocks).
2. Run it: /roblox-testing:test (requires Problem 1's Phase 0 unblocked), or headless once Problem 3 lands.
3. Ratchet: record the specced-module count in the plan file each time it rises; draft (do not merge) a CI test-job proposal for the owner.

You have a result when: N ≥ 5 pure modules have specs AND a gate exists that goes red on a deliberately broken module (prove it by breaking one locally and watching the run fail, then reverting). Coverage without a demonstrated-red gate is not a result.

Problem 5 — Autonomous multi-client testing (OPEN, hardest)

Why current SOTA fails / the blocker: the MCP setup drives one Studio instance; social features (friend bonuses, trading, party mechanics) need two or more befriended players. (Case study, shipped firebit game 2026: a friend-bonus feature's plan sat paused with one unchecked box — "needs a human with a friend account — cannot be run by the agent." Code was verified statically only.)

Why it's genuinely hard: house social features typically gate on otherPlayer:IsFriendsWith(player.UserId). Whether Studio multi-client test players ("Player1"/"Player2") satisfy IsFriendsWith is UNVERIFIED (as of 2026-07-05) — this single boolean decides the whole approach. The roblox-testing plugin's MCP surface lists list_roblox_studios / set_active_studio / playtest_subagent tools, suggesting multiple Studio instances are addressable, but that capability has never been exercised in a house project (UNVERIFIED).

First three steps:

1. Discriminating experiment: start a Studio multi-client test (Test tab → 2 players), run in the server console: for _, a in game.Players:GetPlayers() do for _, b in game.Players:GetPlayers() do if a ~= b then print(a.Name, b.Name, a:IsFriendsWith(b.UserId)) end end end. Record the answer in the plan file.
2. If false (likely): the honest options are (a) a flag-gated Studio-only test seam that treats test clients as friends — a code change through roblox-change-control, with the seam provably dead in production, or (b) accept that this gate needs a live second account = owner act. Write the decision down; do not silently stub.
3. Probe the MCP multi-instance surface: with two Studio windows open, call list_roblox_studios and document what set_active_studio can actually drive.

You have a result when: a social-feature verify box is checked on evidence produced without a second human — a two-client run where the friend-gated behavior demonstrably fires — OR a documented negative: proof that Studio test clients can never satisfy IsFriendsWith, with the plan's verify criterion rewritten accordingly. The negative result counts; it kills a dead-end option permanently for every house project.

Common mistakes

• Declaring a milestone met because code exists. Assets sit "built" for days while their e2e boxes stay unchecked. Code done ≠ verified (roblox-validation-and-qa).
• Routing around the hard rules to unblock a problem — minting test products with rblxsync run, pushing a CI experiment to main, or "temporarily" deleting flag-gated code that trips a spec. All four rules bind research work too (roblox-change-control).
• Tuning numbers while building the measurement loop (Problem 2). Build the loop on current values; tune only after it works, with rule-4 paperwork.
• Claiming lune/headless works from this doc. It is labeled CANDIDATE because nothing headless has ever run in a house project. Install, run, then claim.
• Scenarios that pass vacuously. The plugin's own rule: never PASS on skipped assertions. A scenario that can't fail is not evidence.
• Working these problems without the plan lifecycle. Each problem's steps are non-trivial work — plan file first, status: active, boxes checked in-turn (the project's CLAUDE.md owns the workflow).

Provenance and maintenance

Derived 2026-07-05 from the firebit house-stack reference project. House-convention paths and wiring (RunTests, jest.config, globIgnorePaths, scenario format, workflow set) were verified there on that date; no instruction depends on that repo existing. Re-verify volatile facts against the CURRENT project: